First you determine if your ancestor arrived in the Port of New York between 1892 and 1924. Those are the years automated by the LDS indexing program and donated to Ellis Island.
BTW: Some passengers, especially in First Class and Second Class, never physically visited the Island. Others never did because Ei was closed for different periods due to fires and such.
Good luck...
One of the remarkable points about the New York passenger arrivals records is the number of people who literally "missed the boat".
In a random sampling of manifests it was discovered that between 4% and 10% of all names were lined out. In order of frequency, these are the usual reasons:
- unknown (mostly crew members)
- "did not sail" or "did not embark"
- name transferred to another class (such as alien to citizen)
- name duplicated on another page of the manifest
- landed at another port (such as Boston instead of New York)
Literally missing the boat no doubt meant delays in getting to the port of departure, using more funds than anticipated, waiting for exit papers, hoping for an illness to end, or perhaps a change of heart. Others could not board because the vessel was already full, or the quota for the month was full. In all such cases, when legible, the data was extracted and researchers will also want to search the database for a later arrival.
it took me MANY years to find my great grandmother in the Ellis Island records...because they had her down as a male with her name spelled completely wrong.
Pamela Ann Hall II
Jul 13, 2009
Unknown Ancestor
BTW: Some passengers, especially in First Class and Second Class, never physically visited the Island. Others never did because Ei was closed for different periods due to fires and such.
Good luck...
Jul 15, 2009
Unknown Ancestor
One of the remarkable points about the New York passenger arrivals records is the number of people who literally "missed the boat".In a random sampling of manifests it was discovered that between 4% and 10% of all names were lined out. In order of frequency, these are the usual reasons:
- unknown (mostly crew members)
- "did not sail" or "did not embark"
- name transferred to another class (such as alien to citizen)
- name duplicated on another page of the manifest
- landed at another port (such as Boston instead of New York)
Literally missing the boat no doubt meant delays in getting to the port of departure, using more funds than anticipated, waiting for exit papers, hoping for an illness to end, or perhaps a change of heart. Others could not board because the vessel was already full, or the quota for the month was full. In all such cases, when legible, the data was extracted and researchers will also want to search the database for a later arrival.
Jul 15, 2009
Jill Hurley
Jul 19, 2009