Locating Family Members who Immigrated to America by Paul Duxbury and Kevin Cook
Centuries ago, the first of hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in America. Over the years, they have appeared at America’s doorstep for a variety of reasons. In the early days of the sixteen hundreds, they came with a sense of exploration and a hope for a better life. That hope carries over into America’s immigrants even today. As time passed, people started coming for very different reasons. Many had farms destroyed in other countries and came to America with the hope to find new farms. Other came with the hope of getting an education or to find a better paying job to support their families. Still others came to get those better jobs so they could send money back to their home countries. With the world wars, many immigrants arrived in America to escape the oppression of horrible government regimes. Whatever the reason, whatever the time, this culture of immigration has made America a wonderful melting pot of cultures. It can, though, make it immensely difficult to locate family members who immigrated to America because of the sheer numbers of immigrants that have arrived over the past three centuries.
By the 1820s, American immigration numbers began to skyrocket to over ten thousand. Prior to this era, immigration was documented, but poorly. As a result, it can be a much more difficult task to track family members who immigrated to America before eighteen twenty. After that year, immigration officials began to insert more protocols into the system to ensure immigrants were tracked appropriately. By eighteen seventy, America was seeing so many immigrants, more laws were passed to limit the numbers of foreign born people into the country. As a result, any family members who came in after that time were more carefully documented, making it even easier to track them down. By the nineteen twenties, more quotas were put into place, as were more tracking regulations. All of these laws have made it easier and easier to find your family’s immigrants.
When you get ready to start your search, a date is helpful, but not necessary. There are several ways you can go about locating family members who immigrated to America. You can start by using a paid service. There are a number of these on the internet. You simply choose a service you like, offer them all of the information you have, and let them handle the tracking process for you. This can be a bit costly, but in the end, it can save you a lot of time and hassle.
If you are interested in handling the research yourself, you can start by examining passenger manifests to ships that would have carried immigrants. Again, a date here is helpful, but not completely necessary. A port of arrival is also helpful. Without these two things, you are going to spend an extensive amount of time shooting in the dark for the right passenger manifest. Some of the services that provide these indexes require payment. Others provide the service for free. Both the internet and your local library will be invaluable sources as you begin your search for passenger lists.
Another important thing you can do in your search to track your family immigrants is network with others. Try enlisting the help of other interested family members. Two heads are always better than one when you are attempting to deal with this much data. There are also literally hundreds of genealogy bulletin boards on the internet that you can consult for help. Simply post a query and wait for others to respond. If you are uncomfortable posting a query to a website, you can try posting a query in a genealogy magazine. There are several reputable publications that can help you track the family members you need to find.
One final way to attempt to track your family members is to look at indices that have already been compiled. The LDS family research center is one of the largest genealogical libraries in the world with thousands of family trees and extensive information already compiled. There are also a number of other databases available on the internet for your searching purposes. Some require a fee, others are completely free.
Searching can be a difficult process, but finally locating family members who immigrated to America can be intensely useful to your family history.
About the Authors
Paul Duxbury and Kevin Cook own http://www.amateur-genealogist.com and http://www.our-family-trees.co.uk two of the leading Genealogy Websites. In addition Paul owns a wide range of exciting websites which can be viewed at http://www.our-family-trees.co.uk
