October 17, 2025
The U.S. government has kept passenger lists since 1820. The majority of those lists still exist and are readily available on various genealogy websites such as Family Search and Ancestry.
However, just because most of the passenger lists still exist doesn’t mean that it will be easy to find your ancestors. For lists before the 1890s, it can be difficult to find an ancestor’s name for various reasons. These include spelling errors, illegible handwriting and the fact that earlier lists contain little identifying information about the passengers.
This means many of us will never be able to locate passenger lists for our ancestors. Luckily, there are some substitutes. Emigration lists, church records and newspaper departure lists are alternate records that can help us recreate an ancestor’s journey to America.
Emigration lists from countries of origin contain some of the same information found on American passenger lists. Lists from the port of Hamburg in Germany are available from 1850-1934 on Ancestry. Find My Past contains lists of passengers from United Kingdom ports from 1890-1960. Swedish emigration lists can be found on Ancestry covering the period 1783-1951. Other countries also kept passenger lists. It’s worth checking the Family Search Wiki for the country you are researching to see what type of emigration information is available.
Church records can also be a good passenger list substitute. For example, in Sweden the Lutheran Church was the state religion. The pastors of the churches were required to keep records detailing when people moved away from a parish. This included the date the emigrant left as well as the place he was heading to. The churches of Scandinavia were diligent in recording this information, but churches in other places sometimes kept these types of records as well.
Newspaper departure lists can be found in the ports from which an ancestor left. I found a newspaper article from the New Zealand Herald from May 10, 1877, which listed my ancestors by name who were sailing on the steamer City of Sydney from Auckland to San Francisco. This was an especially valuable find since there are no passenger lists extant for the port of San Francisco before 1893.
Finally, don’t forget to look for journals and diaries your ancestors may have left. I discussed these in more detail last week, but emigration was an important event in an ancestor’s life. He or she commonly remembered the name of the ship they sailed on, even if they forgot the date. Once you know the ship’s name, you can usually figure out an approximate date of arrival. Then you can use the passenger lists on Ancestry or other websites to manually search the lists from that ship.
It is believed that approximately 95% of passenger lists still survive. That doesn’t mean that you’ll easily be able to find your ancestor’s name on one of them. That’s when passenger list substitutes are important.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society