Famiy History Tips: Part 27-Tracing Family Histories with the Hamburg Passenger Lists

by Brenna Corbit, Instructional Services Librarian

If your ancestors are like mine, they can be quite hard to find on board the ships that brought them to America, but like any family history roadblock, there are often other ways to run that elusive ancestor down. I always say if you can’t find them coming into America, then try finding them leaving the Old Country. In this article, we will look at one of those sets of departures. 

The Hamburg Passenger Lists dating from 1850 to 1934 contain about five million records of individuals from many Europeans countries most of which came to the U.S. Like many genealogical records, the earlier lists are less detailed than those from the later period. Besides the usual information such as names, ages, birthplaces, and departure dates, the lists mention the names of the ships upon which they journeyed to America.

When viewing an arrival list such as one from Ellis Island, see if they arrived via Hamburg. This will be noted across the top of the list or a previous main page of the manifest. If so, the arrival list can be coupled with the Hamburg list. This will add verification to what you may already know, or if a village name is obscure on one, the other may be more legible, for example. They are most useful, though, when you can’t find a passenger on a U.S. manifest due to poor indexing of illegible names.

In the case of poor indexing, see if your ancestor appears on the Hamburg list. If so, take note of the ship name and date of departure. Next, go to Ancestry and click on “U.S. Immigration Collection,” and then, under “Narrow by Category,” click on “Passenger Lists.” Search for the ship name with a date that would be approximate to the time of arrival. Do not narrow down by too many search filters, and do not search by name. Try filtering by age and gender. You will get a list of several hundred indexed passengers that you can quickly browse. And lo and behold, you may most likely find your ancestor in a terribly indexed form of his name. As for digital images of torn, folded or dog-eared manifests, they may not have been indexed at all, but may still be there.

In one odd case, I was searching for a Galician Polish man from the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the name of Jan Gil, a very short name not like the typical long names from that region. I had a copy of his naturalization record wherein he stated he arrived at Ellis Island on 20 May 1907 aboard the Amerika, and that he departed from Hamburg on 9 May 1907. I couldn’t locate him through indexing, and neither could I locate him on the ship by browsing 502 pages of digital images, so I turned to a newly discovered source, the Hamburg Lists. Sure enough, I found Jan Gil departing via Hamburg on 9 May 1907 aboard the Amerika. Perplexed, I went back to the digital images of the Ellis Island manifests, and there he was, or I could say there he wasn’t.

Remember, Jan had a very short surname, Gil. He was located at the bottom of a page on image number 156. The page was both torn and partly folded over in the photographed image. If his name was a typically long Polish name, part of it would have been seen, but because of its shortness, it appears that the second-to-last space for a name was left blank. I was able to read all the other information on that manifest line that matched with the Hamburg list.



You can find two versions of the Hamburg lists at Ancestry. Search the card catalog for the indexed Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934 or the unindexed lists under Hamburg Passenger Lists, Handwritten Indexes, 1855-1934. I prefer the indexed version. The lists are in German, so use this simple translation aide.

My genealogical moto is “never give up,” never leave a stone unturned, and like a bloodhound on the trail of its quarry, keep barking wildly and keep sniffing.