Trace Your Ancestors

Visitors to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum may be able to trace ancestors who arrived at the gateway to the New World by using the museum’s American Family Immigration History Center.

Administered by the Statute of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, the center provides access to passenger manifest records of ships that carried some 22 million people through the Port of New York between 1892 and 1924. (Searching the center’s records is also possible online at www.ellisisland.org.)

According to the museum’s Web site at www.ellisisland.com, the center’s database can be searched with as little as an immigrant’s last name. But thousands of records are likely to be produced, and it will be helpful to know the approximate date of arrival, immigrant’s age upon arrival, and port of departure.

A search will produce 11 fields of information extracted from the original manifest including immigrant’s given name and surname, ethnicity, last residence (town and country), date of arrival, age at arrival, gender, marital status, ship of travel, port of departure, and line number on the manifest.

Visitors can also obtain a reproduction of the original ship’s manifest, as well as a picture of the ship of passage.

More information is available online at www.ellisisland.org or by phone at (212) 883-1986.