by LaRae Free Kerr

If our ancestors had only stayed put. In one spot. For generations. Our hunts for them would be so much easier. But just like people of this age, they moved all over. A very old genealogy “rule” said ancestors probably stayed within twenty miles of their birthplace. Well, we know better now. Our ancestors were a movin’, groovin’ bunch.

The good news is that many of our ancestors’ moves were recorded. The bad news is that many of those records are rotted, burned, drowned, chewed by mice, lost – at least to us. More good news is that more and more extant emigration and immigration records are being digitized and printed.

While that old twenty-mile rule has been disproved, another old genealogy rule, “search the neighbors” has been improved. When you find your immigrant family in their first American census, note their nationality and naturalization. Then find neighbors of your family from the same place. If your family immigrated before the 1850 census, check tax records and deeds for neighbors. This allows you to follow the trail of several families at once. If one disappears, perhaps you can follow the other, eventually leading to the place they all called “home.”

So, where do you look for your movin’ ancestors? Ancestry.com’s immigration/emigration indexes record millions of movin’ ancestors. They include Filby’s Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, 1500s-1900s which covers nearly 500,000 immigrants found in published sources. Filby’s is a thirty-plus volume set available at some libraries including the Arizona State Library and on CD at some libraries and at http://www.genealogy.com/354facd.html?priority=0000900. As mentioned, it is available and completely searchable on Ancestry.com along with thousands of rolls of microfilmed passenger records from the National Archives.

A regular stream of movin’ ancestors left Russia for the farming lands of the Canadian Northwest before World War I. This migration pattern is discussed in one fifteen-page chapter of Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation by John Murray Gibbon, published about 1938. One of these books is available at Abebooks.com at the time of writing this column.

New to the web, a database of passengers on ships departing in the United Kingdom for North America, Australia, India and South Africa between 1890 and 1960 will be up and running within six months, according to a United Kingdom National Archives announcement. Already the records covering 1890-1899 are up at http://www.findmypast.com/passengerListPersonSearchStart.action. More information about the site is available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.

The announcement included this telling paragraph: “The passenger lists also open up new insights into family history and social trends. For example, the lists reveal the story of the Jewish migrants who fled persecution and poverty in Russia to escape to South Africa in search of a new life via British ports.”

Even though ancestors on these next two British sites weren’t movin’ out, they were movin’ up. The Database of Court Officers 1660-1837 by R. O. Bucholz, Project Director, describes its’ holdings thusly: “The Database of Court Officers is an online computer database providing the career histories of every remunerated officer and servant of the English royal household from the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.” See http://www.luc.edu/depts/history/bucholz/DCO/. At www.british-history.ac.uk/ it is possible to find much about British history and the people who moved up.

Many people from Eastern Europe as well as Germany emigrated through Hamburg, Germany. These movin’ peoples’ records, 1850-1934 (except 1915-1919) can be found on Ancestry.com. Only 1890-1913 have been indexed so far, although all images are available. Go to http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=11588 to learn more about the Hamburg Passenger Lists as found on Ancestry.com.

It should come as no surprise that the Hamburg Passenger records are in German. But Steve Morse’s site at www.stevemorse.org allows searches in English, though the entries are still in German, of course. Steve Morse has developed faster, easier finding aids for Ellis Island and Castle Garden searches, and now for the Hamburg, Germany passenger lists. Note that membership with Ancestry.com is necessary to see these records and that Steve Morse provides information for using Ancestry.com at libraries.

Another group of sources exists for finding immigrating ancestors. These are emigration lists created by the country or region of embarkation as well as the foreign countries’ city directories, phone books, etc. To find out more about how to find your ancestors in the country-of-origin’s records visit Kory L. Meyerink’s site at
http://www.progenealogists.com/kory.htm. You can read his article, “Rediscovering Passenger Lists,” and you can purchase audio tapes of his lecture, “Getting There When There’s Nothing Here: European Sources for Tracking Immigrant Origins.” His process is important for those who haven’t been able to get their ancestors back over the ocean.

Kory Meyerink also reminds researchers to use the American Genealogical-Biographical Index (AGBI). It includes references to 6.25 million people, many of whom are not included in the big online databases. See his article, Genealogy’s Best Kept Secret” at http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=663. These entries sometimes give immigration information.

Thousands of movin’, groovin’ ancestors can be found in these records. Maybe some of them are yours.

LaRae Free Kerr, M. ED., can be reached at Itsallrelatives@sfcn.org.