KINGS RANSOM ANTIQUES HOME

If you cannot find immigration records for your ancestors, you may consider yourself lucky. I have wasted hours on immigration lists. Look for other records first.

Find any and all records and certificates that document the lives of your family members. Do not get too concerned about immigration records until you have finished this task and have these stored in archival quality storage containers.

To find your immigrant origins, look into the family Bible or any correspondence that may have passed between the members. Naturalization records may list the country of birth and the date immigrated to this country.

The 1900 census was the first to put the date of immigration on the form. The 1910 census had the year of immigration to US, whether naturalized or alien and language spoken as did the 1920 census. The 1930 census asks for the year of immigration into the United States, whether naturalized and whether able to speak English. I cannot find anything about immigration on the 1940 census.

If you are able to make the year of immigration match the number of years in the United States and the age of the person, you can be relatively sure of the date of immigration.

If you go online, you will see that you may search billions of immigration records. There are billions of immigration records but they list many different ships and many different manifests. Most of our ancestors could only afford steerage passage and there are thousands of them listed.

Cindy’s List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet lists hundreds of ships and passengers.

She also has tutorials that help you find your German or Norway family such as Passenger List, Hamburg 1850-1934 and Norway Heritage – Passenger Lists and emigrant Ships from Norway Heritage. If you have a date and a country, you may luck out on Cindy’s List.

From census records, you will find the country emigrated from and the year. Then narrow your search by using that information.

The lists on the internet usually break down to the country emigrated from and the date of arrival in the United States. Do not assume your family came to Ellis Island.

Ellis Island does have a beautiful site and you get free access to it, however, records start in 1892. Before that Castle Garden handled emigrants and some may have fallen through the cracks between the closing of that facility and the opening of Ellis Island.

Remember that there were other ports that accepted travelers such as Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, San Francisco, New Orleans and Alaska. Many immigrants went to Canada as it was cheaper to travel there and walk into the United States.

The record of immigration, the manifest and the picture of the ship that carried your ancestors really adds to the family history, however, it is not one of the most important records to obtain.

A Family Mystery Could Be A Clue

Have you recently joined the thousands of people discovering the fascination of tracing their ancestors? Researching genealogy has become an absorbing occupation all around the world, especially since the Internet is making so many records accessible. But you’ve only gone back a couple generations and hit a stone wall. Your great grandfather, your maternal grandmother, your Great Aunt Maggie or your Great, Great Uncle Josiah just seemed to appeared on the scene with no known history of any kind. That suspicious lack of a past is a big clue. Using information only now coming to public attention, you begin to wonder whether they could be one of the British Home Children, sent overseas from Britain as youngsters to find a new beginning.

Poverty’s Rejects

The child emigration schemes in Britain have remained an overlooked part of history until recently. In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution sucked the rural populations into the dirty, overcrowded, unregulated cities to labour at the mercy of factory owners and brutal economic cycles. Sickness, unemployment, alcoholism and untimely death ripped families apart, leaving thousands of unwanted or destitute children with nowhere to go.

Send Them To The Colonies

The many child rescue organizations that sprang up were quickly overwhelmed. So they came up with the scheme of sending the children overseas to parts of the Empire hungry for more population and more labour for their farms. Canada, alone, received over 100,000 thousand of these children from 1869 right up until the Great Depression.

Why Their Lips Were Sealed

The little ones were adopted, too young to remember where they came from. The older ones, slaving away as farm hands or domestic servants, all too often encountered abuse and ridicule. Longing to shed the stigma of being Britain’s cast-offs, they deliberately hid their origins when they grew up, even from their own families. Or never bothered to tell at all.

Canada Has Four Million Descendants

Australia, South Africa and other parts of the Empire, as well as the United States, also have large numbers of descendants. If you think you are one, you now have a rich archive to help you and you can do much of your hunting on the Internet. The records of the emigration homes, such as Barnardo’s, have been opened to the public and put online. There are growing numbers of British Home Children descendant organizations collecting information, ready to point you in the right direction. Ships’ passenger lists, local histories and family stories are all tools at hand. And, most of all, when you succeed in tracing your own roots, you just might find a tribe of new-found relatives in Britain waiting for you with open arms.

If you are starting tracing your family, family history is the last of your thoughts. You want to find that haughty, crazy grandfather that everyone talks about. You will want to find the unknown members and put them in the right order.

Get over shyness because you will have to ask a myriad of questions and get the right answers to find your family members.

When you have found most of your family and have their certificates, birth, marriage and death, safely stored, and a family tree almost filled, then you can wonder about your family history.

Since our country was founded by emigrants from other lands, your grandparents and great-grandparents came from such countries as China, England, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Israel or others.

This is when things get really fun and interesting. Since the demand for genealogy records has mushroomed in the last few years, it has become much easier to find the necessary documents.

Records that were in the native language have been translated into English and are more accessible than in the past. I have Danish in the family and those records are almost impossible to read and are written in Danish.

Genealogists are an extremely helpful bunch, so if you go on message boards and the many lists on Rootsweb, you will find someone to help translate those records and send you to the right places to find them.

Once you find the country, look into the history of it. Make a time-line and put your family member in it. Every country has been touched by wars, tragedies, plagues and disasters.
Every country is filled with interesting people.

When you find the death records of your ancestors, you will probably find the cause of death. You will then be able to research the diseases and see if they are genetic. As with all genealogy records, use caution as they may have inaccuracies. People are not at their best when answering questions for death certificates.

You will want to visit the areas where your family lived in the past. Visiting the churches or federal buildings in these places may be the only way to get some certificates. You will witness the beauty and culture of the land where your ancestors walked.

By researching your family history, you will find the nationality, the language spoken, the characteristics of the people, what diseases they had, the genetic history and the countries they lived in and you will have a lot of fun.

After you have found your family members and have a lot of their vital record documents, you will want to make a family tree.

If you are computer illiterate or if you just do not like the pesky things, you can still do genealogy. There are companies who will take your data and make a beautiful chart or tree. Your choice and the size of the tree will determine how you will want it to be made.

It certainly is possible to hand letter in your ancestors and family in the slots provided by a commercial tree. If you have beautiful handwriting or can do caligraphy, you are in luck. Or you can draw one and put in slots for each member. There is a site called smartdraw.com where you may download a free example of a tree and make your own.

If you have a large family and a million little notes about each member, you will want to use a commercial software product to organize and keep track of all the members in your family. The software will also easily catch errors that you might make when entering data.

There are many software programs to choose from such as Family Tree Maker, made by ancestry.com; Legacy Family Tree Genealogy Software made by legacyfamilytree.com; Family Historian 4; Ancestral Quest Software’ RootsMagic Software (has a free trial version); Family Tree Maker Builder, from My Heritage; Genbox Family History; and onegreatfamily.com.

Family Tree Maker, the number one selling software program for several years, offers many charts, tools to easily cite your sources and the ability to write your family history.

Legacy, running a close second to Family Tree Maker in popularity, offers a free download of the basic program and it is very powerful.

Legacy, using Microsoft Virtual Earth can pinpoint locations where your ancestors lived. The program will also create many charts, including ones for DNA, cite sources with templates, and make a beautiful tree. To get all these services, though, you need to buy the program.

I downloaded the free version of Legacy and it performs as it promises. Ancestral Quest offers reports, a tree and a family history book with the free basics version. I am as yet undecided which program to use to write the family book, although I have used Family Tree Maker for years.

Genealogy takes a lot of time. I think it is well worth the money spent to invest in a good software program and use all it offers. You can download the free offers and play around with them until you decide which one to use to make your priceless family tree.