Immigration Records

Guide to locating immigration records for ancestry, family history, and genealogy research.

What are immigration records?

Immigration refers to people coming into a country. Emigration refers to people leaving a country to go to another. The records usually take the form of ship's passenger lists collected at the port of entry. Immigration to a country and emigration from a country can involve the same record. Logically, a ship's passenger list is used to record people leaving a country on the ship (emigration) and arriving in another country on the ship (immigration).

What can you find in immigration records?

United States Records

• Passenger lists before 1820 included name, departure information and arrival details. The names of wives and children were often not included.

• Customs Passenger Lists between 1820 and 1891 asked for each immigrant’s name, their age, their sex, their occupation, and their country of origin, but not the city or town of origin.

• Information given on passenger lists from 1891 to 1954 included:
  • name, age, sex,
  • nationality, occupation, marital status,
  • last residence, final destination in the U.S.,
  • whether they had been to the U.S. before (and if so, when, where and how long),
  • if joining a relative, who this person was, where they lived, and their relationship,
  • whether able to read and write,
  • whether in possession of a train ticket to their final destination, who paid for the passage,
  • amount of money the immigrant had in their possession,
  • whether the passenger had ever been in prison, a poorhouse, or in an institution for the insane,
  • whether the passenger was a polygamist,
  • and immigrant's state of health.

• In 1906, the physical description and place of birth were included, and a year later, the name and address of the passenger’s closest living relative in the country of origin was included.

Other Countries

In other countries, content varies but can include some of the above elements.

How do you find immigration records?

United States Immigration Online Genealogy Records

Links to all the online immigration and emigration records for the U.S. have been collected and organized into a recommended search strategy in the Wiki article United States Immigration Online Genealogy Records.

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State or Country Online Genealogical Records Pages

On the main page for each U.S. State page and country page, a blue button leads to a listing of online record collections.

Look for the blue button on each state and country main page to link to the Online Genealogy Records page.

A typical Online Genealogy Records page.

• Also, all the available Online Genealogy Records pages are linked at Online Genealogy Records by Location.

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Sidebar Links to Wiki Articles

Each country or state has a link to an article discussing immigration/emigration history and trends links to online records, and instructions for finding records not published online.

See the links to immigration records in the right sidebar in this typical Wiki main page.

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Finding Town of Origin Articles

Frequently one of the research goals of using passenger lists is to link the family from their location in the new country to their town of origin in the "old country". Knowing the exact town where the family lived is important in locating further information, since records are kept on the local level. There are many records besides passenger lists that can give this information. The Wiki provides a series of articles that will teach you what is available. You can access them from this category page: Category:Finding Town of Origin. There is a link to them on each country page:

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FamilySearch Catalog

• Census Records collected by FamilySearch, usually digitized and online, are listed in the FamilySearch catalog. Enter the name of the country in the "Place Field" and click "Search". A list of record categories will be provided. Select "Emigration and immigration " or "Emigration and immigration - Indexes ".

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