The first successful try at entering the site took me to the search page. I entered my surname, Kerstens, because my father-in-law and his parents came through Ellis Island in 1923. I already have a copy of the passenger list containing the family, as well as a print of the ship. My father-in-law has these treasured items neatly framed and displayed in his home office.

The site found 38 matching Kerstens in its database, including my father-in-law, age 0, his father, age 30, and his mother, age 24. Since Kerstens is an unusual name in the U.S. but a very Dutch surname, I wanted to find out more about the other 35 people listed. Alas, I was bounced off the site, but not before I printed the list of matching passenger records.

Today’s search produced better results, and I didn’t get bounced off the site. However, I did have to wait a long time (up to five minutes) between screens. Sometimes I cancelled and resent the search because the site seemed to be stuck without making progress.

What I have discovered in using this site, despite its shortfalls in performance in its infancy, is that there’s a lot of information in the Ellis Island database that can be of use to many people, even if their ancestors came before Ellis Island opened. For instance, on my Kerstens search, I found my husband’s grandfather listed twice. The second time was the ship list with my father-in-law that I already had a copy of. The first time, he’s listed as Huberius Wilhelmus Franciscus Kerstens. There’s no doubt in my mind that that’s the right guy, even though his first name is misspelled in the index (it’s actually Hubertus). He was the right age, coming from the right port (Amsterdam), and had the same four names that my father-in-law had previously given me. So why was Hubertus coming to the States before he immigrated? He’s listed as the second cook on the crew list for the Bali, which arrived in New York on 28 August 1919, four years before he brought his wife and infant son to live in the U.S.

Immediately after finding this manifest, I called my father-in-law and asked if he knew his father came to the U.S. before he brought his family. You could hear the memories swirling in his mind when he paused and answered that he remembered stories about his father serving as a cook on a ship that went to Dutch possessions in the West Indies. He was unaware, however, that his father had landed in the U.S. before he actually immigrated. He was very excited to have this knowledge and suddenly showed an interest in me finding other family members that entered the country through Ellis Island.

On the Web site, once you’ve signed in, you’re able to view the actual passenger manifest, even though you can’t print a copy of the whole page. I was able to center the image where I wanted it and execute the Print Screen command (in Windows it’s ALT-PrtScrn), and then paste the image into my word processor (or photo editing program). I only got a portion of the manifest page, but it’s enough to show to my father-in-law while we wait for my next visit to the National Archives to get a copy of the manifest.

After you select a person from the search results page and view that person’s information, you can select to return to the search results page. At that point, you’ll see other suggestions for how the name could have been spelled. This is a nice touch for those with names that could have been spelled a variety of ways by enumerators (or indexers).

Even though my Presley ancestors came over to the U.S. in the mid-1800s, I ran a search on the surname to see what I would come up with. I found my great-aunt, Adele Presley, coming back to the U.S. after a nice vacation in Bermuda. This serves to remind us that not only immigrants came through Ellis Island; Americans returning from trips abroad also disembarked their ships at the Gateway to America while it was open for business. So it’s worth checking the database regardless of when you’re ancestors arrived. You never know whom you’ll find coming through the port, and the information may put a smile on the face of someone you love.

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, co-creator of the new family health history program GeneWeaver, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry. She can be reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com or gceditor@ancestry.com.