Passenger List Notations Demystified

At a recent meeting of the Lake County (IL) Genealogical Society, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom gave a fantastic talk about passenger lists. There’s a lot more to them than just finding your ancestor’s name and date of entry into the United States. I can’t reproduce her entire talk, but here are a few tidbits that are…

Ancestor’s Town of Origin

At a recent meeting of the Lake County (IL) Genealogical Society we heard Teresa Steinkamp McMillin talk about finding your ancestor’s town of origin. She called this “the holy grail of genealogical research,” because once you find that, you can research your family in their homeland, across the ocean. But how to find the town…

Look for Page 2

Here’s something to watch out for when you’re searching and finding records in an online database like Ancestry: look and see if there is a page 2 to the image that you have found. The two examples below should tell you why. Example 1: A World War II Draft Registration card for Charles Peterson gives…

Passenger Lists

At our last Genealogy Writing Group we also talked about passenger lists, immigration, and finding the “holy grail” of genealogy: the home town or parish in the country of origin. I don’t have any magic tricks for answering this question; usually finding immigration information is the result of lots of hard, diligent work. But we…