Castle Garden Database is Online

Ellis Island seems to receive all the publicity for immigrants arriving in New York City. Many people do not realize that Ellis Island did not begin operations until 1892. More than 73 million Americans can trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in New York City prior to that year. From 1830 until 1890, these new arrivals first stepped ashore at Castle Garden in lower Manhattan.

The site of Castle Garden remains as one of the oldest public open spaces in continuous use in New York City. American Indians fished from its banks, and the first Dutch settlers built a low stone wall with cannons as a battery to protect the harbor and New Amsterdam. The stone wall was later converted to a street that is now the well-known financial center called Wall Street.

The Castle Garden immigration processing center started operation in 1830. By 1890, the arriving throngs were overcrowding the center, and there was no room to expand the facility since the ocean and the city surrounded it.

After reviewing several possible sites, the United States government selected Ellis Island for the establishment of a new federal immigration center for New York. On the island, it would be easier to screen and protect the new immigrants before they proceeded out onto the streets of Manhattan. Castle Garden processed its last immigrant in April 1890.

After the closing of Castle Garden in 1890, immigrants were processed at an old barge office in Manhattan until the opening of the Ellis Island Immigration Center on January 1, 1892. Then a huge fire at Ellis Island occurred during the night of June 14, 1897. The fire burned the entire immigration complex to the ground. Nobody was hurt, and nobody knows why it happened or who started it. However, many state and federal records were lost in that fire.

Immigration processing was moved back to the old barge office in Manhattan while Ellis Island was being rebuilt. In December of 1900, the new Main Building on Ellis Island was opened, and 2,251 immigrants were received that day. In a single day in 1907, 11,747 immigrants were processed at Ellis Island. .

Castle Garden was soon forgotten by almost everyone, with the exception of those who processed through the facility and later generations of family genealogists. Castle Garden was soon converted to other uses. A theater stood on the site for many years and was used by the likes of Phineas T. Barnum. Today it is a city park, called Battery Park, and is the departure point for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Today's Battery Park is actually bigger now than it once was, having been extended into the harbor over the years by landfill.

While the Ellis Island fire of 1897 did destroy some of the records of Castle Garden, the ships' manifest records of those years survived.

Now the Battery Conservancy has created an online database of information about 10 million immigrants for the years 1830 through 1892, the years before Ellis Island opened. All these records are extracted from the original ship manifests. If you are one of the more than 73 million Americans who are descended from those who entered at Castle Garden, you can probably find your ancestors in this database.

This week I went to the Castle Garden site and conducted several searches with great success. I found that the site's free "Quick Search" allows you to search by first name, last name, date range, place of origin, occupation, and name of ship. You can search by any combination of those elements. Anything that is unknown can be left blank. The result will be a display of all the matches to the parameters you supply.

As usual, I started with my own surname. A few seconds later I was looking at a list of 78 immigrants who share the same last name as mine. I was a bit disappointed to find that one immigrant was listed with a first name of "Mr." while his wife's first name was listed as "Mrs." Another's first name was listed as "Professor," and a fourth seemed to have the first name of "Unknown." However, the rest of the entries had true first names or initials listed, as expected.

By clicking on menu items, I found that Professor Eastman was 34 years old when he arrived from Liverpool, England, on the ship Abyssinia on February 17, 1871. He was a music professor. Perhaps that is enough information for a descendant to make the connection, even without a listed first name.

The following is an example of a more typical entry:

THOMAS EASTMAN   
Occupation: Farmer
Age: 35
Sex: M
Literacy: U
Arrived: 1884-05-05
Origin: England
Port: Liverpool & Queenstown
Last Residence:
Destination: USA
Plan: Unknown
Ship: Alaska
Passage: Unknown

The Quick Search that I used allows you to easily find an individual or family. Quick Searches are free of charge.

The site also offers Advanced Searches: the ability to search the database using more fields. An Advanced Search allows everything that a Quick Search allows, plus the ability to search by gender, age upon arrival, and destination. The site states that Advanced Searches are "ideal for scholars and those interested in genealogical research." An Advanced Search costs $45.

Unless you are searching for a very common surname, I suspect that the free Quick Searches will suffice for most genealogists.

CastleGarden.org is a great resource for educators, scholars, students, family historians, and the interested public. The site currently has 10 million records in its database, with another 2 million records yet to be entered. Donations are solicited to help maintain this site for all.

For more information about the online Castle Garden immigration database or to search the records yourself, go to http://castlegarden.org

Comments

[Nancy Green]

If you found what looks like the right entry where do you go to find out more?

[Sharon]

A bit of a clarification for "Advanced Search allows everything that a Quick Search allows plus...." The advanced search does not allow you to enter a name.

[Jack Knott]

Looking for information on Prokosch family. Came to US about 1864-66 from Bohemia thru Antwerp.

[Donna Booth]

I tried the new Castle Garden site and had no luck, even though my grandfather and his parents and siblings landed in New York on December 31, 1867. I have copies of the ship manifest and the Marine Intelligence column from the NY Times showing the bark arriving. However, when I search for them in the datababse they are not there. I have a feeling not all the ships have been loaded, or they missed some.

Donna

[Dick Eastman]

---> I have a feeling not all the ships have been loaded, or they missed some.

You are correct. As I wrote in the opriginal article, "The site currently has 10 million records in its database with another 2 million records yet to be entered."

[forrest s. clark]

both of my ancesters came through Castle Garden but I cannot find any records of them in your database.

It seems unfair to many to have to pay $45 for an advanced search when the archives and records were to be opened free of charge to genealogists.

[Bev]

A great many of the Scandinavian ships did not land in US ports. They landed in Quebec, Canada. My Norwegian ancestors were among them, as were a great many other relatives who married into my family (siblings of my parents, grandparents, etc.). The immigration databases in Norway list their destination where they eventually arrived and records pick up in those various locations, such as in state census data and Land Grants, but the ships themselves landed in Quebec, not in US ports. The only mystery still remaining is how they got from Quebec to their eventual destinations. (Overland and through relatively open ports? Another ship through the Great Lakes to another port closer to their destination?) This link gives some historical background on Scandinavian immigrants:
http://www.migrationinstitute.fi/nordic/

There is a second link to more information on ships, some passenger lists are included, and there are histories of immigrant shipping lines, photos of ships and ship histories here:
http://www.norwayheritage.com/ships/

But if someone has not been able to find out info about their ancestors arriving in US ports, chances are if they came from Norway, Denmark, or Sweden, the ships landed in Quebec and the immigrants got to their eventual destinations by other means (overland or via another ship in the Great Lakes and then overland to the destination listed in their home country's immigration records).

Just be aware that not all immigrant ships carrying passengers bound for destinations in the continental US arrived in US ports.

[Bev]

The link to the Digitalarkivet records on the Scandinavian Roots, American Lives I posted above doesn't work right since they updated their web site. This is the correct link for Digitalarkivet records now:

http://digitalarkivet.uib.no/cgi-win/WebMeta.exe?spraak=e

All the info in Norwegian and Danish databases and the Norwegian immigrant ship databases is free. The Norwegian Digitalarkivet web site is being updated continually. Most of the immigrant info is online, except for some of the immigrant info in Oslo. Otherwise various counties are in various stages of having complete data for census, birth/baptism, confirmation, marriage, burial records. Some links on some Swedish data is free, but I've not yet found the info on my Swedish grandfather (that's the only brick wall I still have after nearly 45 years of genealogy research).

There is a Norwegian map site online that's clickable - it enlarges as one clicks, and I've found the home farms where all my ancestors lived in the Nord-Trøndelag. Clicking on the hand symbol allows you to move the map around. Click on 'kartsøk' button ("map search") to get the map page to come up on the screen.
http://www.finn.no/kart/

[Marsha Ensminger]

According to the Castle Garden website "From 1855 to 1890, the Castle was America's first official immigration center". So where do the 1820 - 1855 and 1891 - 1913 records come from?
Also, the site lists the ship one set of my immigrant ancestors arrived in, with the arrival date of 11 Nov 1857, and the destination "St. Louis". According to the copy of the manifest I ordered from NARA several years ago, 11 Nov 1857 was the date the ship landed in NEW ORLEANS.
What exactly is the source of the info on this website, and why don't they explain themselves?

[Cara Fletcher]

My grandmother has told me about this huge fire on the island and how all the federal records had been lost in it.It must have been something huge.