If you go back far enough, you’ll find that almost everyone has come from somewhere else. The difference with Americans is that most came from somewhere else recently. In fact, 95 percent of Americans today have descended from individuals who did not live on this continent in the eighteenth century. Yes, America is the land of immigrants. And because of this, immigration records such as passenger lists are a vital source of information for those tracing their American roots.

Beginning in November, Ancestry will launch its newly expanded passenger list collection, with the addition of 70 million names. Formerly, these names could only be found at ports, the National Archives, the LDS Family History Library, Ellis Island, and other library-supported centers and museums spread across the nation. But now Ancestry.com has gathered, digitized, indexed, and made these records available to you in a centralized online location.

INFORMATION YOU CAN FIND IN THE PASSENGER LISTS
Beginning in 1819, Congress mandated that ships coming to America record the names of all their passengers. Furthermore, these passenger lists were required to contain certain information about the passengers, such as name, nationality, and age. In 1893, sixteen more columns of information were added to the passenger lists and in 1906, six more were added. So, depending on when your ancestors came to America, you can expect to find different information.

Information on passenger lists from 1819–93:

• Name of the ship and its master
• Port of embarkation
• Date and port of arrival
• Passenger’s name
• Passenger’s age
• Passenger’s gender
• Passenger’s occupation
• Passenger’s nationality
  
  Possible additional information:
  
• Passenger’s berth number (the location of their accommodation on board)
• The number of pieces of baggage the passenger carried
• The number of deaths that occurred at sea

Additional types of information on passenger lists from 1893–1906:

• Marital status
• Last place of residence
• Final destination in the U.S.
• Literacy—whether the passenger could read or write
• Amount of money the passenger was carrying
• Passenger’s state of health

Use this information to win that family debate over whether great-grandpa O’Brien married great-grandma before leaving Ireland or after planting his roots in the U.S.

Additional information on passenger lists after 1906:

• Height
• Complexion
• Hair color
• Eye color
• Identifying marks
• Birthplace

Are your only memories of Grandpa with gray hair? Information from his passenger list could tell you whether he was blonde or brunette.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND IN THE NEW IMMIGRATION DATABASES
Previously, the immigration databases at Ancestry.com contained 32 million names from passenger list records. This was already a sizeable amount of information, but now Ancestry.com has increased its collection to more than 100 million names, including nearly 75 million passenger names and more than 26 million crew names. Of those, 80 million of the names come from receiving stations at the port of New York—primarily Ellis Island. The database contains more than 7 million images of the original passenger lists, 1,000 paintings and photographs of immigrant-carrying ships, and photos of the 100 port cities represented in the collection. The number of names for the six primary ports in the collection is as follows:

SEARCH TIPS
You can search for your ancestors by their first or last names, narrowing the search with age, dates of arrival, ports of departure or arrival, country of origin, name of ship, or other keywords, such as occupations. And you can search using a Soundex feature that allows you to locate names that “sound like” the one you are searching for. This comes in handy if the ship’s clerk botched the spelling of your ancestors’ names.

FREE FOR THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER
For the entire month of November the passenger lists will be free to anyone using Ancestry.com. After that the database can be accessed by those who have the U.S. Deluxe and World Deluxe subscriptions.

According to our calculations, approximately 85 percent of the current U.S. population has an ancestor in one of our updated passenger lists. So link to the immigration database and start searching for your immigrant ancestors now!