Lured by opportunity or driven by necessity, millions of people made their way to America in the most determined and sustained migration the world has ever known. Initially they left traces of their immigration in scattered records and documents; later, their arrival in this country was documented so minutely that the records resulting from this documentation are among the largest, the most continuous, and the most uniform in the nation's archives ...

Title of the first 10 volumes of the series is Germans to America : lists of passengers arriving at U.S. ports 1850-1855.

A listing of 675 microfilms of passenger lists, and the dates covered by each, available from the National Archives.

"Starting in 1820, ships' passenger lists were collected by U.S. Customs officials at all ports of entry. Well into the 1890s, these lists--Customs Passenger Lists--furnish proof of the arrival in the United States of nearly twenty million persons. With the exception of federal census records, they are the largest and most continuous body of records of the entire century. Listing each passenger by name, age, sex, occupation, the country he intended to inhabit, the name of his ship, his port of embarkation, and the date of his arrival, the lists were kept under the authority of the collectors of customs at the various ports of entry, later deposited with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and finally given to the National Archives, where they were sorted and arranged by port, date, and ship, and then microfilmed. The microfilm version of the Customs Passenger Lists for the port of New York--by far the busiest port of entry in the U.S.--consists of both original passenger lists and copies of those lists, depending on which list was most suitable for microfilming. This new compilation by Mrs. Bentley, a sequel to her recent book covering the period 1820-1829, is a direct transcription of the original microfilmed lists (National Archives Microfilm #237) for the port of New York for the period 1830 through 1832. In this one encyclopedic volume are the names--in alphabetical order--of 65,000 passengers with their age, sex, occupation, place of origin, etc., and the names of the 1,700 ships that brought them to New York. Also included is a separate list of ships with the names of ship masters, ports of embarkation, and dates of arrival.Until now these passenger lists have been virtually inaccessible, available only through a somewhat incomplete card index maintained by the National Archives. Along with the first volume in this series, we now have complete coverage of passengers arriving at the port of New York for the entire period from 1820 through 1832!"--Amazon.

These passenger lists, which cover the period of the Irish Famine and its aftermath, identify the emigrants' "actual places of residence", as well as their port of departure and nationality. Essentially business records, the lists were developed from the order books of two main passenger lines operating out of Londonderry--J.& J. Cooke (1847-67) and William McCorkell & Co. (1863-71). Both sets of records provide the emigrant's name, age, and address, and the name of the ship. The Cooke lists provide the ship's destination and year of sailing, while the McCorkell lists provide the date engaged and the scheduled sailing date. Altogether 27,495 passengers are identified.

Janie Riley is an avid genealogist with a habit of stumbling on to dead bodies. With her husband Steven, Janie heads to Salt Lake City Utah to track down her elusive fourth great-grandmother. But her search into the past leads her to more than she bargained for. Her discovery of a dark secret brings her closer to danger. Can she solve the mysteries of the past and the present, and untangle a web of lies before disaster strikes?

Provides information on searching passenger ship lists and indexes, naturalization and immigration records, and genealogical Websites to find records of ancestors who came to the United States on ships.