Discovery News announces “Immigrant Passenger Logs Now Online”, referring to the digitization and collection process by Ancestry.com to bring together immigration records and collections.
The digitization project contains more than 100 million names and is now searchable online, according to Ancestry.com, a company that provides family history information. The database took three years to complete and represents the largest collection of passenger lists on the Web.
Previously, the lists were scattered around the country at ports, branches of the National Archives, Ellis Island, museums, libraries and at other locations.
While actual scanned images of the ships and passenger lists are viewable online, cataloging the names and information has been a long three-year process with many checks to try to get the names right and in a searchable form.
Not all US immigration records and information are available.
Immigration to the United States began after the Mayflower’s arrival in 1620. Data from 1620-1820 was not included in the project because it wasn’t until 1819 that Congress passed a law requiring ships docking at American ports to document all passengers and crew. After 1960, most individuals arrived by plane.
For individuals who did travel by ship between 1820 and 1960, the major ports of arrival were New York, Boston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Sullivan and his team determined that major ports of departure in Europe were Liverpool, England; Bremen, Germany; Naples, Italy; Antwerp, Belgium; and Hamburg, Germany.
The new collection will be free to the public until the end of November through Ancestry.com, and continue to be free to public libraries, LDS Family History Libraries, and other membership groups and associations connected with Ancestry.com.
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