Do your ancestors come from Germany? From Central or Eastern Europe? Approximately one-third of people emigrating from these areas in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century did so through the port at Hamburg, Germany. And searching the newly released passenger lists from Hamburg available on Ancestry.com may be a great way to locate them.

CASE STUDY
Adele Marcum was told as a young child that her ancestors were from Germany. From her parents she learned that her third great-grandfather, Ferdinand Bartels, had come to America from Germany and settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was a bridge tender and raised a family with his German-born wife. But she didn’t know much else. In hopes of finding more information about her great-grandfather and her ancestry, she searched the Hamburg Passenger Lists for some sign of his departure. She found that Ferdinand had come to America in 1867 on a ship called the Cimbria. He was unmarried (she had always wondered whether he married before or after coming to America), and he was traveling with a brother, Gerhard, whom she had not heard of before. She also found out that they had come from Lübeck.

“This passenger list opened up a whole area of new sources for me,” said Adele. “Because I found out he was from Lübeck I was able to go back and search parish vital records for both Ferdinand and his brother, Gerhard. I found out he had other siblings who hadn’t emigrated with them. And because I knew he came to the U.S. in 1867, I was able to locate him in Wisconsin in the 1870 U.S. census. This passenger list record was one of the first documents I had success with and it boosted my confidence in being able to do genealogical research.”

ONE IN A MILLION
Ferdinand Bartels was one of 5 million individuals recorded on passenger lists from the port of Hamburg between 1850 and 1934. The State Archive of Hamburg began indexing these lists years ago and put approximately 2,547,135 names, from the years 1890–1913, online. Now, in partnership with the archive, Ancestry.com has begun linking original images of the lists to the index. So far, almost 200,000 images have been added. Ancestry will continue to index the records until all of the original 5 million names are online.

From the lists, you can learn such information as the name, age, birth date, and birthplace of a passenger. You may also learn an individual’s occupation, residence, nationality, marital status, religion, military service, date of departure, port of arrival, ship type and name, and accommodations on board the ship.

The lists are in German so you may need some help deciphering them if you don’t speak German. However, Ancestry.com has provided a few helps: the field labels on the searching boxes will have English translations, as will some of the indexed information on the results pages, such as the gender of the passengers. You may also want to try an online German/English dictionary, such as http://dict.leo.org or www.gmsmuc.de/look.html for help deciphering records.

A CLUE TO SOMEWHERE NEW
As was the case with Adele, a record from the Hamburg Passenger Lists is often a clue to a new source of information. For example, most foreign records are kept at the town level, so knowing the place of your ancestor’s birth and later residence can give you a clue to where to start looking for more records. Religion may lead you to parish records to search, and occupation can even be a clue for more resources. For example, the Directory of the Baker’s Guild for Berlin, 1926, is an occupational directory listing all of the bakers living in Berlin in the year 1926. This is only one of about 600 city, regional, and occupational directories that Ancestry.com is in the process of indexing and adding to its online collections.

OTHER RESOURCES
While the Hamburg Passenger Lists make up the largest amount of content recently added to the German records collection at Ancestry.com, other records and resources on the site will also be valuable to your research. Try searching these resources, many newly updated:

• The Mecklenburg-Schwerin Census, 1867
  Few national census records exist for Germany. However, this is one of the few state census records to survive. It contains more than 600,000 names.
• Bremen, Germany Sailors Registry, 1837–73
  The Sailors Registry for Bremen, home of the second largest port in Germany, was a log in which each sailor registered every time he left Bremen. The first time he registered he had to enter much of his personal information. Nearly 40,000 seamen are listed in this registry.
• Meyers Gazetteer of the German Empire (Meyers Orts-und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen Reichs)
  If you find an ancestor’s birthplace on the Hamburg Passenger List or elsewhere, you may want to turn here. This is a gazetteer listing every town in the German Empire prior to WWI and gives information like population, major town industries, and clues to where record repositories for that town were located. Some family historians refer to it as the Bible for finding small towns in Germany, and it is one of the most frequently used tools by German genealogists.
• Encyclopedia of German-American Genealogical Research
  This reference work gives Americans with German roots important directions on how to connect with their German immigrant ancestors, including how to find and use immigration records and other source material in both America and Germany.

BACK TO YOUR ROOTS
When Ferdinand Bartels and his brother Gerhard left Germany 140 years ago, they probably thought little about the data they had to release for a passenger list that seemed just another item on a checklist leading to their departure. Little did they know that more than a century later their third great-granddaughter would use that information to link herself back to them and her German roots. That list has become a genealogical goldmine. If you, like Adele, know that your ancestors come from Germany or somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe, take this opportunity to search the new records available at Ancestry.com. You never know what you’ll find.

Search the new Hamburg Passenger Lists.

Jana Lloyd is editor of the Ancestry Monthly newsletter and associate editor of Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached at AMUeditor@ancestry.com but cannot assist with personal research questions.