Identifying Your Ancestral Town
By Angelo Coniglio
Most censuses give a person’s age at their last birthday before the date of the census, from which an approximate birth year can be determined. In addition, often the following information is listed: date of arrival in the U.S.; country of origin; whether naturalized; occupation; and address. Family members living at the same address are shown with the same information as above for each member. A man and wife’s record may also include their ‘age at first marriage’ or ‘year of marriage’, but the wife’s maiden name is not given. The children’s names may be helpful if you remember the naming convention previously discussed. The first name of a man’s oldest son would be the same as the man’s father; oldest daughter named after his mother, etc. Children’s names may help to confirm the person’s identity when other records are found. If you plan to research the wife named in a census, the younger children’s names may reflect her parents’ given names.
Having the census information, you can search on-line for the person’s ship passenger manifest by first and last name, at libertyellisiforundation.org, castlegarden.org, or Ancestry.com. Use the census information to narrow the search to those who fit. The most commonly used of these sources is the free site libertyellisiforundation.org (formerly ellisisland.org) which has over 25 million passenger records, and the following discussion refers to that site.
When you log on to HYPERLINK libertyellisfoundation.org, if it is your first use, you’ll be asked to join or contribute to the Ellis Island Foundation, but this is optional. But you must register, for free, with a user name and password. Future searches may ask for those, but there is no charge to do the searches. After registering or signing in click the PASSENGER SEARCH box. Here you can enter the person’s name, as it was spelled in the ‘old country’. You can select “results” at this point, but that may return a long list to sort through, of persons with the same name. You can also click on‘Wizard’. Then, on the drop-down menu, click the right arrow until you see slide bars for Year of Birth, Current Age, Age at Arrival, Year of Arrival (i.e., age at the time of immigration), Month of Arrival and Day of Arrival. Don’t be intimidated. If you don’t know a fact, enter only the facts you do know. If your search is too general (last name only, or even first and last names), you may get TOO MUCH information, with hundreds of names to sort through.
If your search is too specific (searching first and last names, exact year of birth, and gender, etc.), you may get NO matches. This is not necessarily because the person’s name is not in the database, but may be because the recorded data (whether correct or not) doesn’t exactly match your search criteria. For example, obviously your grandfather Andrea Petix was a male, but whoever entered the information in the original manifest or in the database may have interpreted ‘Andrea’ as a female name and entered the gender as female. Therefore, your nannu wouldn’t show up if you searched for males only!
I usually start my search with my best guess for the first name and surname, and press the RESULTS box. That will produce either a message saying no one by that name was found, or a list of folks with the requested first name and surname. It may contain as few as one, or as many as hundreds of folks with the same name. Here’s where the census information comes in. The Ellis Island list will show first and last name; residence, year of arrival; the name of the ship, and other information. Study the list to see if there is anyone with your ancestor’s name whose arrival year and other information matches the information you found on the census. If you’re reasonably certain of these facts, you may limit the search by the slide bars mentioned above, before you click on the RESULTS box, to reduce the number of names returned. Select one of the names in the list shown, and click the ‘Ship Manifest’ icon on the far right.
You’ll see a display with the pertinent information above a ‘thumbnail’ of the manifest. Moving your cursor over the thumbnail will enlarge it for reading. I urge you to look closely at the image of the manifest, and do your own interpretation of the names and other information, rather than trusting someone else’s transcription. Hand-copy the information, or order a copy ($20 - $30). Before mid-1907, there was one page per manifest; after that there were two pages, and both pages are important. Very early records may give only the country of birth. Manifests for about 1900 to mid-1907 give the town of last residence, and from mid-1907 on, both the last residence and town of birth are given. Once you’ve found the manifest for the right person, you can navigate back for a ship image ($10 - $12.50), or a diploma-like ‘passenger record’ ($30). Warning: if there are misspellings of the name or town, or other errors, they will also be in error on the purchased passenger record.
Coniglio is the author of the book The Lady of the Wheel, inspired by his Sicilian research. Order the paperback or the Kindle version at http://bit.ly/SicilianStory. Coniglio’s web page at http://bit.ly/AFCGen has helpful hints on genealogic research. If you have genealogy questions, or would like him to lecture to your club or group, e-mail him at genealogytips@aol.com
