Ellis Island , a lilliputian spot of country place off the southern tip of Manhattan , was the entrance point into the United States for more than 12 millionimmigrantsbetween 1892 and 1954 [ source : Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation ] . During the largesthuman migrationin modern history , this processing center handled more immigrants than all other North American port conflate . About 40 per centum of Americans have at least one ascendant who embark the commonwealth there [ seed : Smolenyak ] . So , if you want to learn more about your family tree diagram and you do n’t know where to protrude , it ca n’t anguish to jibe out Ellis Island — especially if you acknowledge of any relatives who come to the U.S. from Europe in the first one-half of the 20th century .
The Ellis Island Immigration Museum has been overt to the public since 1990 , and visitors can physically search through the center ’s vast archive to find passenger information and find out more about their ancestries . That often tedious and time - run through mental process became infinitely easier when the archive were digitized and made uncommitted online in 2001 . Everything from 1892 to 1924 is searchable online now , and record up to 1957 will be available in 2015 .
The Ellis Island Archives hold back the ship manifests ( lists of rider information ) for more than 51 million people who pass through Ellis Island and the Port of New York . Some passenger record are more concluded than others , but they can reveal name , age , date of arrival , ship name , nationality , birthplace , occupation , last mansion house overseas and final name and address . You also might be able to see a picture of the actual ship your ascendant traveled on — the database has more than 900 ship double [ source : Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation ] .
All you want to get going is a name , but your search will obviously be a heap easier and more precise if you start out off with more selective information . If you have only a name to process with — and that name happens to be John Smith — you ’re going to be wading through thousands of records with no clue as to which John Smith is your with child - grandfather . Even more - uncommon epithet could give you hundreds of results . So attempt to dig up anything else before you head to the Ellis Island database : your relation ’s possible travel companion , her hometown or possible date of locomotion . The site also has an cunning alternative to explore all possible surname spellings because so many names were convert during the highly inexact transcription process , over the years as kinfolk assimilated into a new country and possibly in the painstaking record recovery a hundred years later .
Once you ’ve taken all the information you could from Ellis Island , you could go forth — or rearward , as the case may be — with your ancestry research . Armed with the wealth of names , places and dates you might be able to see , you should be able to fill many holes in that phratry tree .
