Genealogy Online

by Elizabeth Crowe

  The Immigrant Experience link has two sets of articles on the population of the United States. “Family Histories,” the first set, gives real-life examples of people whose ancestors passed through Ellis Island. “The Peopling of America” is a companion series of articles showing the timeline of people coming to the United States from all over the world, beginning with those who crossed the Bering Straits 20,000 years ago. You can also look at a history of Ellis Island and a timeline that begins in 1630.

  Using the Site

  The site has two parts: free services and services available only to foundation members. Even without the free registration, however, you can find names and dates, and that’s what’s important.

  Before you can gain access to the free searches, you must register. This involves choosing a logon name and password and giving your name and address; when you return, cookies on your computer will allow the site to show you saved searches.

  Searches

  As a registered user (remember, registration is free), you can use the Passenger Search. Simply put in a first and last name at the opening screen, and then click Search Archives. If you want to perform a more targeted search, click Passenger Search at the top of the page, and then click New Search. On that search page, you can input a first and last name, and then choose Male or Female (or don’t use gender at all).

  As the site says, if at first you don’t succeed, don’t give up! Remember that many passengers’ names were misspelled, so try clicking the “close matches” or “alternate spellings” boxes at the top of the page to ask the system to search for spellings that have similar sound values (e.g., Dickson and Dixon would sound the same). If the results list is too long, refine the search using the bar on the left side of the screen, filtering for year of arrival, ethnicity, and so on. Choosing one of the names gives you a screen where you can choose to see the original ship’s manifest.

  Free vs. Paid Membership

  If you register as a regular user, which is free, you can keep copies of the passenger records, manifests, and ship images in “Your Ellis Island File.” This can be opened on the computers at Ellis Island or on the website. You can purchase copies of these documents at the online gift shop or at the interpretive shop on Ellis Island.

  If you join as a foundation member for $45 per year, you can:

  • Annotate passenger records in the Ellis Island Archives

  • Create and maintain your Family History Scrapbook

  • Order one free copy of your initial scrapbook (printout or CD-ROM)

  • Receive a 10 percent discount at the online gift shop or at the center

  • Possibly get a tax deduction (check with your accountant)

  • Help support the work of The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation to preserve and protect the sites and their records

  The information on passenger records comes from passenger lists, called ship manifests. Passengers were asked a series of questions, and their answers were entered into the manifests. Ellis Island inspectors then used the manifests to examine immigrants. Click the links on the left to view the passenger’s ship and the manifest with the passenger’s name. On some passenger records, click to read information added to the community archive by members of the foundation. (If you’re a foundation member, you’ll be able to add annotations of your own.) To save the passenger record, click Add To Your Ellis Island File. As a registered member, you can access this file at a later logon.

  You can look at the transcription of the ship’s manifest to see who is recorded near the person. You must look at two images for the complete records, which ran across facing pages of the original books.

  Click the Ship link to view details about the vessel. Registered members can save their searches and results in an online file for later reference and use. All of these images, as well as an official Ellis Island Passenger Record, can be ordered in hard copy.

  The Ellis Island search form lets you enter just the leading characters of the last name. It also allows you to search on ethnicity, ports, and ships. However, the search on the Ellis Island site requires you to first have an exact spelling match, whereas the Morse form (see the following section) does not. For example, if you are searching for Noelle de Nantes D’Avignonet, you will probably come up blank. But if you let it search for “den,” it may come up.

  Once you have the name, or a ship, or a date, you can probably find the manifest. Then you can look at either a transcription or the actual page, as in Figure 13-2.

  FIGURE 13-2. You can look at an image of the original ship’s record at the Ellis Island site.

  You can order either a print of the original page or a pretty certificate with a transcription in the gift shop. You can also store what you find in Your Ellis Island File so you can resume a search that you started earlier.

  Community Archives

  On the Ellis Island site, only members of the foundation can create annotations to the records, but all registered users of the website can view them. Annotations supplement information in the record, telling more about the passenger’s background and life in the United States. This information has not been verified as accurate and complete—it’s simply what the annotating member believes to be the facts. Click View Annotations on the passenger record (if no View Annotations button exists, the record hasn’t been annotated yet). If you’re registered with the site, you’ll see a list of annotations. If you haven’t yet registered, a screen will appear so that you can.

  Ellis Island Family History

  If you have paid for a membership to The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, you can contribute Family History Scrapbooks on the website or at the American Family Immigration History Center itself on Ellis Island.

  Visiting in Person

  The link for information is “Visiting Ellis Island” under “Ellis Island” in the bar at the top of any page on the site. As of this writing, the island was still rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. That means some areas are restricted, but the American Family Immigration History Center is open for research into family immigration records. Also open is the Great Hall exhibit, “Journeys: The Peopling of America 1550–1890” and The American Immigrant Wall of Honor. Visitors can also enjoy the audio tour, join a ranger program, and watch the award-winning documentary Island of Hope, Island of Tears.

  Morse’s Forms

  This search on the Ellis Island site is better now than it was the first summer the site went online, but it still has many steps you need to take, and sometimes the index is incomplete. Dr. Stephen Morse, with collaborators Michael Tobias, Erik Steinmetz, and Dr. Yves Goulnik, created One-Step Search Tools for the Ellis Island site (www.jewishgen.org/databases/eidb/). This project has several different search forms that overlap to a degree. Though this may get you a bit confused about which one to use, I suggest using several of them in this order:

  • Ellis Island gold form (1892–1924) is an enhanced form for searching for Ellis Island passengers. If you put in your e-mail address at the top of the gold form, you will receive an e-mail with the results in addition to the display in your browser. This is the best one to use.

  • Ellis Island white form (1892–1924) is the simpler form when searching for Ellis Island passengers.

  • Ellis Island ship lists (1892–1924) allows you to search for the names of specific ships in the Ellis Island microfilms.

  • Ellis Island additional details (1892–1924) searches the additional passenger information.

  Note

  Dr. Morse’s pages are so much better at finding things than the Ellis Island site that I think you should go there to search. Register as a user at www.ellisisland.org and then search with One Step.

  The forms on this site can search by town of origin, use “sounds-like” codes, and can search microfilms that are in the index but that are not accessible through the Ellis Island site’s algorithms. An article on using these forms is at www.stevemorse.org/onestep/onestep3.htm with tips and explanations. It is
definitely worth your time to read this article before you start, but I’ll provide a quick overview here.

  Other Forms

  Morse has several other forms for searching the Ellis Island database, Ancestry.com (you have to input your ID and password for your paid subscription for those), and several other ports of immigration, including Baltimore, Galveston, Philadelphia, and more. He also has help on census forms, calendars, and translations. His site, www.stevemorse.org/index.html, is a bookmark you must have!

  Wrapping Up

  • Ellis Island Online is a wonderful resource on the Web.

  • You can search for immigrants from 1892 through 1924—the peak years of Ellis Island’s processing—by name, date, and ship.

  • You can upload pictures, sounds, and text to an online scrapbook if you’re a member of The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation (it costs $45 to register) or if you visit the museum itself in New York.

  • Stephen Morse and several others have created alternative search forms for the Ellis Island data, as well as other ships’ lists and sites.

  Chapter 14

  Online Library Card Catalogs and Services

  One of the wonderful things about the online world is the plethora of libraries now using online card catalogs (OCCs). This greatly speeds up your search while you’re at any library.

  It is so easy to look in the card catalog before actually visiting the library. You know immediately whether that library owns the title. With a few more keystrokes, you can find out whether the title is on the shelf, on reserve, on loan to someone, available by interlibrary loan, or found in a nearby branch library. Then, if you want to, you can get dressed and go to the library to pick up your resource!

  You can connect to most libraries, both their online card catalogs and their services, through the World Wide Web using a browser interface. In many cases, the catalog will look exactly as it does in the library itself.

  But almost as exciting: You can often download certain holdings as a PDF or other digital format; you can sometimes view an image of an actual artifact and save that digital file; and best of all, sometimes, you can use the library’s online services, such as NewsBank, from your home if you have a library card with that institution.

  Connecting to OCCs by Web Browser

  Modern libraries use computerized card catalogs all around the world. Two sites to bookmark that will get you to most of them:

  • An important site to bookmark is WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org/). With this site, you can create an account and save your searches and results. This way, you have a research log of sorts for your book searches. Its opening page is shown in Figure 14-1.

  FIGURE 14-1. The WorldCat site helps you search many libraries and formats at one time.

  • Another important one is LibWeb (www.lib-web.org/), a directory of worldwide libraries, library catalogs, and library servers. In Figure 14-2 you can see that the site has academic, national, and public libraries in its list.

  FIGURE 14-2. The LibWeb site helps you search specific catalogs from around the world.

  In addition, many archives have their holdings cataloged online. You can browse these and more:

  • A2A (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a) is a searchable collection of archive catalogs in England and Wales from the eighth century to the present. Type a word or phrase into the box; you can limit the search to specific archives or to English or Welsh counties, as well as specific dates.

  • Catalogue Collectif de France (http://www.bnf.fr/pages/zNavigat/frame/version_anglaise.htm?ancre=english.htmr) will let you use one interface to query the three largest online library catalogs in France, including the printed and digitized holdings of the national Library of France, the University SUDOC (System of Documentation) of French universities, and local libraries across France. It includes books printed from 1811 to the present in more than 60 public or specialized libraries.

  • LibDex (http://www.libdex.com) is a worldwide directory of library home pages, web-based online public access catalogs (OPACs), friends of the library pages, and library e-commerce affiliate links, with a page for you to browse by country.

  • Lib-Web-Cats (http://www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats) is a directory of libraries worldwide. While the majority of the current listings are in North America, the numbers of libraries represented in other parts of the globe are growing.

  • The European Library (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org) searches the content of member European national libraries. This includes books, newspapers, manuscripts, and more.

  Google Books

  Using Google Books for family history is fun and interesting. Google Books has full text search capabilities on millions of books. It is like an international library you can use and peruse from home.

  The texts of all the books can be searched. Some of these books are public domain, and you can even download them as a PDF, in Google Play, or in some cases, to a Kindle or Nook. Others are still under copyright, but the pages that have your search term may be available to look at. Then you can click Find In Library to see if it is available to borrow, or Click Get This Book to find places where you can buy it.

  Let’s look at an example. Recently, I was researching Col. Guy H. Wyman. He is not a relation—he is the man who named and first surveyed Navarre, Florida, where I live. Opening www.books.google.com, there is a simple text box. Remembering the lessons from Chapter 7, the input could be as simple as GUY H.WYMAN. But to get better results, I would want to use quotation marks to search for the phrase. Because he was an officer in World War I, several government publications list him, including annual reports of his cavalry unit and a petition to the Treasurer of the United States for reimbursement for a horse. He is mentioned in the Official Bulletin of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, in the Journal of the Senate when he is promoted, and best of all, in a local history that has an entire chapter on him (see Figure 14-3). If I click Find In A Library to the left, the browser goes to WorldCat, which lists six local libraries that have this book.

  FIGURE 14-3. This book has a chapter on the subject of my search. Note on the left that Google Books has links for stores to buy this book, as well as Find In A Library.

  Google Books can be searched just as any card catalog can be: by subject, location, author, keyword, and so on.

  Also, check out GooBooGeni (www.gooboogeni.com), a site that searches specific Google Books, such as city directories, surname genealogies, and so on. The opening page is a blog by the author, and this is a volunteer site, so updates are occasional. Still, it is a good idea.

  The Library of Congress Card Catalog

  The Library of Congress Online Catalog has about 14,000,000 records of books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, and visual materials in one database with cross-references and scope notes. As an integrated database, the online catalog includes 3,200,000 records from an earlier database. These catalog records, primarily for books and serials cataloged between 1898 and 1980, are being edited to comply with current cataloging standards and to reflect contemporary language and usage.

  Many items from the library’s special collections are accessible to users, but are not represented in this catalog. In addition, some individual items within collections (microforms, manuscripts, photographs, etc.) are not listed separately in the catalog, but are represented by collection-level catalog records. You can use the simple search on the far left, or use Boolean terms and limiters in the middle and the right.

  Don’t Miss These Library Sites

  Genealogy sections in libraries can be a small section or an entire floor, or even the library’s reason for existence. Here are some card catalogs to examine from home:

  • Anne Arundel County Public Library (Maryland) has the Gold Star Collection, which contains about 700 titles dealing with Maryland, including some Anne Arundel County genealogy. In their special collections are several Maryland family his
tories and local histories. The library catalog is located online at http://www.aacpl.net.

  • California University and State Libraries MELVYL (California) at http://www.melvyl.worldcat.org/ is a searchable catalog of library materials from the ten UC campuses, the California State Library, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics Library, the Graduate Theological Union, the Hastings College of the Law Library, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Library. And every single one of those institutions has a history/genealogy section.

  • Connecticut State Library (Connecticut) has not only genealogy and local history of Connecticut, but also of the rest of New England. Their special collections include Connecticut town vital records to about 1900. The state library’s catalog can be accessed through the state library home page at http://www.ctstatelibrary.org.

  • Samford University Library (Alabama) does not have quite the scope of the Birmingham Public Library with regard to Alabama history, but because of the annual Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research held here has quite a collection of all things Alabama. The website is http://library.samford.edu/.

  • The Allen County Public Library (Indiana) at http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/has one of the best genealogical collections in the country. The link to the genealogy page gives you an overview of this wonderful treasure house. More than 50,000 volumes of compiled genealogies, microfilms of primary sources, and specialized collections, such as African American and Native American, make this library one you must see. But, like the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, you must first plan your visit, or you will be overwhelmed. Search the catalog online for the names you need to see if they have something for you!