11 of the Best Websites for Free Ship Passenger Lists
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Updated August 17, 2021
In this post
The benefits of using passenger lists for genealogy
11 websites for free passenger arrival records
If you’re in the US, chances are at least one of your ancestors immigrated here. And depending on when they arrived, they probably came by ship.
If that’s the case, there may be a record of them in passenger ship manifests.
Many ship records still exist, but they’re not all in one place. Depending on their port of entry and when they arrived, the records could be in a lot of different places. Fortunately, a lot are online, making them easy to access if you know where to look.
Image source: National Archives
Why you should look for your ancestors in passenger lists
Finding your family in ship passenger lists can be incredible for things like learning your ancestor’s hometown and names of relatives. And, of course, it’s amazing simply to see their names on manifests and discover when they arrived!
Things you can learn from a ship manifest are
their age
where they sailed from
their last residence (sometimes with the town)
a contact in their country of origin and their relationship
their final destination
their occupation
how many bags they had
the ship name
how much money they had with them
Related posts:
How To Add More Details To Your Family Tree With Passport Applications
What Are Naturalization Records And How Can They Support Your Research?
Ports of entry
How do you find your family in ship lists when you don’t know when or where they arrived?
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone came through Ellis Island. There were many ports of entry all across the US.
The main ports were New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.
Other places ships arrived were
Portland, ME
Seattle, WA
Charleston, SC
San Francisco, CA
Savannah, GA
Mobile, AL
Providence, RI
Alexandria, VA
And many other smaller ports along the coasts
My suggestions to you are don’t ignore the other, smaller ports and don’t assume your family came through Ellis Island. I have Irish ancestors who lived in Western Massachusetts that I assumed for years must have come through Boston, but I could never find them. About a month ago, I found them in passenger lists for Portland and Falmouth, Maine!
Start with the nearest major port to where they lived and then expand your search from there.
Knowing about when your family arrived is also important. If you don’t know their approximate arrival year, use a US census immigration worksheet to narrow down when they came to the US. This will help you more easily identify records that can help you.
Related posts:
How To Add More Details To Your Family Tree With Passport Applications
What To Know About Alien Registration Files And Where To Find Them
4 Great Genealogy Resources For US Canada Border Crossing Records
11 places to find free ship passenger lists
The US government didn’t require ship passenger manifests until 1820 so lists are spotty before then, but some do exist.
Passenger manifests for ships carrying immigrants can be found all over the web. Some are very niche, specific websites that have transcriptions of a small number of ships to or from a certain place. Some are specific to ethnic groups.
Here are 11 of my top places to find free passenger manifests:
1) The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation has a database of people who came through Ellis Island. You need to create a free account to search arrivals from 1820-1957.
2) German Roots Passenger and Immigration Records 1820-1940s has links to indexes to the major and smaller ports.
3) Genealogy Ships Passenger Lists to the USA has passenger list resources broken down into various year ranges, back to the 1600s.
4) Castle Garden was America’s first immigration center. The records for over 11 million immigrants are free to search.
5) Irish Passenger Lists has transcribed ship records for Irish immigrants in the 1800s.
6) The Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild has over 18,000 passenger manifests. The lists are organized by port of departure, surname, port of arrival, and other criteria.
7) The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has searchable passenger lists from 1848-1891, updated monthly. There aren’t images, but the entries do give their name, age, occupation, arrival date, and other key facts.
8) Maine Genealogy has a database of arrivals from 1820-1867 for several ports. The entries give the date of arrival, ship name, country of origin, and other key facts.
9) The Internet Archive has over 600 items for passenger lists to Baltimore and Philadelphia, covering 1800 to the mid-1940s. They also have passenger and crew lists for ships arriving in New York from 1897-1957. These aren’t indexed, but they are good quality digitized images.
10) The Hawaii State Archives has searchable databases for Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese passenger lists.
11) Resources by ethnic or religious groups can help narrow down where to search. Sometimes the port of entry was influenced by the country they were coming from.
Related posts:
Ellis Island Genealogy Resources
Image source: National Archives
Books on passenger lists
There are a lot of books of compiled passenger lists. Try seeing if there are books available for the place and time you’re looking for. Some books are by region and some by ethnicity.
- German Immigrants: Lists of Passengers Bound from Bremen to New York, 1847-1854 This is part of a series.
- Ship Passenger Lists, The South, 1538-1825
- Ship Passenger Lists, Pennsylvania and Delaware, 1641-1825
- They Came in Ships: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestor’s Arrival Record is a good guide to using not just ship records, but other immigration records.
- Irish Passenger Lists, 1847-1871: Lists of Passengers Sailing from Londonderry to America
- Emigrants to Pennsylvania 1641-1819
Final thoughts
There are a lot of great resources to find free ship passenger lists all over the internet, and in print books. Some resources have only a few ship records, while others have many. It may take some time to go through all of the possible places you can find passenger records, but these 11 are a great place to start.
If you don’t have an idea of when your family may have immigrated, try a US census immigration worksheet to help you get a better sense of their arrival year. This can help you find the most relevant places to search.