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10 Tips to Help You Trace Immigrant Ancestors

14 July 2017

One particularly intimidating brick wall that many people face when researching their family history is uncovering their ancestor's immigration story.

It can be difficult to know where to start looking through the records to find your ancestors that emigrated overseas, but there are many tips and techniques that you can use to get started. Once you overcome and break through the immgration brick wall, there's a whole new world of records for you to search next.

Here are 10 tips to help you trace your immigrant ancestors and to start breaking through that brick wall in no time.

1. Establish a Clear Timeline of What you Already Know

In genealogy, it's always best practice to start with what you know and move backward. Some of the best immigration discoveries come from finding your ancestor's parent's information in the records, the census, for example. But when working with travel records, it's important to have a clearly defined timeline created for your ancestor so that you can dive into the records more easily and narrow your search.

Having an approximate date range of when your ancestor emigrated is key to starting your research so that you can narrow where to look.

It's also important to have a clear understanding of the location(s) of your immigrant ancestor because having your ancestor's location can help you narrow down your search since the naturalisation process may have occurred over multiple courts and locations.

2. Check the Attic

A great place to start before you dive headfirst into the records is to do a search around your house for clues that might point you in the right direction. Look for family bibles, heirlooms from another country, postcards, journals, books with inscriptions written in them, photographs, etc. Don't leave any stone unturned, you never know what may be the key to uncovering vital migration details about your ancestors.

3. Use US Census Records to Get you Started

If your ancestor, like so many, emigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, our
US Census records can provide you with clues to help you narrow down your search for their immigration records. The US Census records have sections for citizenship as well as naturalisation of the person and parents of the person listed, so it can help you determine which ancestor came over and where from.

Narrowing dates can be a little bit more complex, so it's best to use the census records as a starting point. As with all records, keep in mind that some of the data might not be 100% accurate as the census data was collected verbally from the head of household and wasn't fact-checked by the enumerators.

TOP TIP:Often immigrants didn't begin the naturalisation process until after they had been in the country for a few years, so be careful with this data because it could be either derived from the head of household's memory or it could be inaccurate because of the way they chose to report it.

US Census abbreviations

If you see abbreviations in the census under the naturalisation columns they can provide clues about your ancestor's naturalisation process and can help guide your search. Here are the common abbreviations in the naturalisation and citizenship columns:

4. Locate your Ancestor's Place of Origin

If you can pinpoint where your immigrant ancestor lived before they immigrated to the United States, it will help you narrow your search. You can often find this information in records you've likely already searched previously. Church records, school records, marriage records, death records, gravestone inscriptions, etc. can all reveal hints about where your ancestor may have lived prior to journeying overseas. The census records can help you narrow down the country at least.

5. Research Country of Arrival Records First

Even if you don't find anything or find possibilities, track down everything you've searched. If you're organised while you search then it will be easier for you to put the pieces together when you have more information, plus some of that information you didn't think was helpful initially, could end up being a key element in your research later on.

6. Ship Passenger Lists

Luckily for us genealogists, ship manifests were required during the period of mass emigration in the 19th and 20th centuries. If the record survived, it's likely that you'll find your ancestor in one of these lists. Passenger lists and the information you can learn from them varies as each shipping line had their own way of keeping record.

Keep in mind that passenger lists are often kept in the country which your ancestor departed. If you have a general idea of when your ancestor immigrated, you can browse ship records by time period to try to lcoate them.

7. Use Wildcards

Be sure to use our wildcard tool or search with name variants as in some instances, your ancestor's name may have changed due to miscommunication or language differences.
The wildcard function is a tool to help bring up additional, variant results in your searches and allows you to search with parts of names. Use either an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) within any search term. If you're looking for a "Eugene," for example, but don't know if he went by "Gene" in the records, you can look for both by using the wildcard at the beginning of the name, for example, *gene. It will bring up anything that ends in gene to help you.

Don't neglect the whole list of information because it could show you family relationships or friends that your ancestors may have travelled with. If you find a close friend of your ancestor, it's possible that they were lifelong friends and could indicate your ancestor's birthplace.

8. Naturalisation Records

Naturalisation records are the records associated with the process of becoming a citizen in the country they've decided to settle in. These records often include key details about your ancestors that you might not find anywhere else.

These records may also include extra ancestors for your family tree because they often include the family members of those who are applying for naturalisation. If your ancestor was born in the United States, for example, but their parents immigrated, you could find your citizen ancestor in US naturalisation records and those records could lead you to their parents who were applying for naturalisation.

Naturalisation records are often more than one page long, so be sure to look through all the pages in the search results by clicking the "next page" button to see everything included in the record set.

The naturalisation process could take many steps so if you have multiple locations where your ancestors lived, be sure to check regional naturalisation records as well as part of the process may have been completed there.

9. Passport Applications

If your ancestor wanted to travel abroad, they had to apply for a passport like we do today, so be sure to check for your ancestor in our passport application records because they can reveal:

10. Search By Family, Not Individual

It's always a good rule of thumb to search for all the members of the family because these vital details might be in one of their records, but not the records of your ancestor in question. For example, your ancestor's hometown might be listed in their sister's marriage certificate, but not in any of their documents. Your ancestor's close, or even distant, relatives can provide additional clues to help you fit the pieces of the puzzle together.