NARA Makes Some Passenger Arrival Records Available Online

This week, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it has made available for the first time online more than 5.2 million records of some passengers who arrived during the last half of the 19th century at the ports of Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The records can be accessed through NARA’s online Access to Archival Databases (AAD).

The records were transcribed from original ship manifests into electronic databases by Temple University’s Center for Immigration Research at The Balch Institute. The Center donated the digital records to the National Archives. The records are known as Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Germans to the United States, 1850-1897; Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Italians to the United States, 1855-1900; and Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Russians to the United States, 1834-1897.

This series consists of records of 527,394 passengers who arrived at the United States between 1834 through 1897 and identified their country of origin or nationality as Armenia, Finland, Galicia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Russian Poles, or Ukraine. There are records of passengers who were U.S. citizens or non-U.S. citizens planning to continue their travels, returning to the U.S., or staying in the U.S. There are records of passengers arriving at the following ports: Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia; the bulk of the records are for passengers arriving at the Port of New York. Each of the passenger records may include name, age, town of last residence, destination, and codes for passenger's sex, occupation, literacy, country of origin, transit and/or travel compartment, and the identification number for the ship manifest. Information on each ship is in the manifest header file and includes the ship manifest identification number, the name of the ship, the code for its port of departure, and date of arrival. The ship manifest identification number indicates the port of arrival.

The new databases may be found at http://aad.archives.gov/aad/index.jsp.

Comments

[Israel Pickholtz]

NARA Makes Some Passenger Arrival Records Available Online

"Information on each ship is in the manifest header file and includes the ship manifest identification number, the name of the ship, the code for its port of departure, and date of arrival. The ship manifest identification number indicates the port of arrival."

There is obviously something I don't understand here, Dick, but if you see ship's name and date and port of arrival, you have a better pair of glasses than I. I don't see anything called "manifest header file."

[Gwen M. McCullagh]

There is an additional file most unfortunately not referenced in your article but accessible via the link given (if anyone interested specifically in IRISH immigration research should just happen to look!)It contains 607,000 passenger records, a shame to omit such a resource.

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[Margaret]

I too just got a list of information without a date, so the age of the person has no reference value. Too bad that the link did not show the actual passenger list.

[Kay]

The search results lack a date of arrival so the age is meaningless in determing a match. There is a statement that in order to locate information about each ship, such as date of arrival . . . " you must search the Manifest Header Data File. I cannot find this file. Where is it?

[Kathy]

When you go to the main page of the site and select Passenger Lists the correct page comes up and right underneath the passenger data base is a link to the Manifest File.

[Vic]

Thanks for the info, Kathy. That certainly isn't intuitive. The other thing that is too bad is that now that I have the date, ship and port of entry, there is no image of the manifest, so I still have to order the microfilm.

[G. Lloyd]

Gwen, I am very interested in the Irish immigration records mentioned above. I tried to find them on the NARA ADD site but was unsuccessful. Please, could you give me a little more info on how to access these Irish records?

[Sheila]

You can find the Irish records under "Passenger Lists", along with the other 3 files mentioned in the article. To find the date of the ship's arrival, you take the Manifest Identification Number from the individual record, and use it to find the ship in the Manifest Header Data File. I've just been cutting and pasting between the 2 files, to get all the information on dates and ages.

[Joy]

Gwen, Dick wrote about the Famine Irish Data Files on the NARA website in vol. 8, no. 11 (March 17, 2003) of his newsletter.

[Israel]

Kathy writes "When you go to the main page of the site and select Passenger Lists the correct page comes up and right underneath the passenger data base is a link to the Manifest File."

Well, I still can't get it to work, even after I seem to have gotten to the correct form.

[Joan Lapinski]

I attempted to access the Russian immigrant ship manifest files and found the whole thing impossible to use. As an added insult, I received a questionaire asking about quality and ease of use!! How is it that governmental bodies can make something simple into something so complex? I have been researching for at least 20 years using the Internet and NARA was by far the worst site to use.
For a moment, I almost used the term 'government facilities', but realized that anything run by the government is neither facile nor easy.

[Krista]

Actuall, if you copy and paste the passenger's manifest number in to the Manifest Header Data File's Manifest Identification Number field, you'll find the ship name, place of departure/arrival, date of departure/arrival.

A little tedious searching the info this way, but at least this informtion is available.

Thanks NARA & The Balch Institute's Center for Immigration Research at Temple University!