RLP 299: Immigration Records Part 3 – 1820 -1906

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 299 Immigration Records Part three. Welcome to Research Like, a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder Accredited genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother, mother-daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. Hi everyone and Welcome to Research Like a Pro and Hi Mom.

Diana (51s):
Hi Nicole. how are you today? Well,

Nicole (54s):
I’m getting better from my cold, but still just feeling a little under the weather and stuffy. So if, if I sound funny, that’s why.

Diana (1m 2s):
Well, and I have the same thing going on. So we’re both just a little stuffy, aren’t we? It’s the way it is in the winter.

Nicole (1m 10s):
Right. What about your work? What’s going on with it?

Diana (1m 14s):
Well, I’m working on my Kline project for the study group and continuing to add DNA matches to my Airtable base and my lucid chart. And yesterday I got off on a bit of a, I’m not sure if it was a wild goose chase or not because I found a shared match of a shared match. You know, I think these are people are all in the same Kline cluster, and this person actually had Kline in their tree. So I started looking at that and tracing it back and I was so excited. But it goes way back to a Moses Leonidas Kline out of South Carolina. So now I’m thinking, okay, well was this maybe a brother to my John C.

Diana (1m 55s):
Klein or a cousin You know you just are not sure. Or maybe we’re connected on a whole different branch and it wasn’t the Klein’s that this connection comes through. It’s kind of tricky when you have the same surname as You know the people in the cluster that you’re researching. So I’m still a little bit on the fence about that match. Have you had that happen in your research before where you had a surname but turned out to not actually be the relevant line?

Nicole (2m 20s):
Yes, that happens sometimes. And what I like to do with that is ask them, look at your shared matches and tell me what line of your tree is this match on because they can see better, you know,

Diana (2m 33s):
Right? Well they do share with a lot of the people that are actually in this cluster, but You know, I am still wondering ’cause they’re southern, everybody’s southern. Maybe there’s just a different line they’re sharing, right, with random people.

Nicole (2m 48s):
Yeah. It is tricky when they’re in like the Kline cluster, but like you said, it could be a different branch of their tree that they’re related on. So Right.

Diana (2m 57s):
You

Nicole (2m 58s):
Just have to be careful that we don’t assume it’s on the same surname line that we’re hoping for it to be. This used to happen a lot on my Dyer research where the dire surname is pretty common and so it’ll be in other people’s trees, but then the actual side of the family that they’re related on is a different side.

Diana (3m 20s):
Right.

Nicole (3m 21s):
And even though they have Dyer in their trees some other Dyer line.

Diana (3m 25s):
Yes. That can be confusing and tricky.

Nicole (3m 29s):
Alright, for announcements today, just a reminder that we put out some new Airtable quick reference guides. So if you’re wanting to have those PDFs, then you can go to our shop and purchase those. There’s two Airtable research Logs for Genealogy second edition, and then tracking DNA matches with Airtable. And that’s a separate guide. Our next Research Like a Pro Webinar is on April 16th and it’s by Alice Childs Accredited Genealogist Professional. The title is Parents of Maria Terwilliger in New York, A DNA case study, and she will cover topics such as New York Census records, Dutch Reformed Church records, probate records, Gephi network graphs using Ancestry DNA data, lucid chart diagrams, pedigree collapse, and the shared cM project.

Nicole (4m 20s):
If you want to join our next study group that will begin in August, 2024 and registration for that begins this summer. Please join our news letter every Monday. You can get a email from us with our new blog posts and podcast episodes and any other updates and announcements. We have the Ohio Genealogical Society Conference coming up in April, that’s this month. That’ll be an in-person conference that mom is going to. And then both of us are presenting in the virtual conference at the National Genealogical Society Conference in May.

Diana (4m 56s):
Right. It’s always fun looking forward to these conferences and thinking of all the fun people we’re going to meet, I guess virtually. We may not, we may not meet people in person, right. But we’ll be there. Well, let’s get into our subject, which is Immigration Records Part three. This is going to deal with ancestors who immigrated to the US after 1820. And if you do have someone in immigrated in that timeframe, then there’s a good chance there is actually a record detailing the ship, the date of arrival, port of departure, fellow passengers and more. But the challenge really comes in uniquely identifying our Ancestors among those of the same name.

Diana (5m 37s):
But record availability in the 19th and 20th centuries is fairly good. So we can research the Ancestors thoroughly, look for those clues, and then hopefully find a record. So this is our third in the series. Third episode. And in part one we talked all about the important factors for identity, such as discovering a full name, birth and marriage date, ethnicity, religion and family and friend relationships. And in part two we discussed the Colonial Era of the US and what records might be available and how to find them. And what we learned was that there are not as many records during the Colonial Era, but during this period from 1820, and we’re just going to go up to 1906, we saw the immigration process really change and the records changed as well.

Diana (6m 28s):
So let’s talk about who it was immigrating in the 19th century. This was a time where we saw immigrants coming from the British Isle, Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland. And we had a huge wave of immigrants from Ireland and Germany. So they are pretty specific to that research and we do talk about that a bit in our blog posts and podcasts on tracing Irish immigrants and German immigrants. With the industrial revolution beginning about 1880 in the urbanization of large cities, we begin to see a huge number of southern and eastern Europeans immigrating from Russia, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.

Diana (7m 11s):
And the peak year was 1907 with over a million arrivals.

Nicole (7m 17s):
Wow. That’s a lot of arrivals. Well, let’s talk a little bit about United States immigration laws. Whatever country your ancestor left behind immigration and the records were influenced by United States laws because these laws encouraged or discouraged immigration. So we have to research them to understand how they affected our ancestors. The Library of Congress has published the laws public and private enacted by Congress. Some of the major laws with far reaching implications are first the 1819 Steerage Act. This was an act regulating the passenger ships and vessels after the war of 1812.

Nicole (7m 58s):
Immigration from Europe to the United States increased a lot because of better transportation, but the conditions for passengers were really bad and the poorest who traveled in steerage being given limited food, water, ventilation and access to the ship’s deck. So if you can imagine just kind of being stuck below deck and not being able to get up and get fresh air, how terrible that would be. Well, in 1819, the US Congress passed the first of the several steerage acts to offer protection to immigrants. This act was passed by the 15th Congress on March 2nd, 1819, and it required the ship’s captain to deliver a list or manifest of all the passengers taken on board of the said ship or vessel at any foreign port or place in which list or manifest is shall be the duty of the said master to designate particularly the age, sex, and occupation of the said passengers respectively, the county to which they severally belong, and that of which it is their intention to become inhabitants.

Nicole (9m 4s):
The law required passenger list to be filed with a customs agent, but not all ports had customs agents, the lists were then to be forwarded to the US Secretary of State. So this law was a real boon for us Genealogists because now we have many more passenger lists being created.

Diana (9m 24s):
Exactly. And then several years later, we had another act in 1882, and this was on August 3rd and the 47th Congress passed an update to the US immigration policy. This act brought the policy under the umbrella of the federal government rather than the state or local ports. And it called for a head tax on non-citizens arriving in the US and imposed restrictions on immigration for those considered undesirables or likely to become a public charge. So this could have been assigned for any number of situations including poverty, lunacy, disability, illness, pregnancy, or being a single woman.

Diana (10m 7s):
The head tax of 50 cents per non-citizen passenger was paid into the Immigration fund of the US Treasury and helped finance the bureaucracy managing Immigration. And then a little bit later in 1891, we have the act that changed the way incoming vessels were dealt with. And now the ship officers had to submit a list of passengers to the immigration and inspectors at the port who would then board the ship and perform medical examinations on any passenger who might be unfit and a disease carrier. This act not only included the ports on the US coast, but expanded to cover border crossing with Mexico and Canada.

Diana (10m 50s):
So I think we’ve read stories or seen it in movies. We’ve heard of these instances where passengers were always worried that they maybe would be sent back because they were carrying some disease You know they were trying to stay healthy. So I can only imagine, anyhow, scary that would’ve been to have come all that way and then maybe not be allowed in.

Nicole (11m 11s):
Oh yeah, that would be hard. That would be a big moment to keep your fingers crossed for

Diana (11m 17s):
That you would pass that examination. Well,

Nicole (11m 20s):
Let’s go back in time a little bit to 1855. And this is when Castle Garden opened as the United States first immigration station. It was known as the Immigrant Landing Depot and connected to Manhattan Island on an artificial island. It was a military fort from 1811 to 1821. From its beginnings in 1855 to 1890 when it was replaced by Ellis Island as an immigrant processing station, it’s estimated that 8 million immigrants were processed there. Records for Castle Garden are included in the large collection called New York Passenger list, 1820 to 1891 on FamilySearch.

Nicole (12m 5s):
Well after the 1891 Immigration Act, Ellis Island was opened as an immigrant inspection location and this is located near New York City and it became the busiest inspection and processing station in the United States. Millions of immigrants passed through Ellis Island from its opening in 1892 all the way up until 1954. The Ellis Island passenger search database holds 65 million records for passengers arriving in the Port of New York between 1820 and 1957. So that is a lot of records.

Diana (12m 41s):
That is so many records and I have friends who have visited Ellis Island in person and enjoyed that experience, which I would love to go there someday. I don’t think we have any of our ancestors that came through Ellis Island, but it would be neat to go and just be there and imagine

Nicole (12m 60s):
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Nicole (13m 42s):
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Diana (13m 54s):
Well, let’s talk about what kind of records we might be looking for. And generally with immigration, we’re thinking mainly of those ship passenger manifests as the record to search. But in reality, there were a lot of different records created when a person arrived in the us they could be in any of the following, a passenger arrival list. The ship manifest hospital records, detainee lists, alien registration, and you’ll find this under the acronym LPC for lack of proper credentials, naturalization records, newspapers and periodicals. And then also think about the records that were created when a person left their home country.

Diana (14m 36s):
These could include the sale of property permits to emigrate such as in Germany, indentures work permits, travel documents, immigrant lists, church records and more. And we also have additional record types such as border crossings between the US and Canada or the US and Mexico passport applications and crew lists. So there are so many different records that we could use to pinpoint immigration.

Nicole (15m 4s):
Wow, there are a lot of different options there. Well, how do we find those records? The National Archives holds the passenger arrival records from 1820 to 1982. It’s important to note that there are gaps and the records are by no means complete. The records have been microfilmed and are currently being digitized. The FamilySearch Research wiki page for US Immigration Passenger Arrival records breaks down the various collections by United States City and here and includes direct Links to collections on FamilySearch, Ancestry, Find My Past and MyHeritage. A good way to do this is to perform a broad search first and then if the ancestor is not located, begin searching specific databases.

Nicole (15m 49s):
Ancestry has a major collection simply titled passenger Lists. This can be filtered by location and date. And basic information for the ancestor can be filled in Within this collection are smaller data collections specific to a port such as New York or Alabama. For example, if You know that your ancestor was a sailor from Boston, Massachusetts, you’d want to search the Massachusetts Boston Crew list 1811 to 1921. You could use the search engine or browse the crew list by date. Although indexed your ancestors name could be difficult to read and index differently than you would expect. And this is a very common problem with passenger list.

Nicole (16m 29s):
For some reason, those people filling ’em out were not very good at writing clearly. Right? And because a lot of the names were foreign to them, they were written down in weird ways, spelled wrong, spelled phonetically, whatever it was. So we just always have to be creative as we search through the passenger list databases. We always research our ancestors thoroughly in the US with censuses and other US records too, and review family knowledge before looking up Immigration records. That’s because immigration records aren’t always clear on who the individual is. So you have to really have a good timeline and have all the clues in hand so that you can identify the right list.

Nicole (17m 16s):
This will really help us You know, identify ancestors among those of the same name and just identify them on a record that doesn’t have very many details. So knowing You know, having a really clear timeline and idea of where they came to can really help us.

Diana (17m 33s):
Right? So let’s illustrate this with a case study and we’re going to return to my second great grandparents, your third great grandparents, William and Mariah Brockhouse. And they came to the US from their Native England in 1868. And as I was writing about them, I was doing a blog post on Mariah and I realized I actually didn’t even have a record of their voyage. so it was a good opportunity for me to put this into practice. So we always like to start with the census records if we have those available. And the first census to list William and Mariah was in 1870. And this was after they’d arrived in the us.

Diana (18m 13s):
They were out in Utah territory and they reported they were both born in England with parents of foreign birth. Now this census does not ask any questions about immigration or naturalization, but here’s the clue, looking at their household, we can see the first child born in the US was Emma, who was age 3/12ths. So she would’ve been born February of 1870. So this gives us a clue that they likely arrived between Matilda’s birth in 1867 in England, and Emma’s US birth in 1870. So if you haven’t thought about using the children in a family and seeing when and where they were born, that can narrow it down a bit.

Diana (18m 55s):
Now the family was next enumerated on the 1880 census, which again had no questions about immigration or naturalization, but it did ask about parent birthplaces and that can help us to trace immigration. William and Maria, I were both born in England, reported their parents were also of English descent. And again, their daughter’s birthplaces gave us those clues to that immigration between 1867 with Matilda’s birth in England in 1870 with Emma’s birth in the us. And it’s always nice when those correlate between census years,

Nicole (19m 29s):
Right? That’s such a good strategy with so many immigrants coming into the us. The 1900 census asked questions about people’s immigration year and the number of years they’ve been in the US and whether the person was a citizen. So on the 1900 census, William and Mariah reported their immigration year was 1868. And this correlates with what we had seen for their daughter’s birthplaces. They were also both listed as naturalized and stated they had been in the US for 32 years. Mariah and the children would’ve become citizens under William’s naturalization. The 1910 census for William Betos repeated the citizenship questions, but the microfilming makes it difficult to tell whether it is 1865 or 1868.

Nicole (20m 17s):
He did report being naturalized. By 1920, the census asked for the date of immigration and the date of naturalization. William reported an immigration in 1868 and his naturalization in 1872. Information correlated with other census records and family details.

Diana (20m 35s):
So one of the other things we might have available are family stories and histories, which can give us clues. And in this case, William daughter Eliza did write a history and she gave this description of the journey. She said they left England in the spring with two little girls. The steamship Manhattan sailed from Liverpool, England with 480 saints under the direction of Archibald and Hill. They were on the water six weeks and arrived in New York July 4th, 1868. so it seems with clues from the census and the family history that William and Mariah settled in 1868 on the Colorado. However, when I went to the Ancestry collection, New York passenger and Crew list, 1820 to 1957, I found a record for William, a storage passenger on the Colorado arriving in New York on 28 July, 1868.

Diana (21m 29s):
Wait, the story said that it was the Manhattan. And so why is he on the Colorado? Was this the correct William Betos? So armed with the knowledge of his wife’s name and Mariah and his daughter’s Selena and Matilda, it was very clear that this was indeed the Betos family. And I always like to go to the first page of a ship manifest to learn more about the voyage. And I learned that Robert Charles Cutting, master of the SS Colorado to clear the following list or, manifest to be a full perfect list of all the passengers taken on board the steamship at Liverpool and Queenstown. And it’s always fun to look at the printed form.

Diana (22m 10s):
This gives you an idea of what the law was because it says unsaid list is truly designated the age, the sex, and the occupation of each of said passengers. The part of the vessel occupied by each during the passage, the country to which each belongs, and also the country of which it is intended by each to become an inhabitant. And that said, list of manifests truly sets forth the number of said passengers who have died on said voyage and the names and ages of those who have died. Wow. So that is something to look for. If you didn’t know that ship’s passenger list could be listing those who died. Now, the great majority of the passengers were in steerage, and the total passenger account was 1,159.

Diana (22m 53s):
So many people on that in steerage, so they were down below. That’s a lot of people

Nicole (23m 0s):
Oh. my goodness, that is, that must have been so crowded. Well, the key to finding the correct passenger list for William Betos was knowing the names of his family members and approximate date and place of arrival and his country of origin. Although his history gives the wrong ship, the date was close and perhaps another family member arrived on the Manhattan and William’s daughter just got the two names confused. When evaluating family histories, we must always consider the possibility of these types of errors creeping in. Well, what about William Betos naturalization records? With the information gleaned from the census study, we found his declaration of intention to become a US citizen.

Nicole (23m 41s):
And we already discussed this in our series on naturalization records, which you probably already heard,

Diana (23m 47s):
Right? Immigration and naturalization really go hand in hand. But it’s nice to just take them apart and discuss each in its own right. So good luck with all of your research, everyone, and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-Bye.

Nicole (24m 1s):
All right everyone. Bye Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a, Pro at D on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.