How do I find the passenger list for an ancestor who sailed to America?
Since 1820, United States law has required every arriving ship to hand over a list of its passengers, the ship's manifest, and those lists survive in the National Archives. Search them free through the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation's passenger archive, which covers New York arrivals across both the Castle Garden and Ellis Island years, and through FamilySearch; the large subscription sites hold the same records. To find yours, work with a window of years rather than one date, and search under variant spellings, because the list was written by the ship's clerks at the port of departure, from the ticket details, before the ship sailed. Lists before the 1890s give little more than name, age, occupation and nationality. From 1893 they add the last residence, and later lists name a relative in the old country and the person the passenger was travelling to join.
Useful pages: Irish in USA · The Irish surnames map · Trace your Irish roots · Coming home · Irish around the world
Sources
- National Archives and Records Administration (US): passenger lists, census clues and naturalization guidance, archives.gov
- National Park Service: Ellis Island, Castle Garden and tracing immigrant ancestors, nps.gov
- FamilySearch: record guidance for the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia, familysearch.org
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