What fires our imaginations more than the image of an immigrant ancestor's first steps on American soil?

Whether our ancestors came with the earliest settlers from Spain or England , later with the great waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or somewhere in between, we want to learn all we can about that turning point in our personal histories—the moment our families arrived in America .

I suspect that my grandparents knew the stories of my ancestors' arrivals, but, except for one grandfather, my own grandparents passed away before I was born. By the time I was a teenager and started to develop an interest in the ghosts of my past, my remaining grandfather as well as my parents had also died—taking with them everything they knew of our heritage.

What was the driving force that motivated our ancestors to physically and mentally uproot, to leave family, friends, and all that they had ever known and loved? History tells us that most of our people found severing themselves forever from their homes and traveling to this country a dangerous and terrifying proposition, yet they did it anyway. And now, most of us want to be able to see the places our ancestors called home—in America and beyond.

Thankfully, we live in a time when, despite any initial lack of knowledge of our family origins, we have documents within our reach that will help us rediscover lost stories of our family's immigrant experiences.

Some of the most fascinating records that have survived time are passenger lists—veritable personality profiles of our nation. These lists tell us who traveled in the relative comfort of cabin class, who was relegated to the harsh conditions of steerage, the ages of travelers, their occupations, and sometimes even family relationships.

But what was travel like for our ancestors? Published histories, immigrant journals, and contemporary newspapers give us the stories of the people who left lands where their families had lived for generations. Naturalization papers and an amazing array of other sources can add rich details, allowing us to track our ancestors' travels. They can also give us a better understanding of what our ancestors went through so that they—and we—could have a better life.

My colleague Sandra Leubking and I have just completed our final edits of the third edition of The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy . Every chapter has new information useful for discovering ancestors—whenever they came to this country. And, this issue of Ancestry Magazine is loaded with ideas for carrying on the quest to find our personal roles in immigration history.

Each day, more and more roads are opened that allow us to feel like we can almost travel back in time to the homes of our ancestors. But we can best honor our ancestors who brought us to America by preserving their stories of courage and hope and by passing these stories along to our children and our children's children so that the next generation might avoid some of the mistakes of the past and be empowered to make positive changes for the future.