Ancestry.com now has the Hamburg Passenger Lists available online. These are lists of millions of emigrants from what is now Germany and a number of surrounding countries. These people left their homelands to go to North America and elsewhere.
The Ancestry.com collection now contains almost 200,000 images of original records. This is high-quality genealogy information: you can stay at home and view images of original records on your computer. The company plans to continue indexing the records until all of the original 5 million names are online.
For more information, go to http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=11588.
Ancestry.com's web site allows the user to search by using dropdown lists for gender, marital status, and relationship. The problem for many of us is that these dropdowns are all in German. Steve Morse, owner of the well-known "One Step" indexes to other online databases, has created an improved index to Ancestry.com's Hamburg Emigration List.
One of the advantages of Morse's version is that you don't have to know as much German. His dropdown lists for gender, marital status, and relationship are all in English.
As is true of many of Steve Morse's indexes, you can search the index on his web site but it will always point to data on Ancestry.com or other web sites. Note that Morse creates INDEXES, his web site does not host the data. In this case, whichever index site you use, you will still need to have a subscription to Ancestry.com in order to view the records.
You can access Steve Morse's "One Step" indexes at http://stevemorse.org.
My thanks to Ceil Jensen for letting me know about these new online resources.
