April 26, 2024
Passenger lists are my favorite records. They document a momentous time in our ancestors’ lives – the day they set forth on a journey to a new life in America. Finding an ancestor’s name on a ship’s list verifies an event that changed our ancestor lives. It continues to impact our own lives even today.
As thrilling as finding our ancestors’ names on passenger lists can be, it’s not always easy. I’ve spent decades looking for passenger lists for three of my great grandparents. So far, I haven’t found any of them. At this point, I’ve added them to my “maybe they teleported” section on my family tree. While I don’t seriously believe that my relatives teleported to America, it is frustrating to search through endless passenger lists with no results.
Despite this, I continue to search for my family’s passenger lists. One of my favorite stories about passenger lists concerns one set of my second great grandparents and their four children. This family emigrated from Sweden in the 1860s. The family had the unusual surname of Fernelius, and I had had good luck in finding passenger records for other members of their extended family.
Thanks to census records that listed dates of arrival I knew about when the family arrived. This information helped me narrow my search, but after several years of on and off searching, I still couldn’t find this family.
To make the search even more daunting, during the 19th century, information on passenger lists was sparse. Names, gender, ages, occupation, and place of origin was the only information provided. First names were often abbreviated or merely indicated by an initial. The list makers were supposed to be able to understand multiple languages to enable them to record names correctly. However, spelling was not their forte. Surnames were spelled in ways that make them almost impossible to decipher.
I eventually consigned these grandparents to the teleported section of my family tree. Then I came upon the naturalization record of one of their sons (not my direct ancestor). As part of his Declaration of Intent, he gave the exact date he arrived in America with his family. Using this exact date, I searched manually for my family’s arrival. Almost immediately I found a family with the right ages, genders, and first initials. With some squinting, I could imagine that the list maker had meant to write Fernelius when he made the scribble he used for their surname.
It was clear that this was my elusive family, but even when I knew the ship’s name and the date it arrived, I still couldn’t find them on the passenger list index. I looked at the actual passenger list again and noticed the location the list maker had listed as my family’s place of origin. I immediately knew why I’d never been able to find this family. My Swedish family was listed as being from Italy!
I don’t know why my Swedish family became Italians on that passenger list. Maybe the list maker thought Fernelius sounded Italian? I’ll never know for sure, but I did learn that it’s important to keep looking for passenger lists even if it seems like you’ll never find them.
Although it’s sometimes easier to shrug and guess that your ancestors must have teleported, unless they came from the future, they really didn’t.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society