Places to Search

International and Passenger Records This authoritative collection includes passenger lists for all of America's major Atlantic ports, plus European, British, and Canadian records.

Emmigration from the United Kingdom

Passenger and Immigration Lists Index (PILI)

The Passenger and Immigration Lists Index (PILI) contains immigration, passenger and naturalization records of individuals that came to the U.S. and Canada between the 16th and mid-20th centuries, containing more than 2.8 million citations. Information includes the name and age of the immigrant; year and place of arrival, naturalization, or other records which indicates person indexed is an immigrant; and names of all listed family members, with their age and relationship to the main entry.

Boston Port Arrivals and Immigrants, 1715-16, 1762-69

Rivaled by few other ports in the middle of the 18th Century, Boston was the destination of many immigrants to British North America. This collection of port authority records reveals a wealth of information regarding some of the arrivals in the years 1715-16 and 1762-69. Organized chronologically, researchers will find the ship's name, captain, date of arrival, where it sailed from and passengers, if any, who came to the city. It contains about 5000 names.

Irish Quaker Immigration into Pennsylvania

This richly detailed database contains information regarding Quaker immigrants from Ireland to Pennsylvania. Compiled by Albert Myers, a member of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, this work narrates the general history of immigration from Ireland focusing on Quakers who came to the United States. In addition to the historical narrative, biographies of many immigrants, often containing birth and death dates, as well as some wills and probate records are included.

Irish and British Immigrants to America, 1860s-1870s Trace your Irish and British roots with this ground-breaking collection of immigration data.

Scotch-Irish Settlers in America, 1500s-1800s Immigration Records If you've got ancestors of Scotch-Irish descent, you'll want to explore the 13 volumes available here. Among these significant volumes, you'll find a collection of Pennsylvania genealogies from Chester county, a location historically scarce on genealogical source material. Approximately 215,000 individuals referenced. Genealogically valuable because passenger and immigration lists can be an invaluable primary source for tracing most immigrants to the United States, particularly in the 19th century. Highlights include three out-of-print sources, including Ford's The Scotch-Irish in America, providing an essential historical perspective.

Irish to America, 1846-1865 Passenger and Immigration Lists Between 1847 and 1854, the arrival of more than 1 million Irish marked the first voluntary mass migration to the United States. This Family Archive contains information on approximately 1.5 million individuals who arrived in Boston between 1846 and 1851 and in New York between 1846 and 1865. It was compiled from the original ship manifest schedules filed by all vessels entering United States ports in accordance with an Act of Congress in March of 1819. This resource was produced in collaboration with the Balch Institute Center for Immigration Research and the John F. Kennedy Trust of Wexford County, Ireland. Information was selected, coordinated, and arranged by the Balch Institute and the John F. Kennedy Trust from ship manifest schedules at the National Immigration Archives in Philadelphia. The National Immigration Archives maintains one of the most extensive collections of European immigration data in the Western hemisphere with U.S. passenger lists from 1820 to just before World War I.

Additional Information

National Records at the PRO
by Phil Westwood

There are a vast range of records here the most heavily accessed being military records. Others include legal records, records of emigration / immigration, changes of name, police records, debtors / bankrupts, prisoners of war and many others.

Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Boston
by Karen Frisch

While Boston is identified more with the Irish than with those of any other nationality, few groups of immigrants were more persecuted in the nineteenth century. The slogan "None need apply but Americans" had already come into being by 1845. The Irish who came in droves to Boston stepped off the docks into lives of poverty and discrimination.

Taking the Plunge on Ships' Passenger Lists
by George G. Morgan

There was a time when I thought that undertaking a search for my ancestors on ships' passenger lists would be as perilous as the journey they took to cross the ocean. I'll be the first to admit that I was a coward, intimidated by what I thought was certain to be a hopeless waste of time. Most of my ancestors arrived prior to the American Revolution, you see, and I had been told that passenger lists from that time had been maintained in the port of entry, and that most of them had probably been lost or destroyed. Boy, how is that for discouraging news!

 

 

See also: GenDirectory: Immigration