Tracing Your Roots: Using Immigration Records to Find Ancestral Origin

Government agencies create Immigration records to track people entering a country with the intention of residing there. They contain valuable information about your ancestors, including their names, travel details, and other personal information.

This information can help you learn more about your family history and understand your ancestor’s lives. Below, we’ll explain how you can move beyond family stories and use historical facts to trace your roots with immigration records.

» Start tracing your roots using immigration records

3 types of immigration records

1. Passenger lists

Passenger lists were essential for recording travelers arriving by ship, especially before widespread air travel. They list a person’s name, age, origin, and sometimes even occupation. You can find them using the search feature on large genealogy websites, including MyHeritage, NARA, and the Statue of Liberty — Ellis Island Foundation.

2. Naturalization records

Naturalization records track immigrants who became citizens of a new country. These detailed papers typically appear from the early 19th century onwards. They can reveal valuable details about your ancestor’s life, including their:

• Full name
• Address
• Occupation
• Physical description
• Date and town of birth
• Last place of residence
• Emigration port and point of arrival
• Date of arrival and ship designation

Apart from providing details about the head of the household, these papers offer a snapshot of their spouse and minor children, too. Naturalization petitions give you access to their names, birth dates, and the date and location of their marriage ceremony.

3. Border crossing records

A single land border crossing record can tell a complicated story. It starts with your relative’s birth in a foreign nation. And it goes on to show how your family crossed oceans and arrived at the U.S. border after traveling through one or more countries.

If your ancestors originally came from outside the Americas, officers of land-based ports would’ve recorded the ship that brought them once they crossed the border from Canada or Mexico to the U.S.

The document also reports on previous trips to the U.S. It can give information on the traveler’s contact people in their home country and at their destination, which are usually close relatives. You can even find details like names, ages, occupations, and families traveling together.

Using immigration records to find your ancestry

Step 1: Gather personal and historical clues

Talk to family members and ask about their origins, immigration stories, and any exciting details passed down through generations. You can also look for old photographs, letters, or diaries. They might contain birthdates, marriage records, names, or even clues about where they lived.

Alternatively, the federal censuses of 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 all ask for immigration information that you can use to narrow a search for a foreign-born ancestor living in the U.S. in those years.

Tip: If your relatives came to the U.S. before 1900, censuses from 1880 to 1930 could also give you the birthplaces of your ancestors’ parents.

» Use MyHeritage’s free Census Helper™️ to compile a list of your relatives

Step 2: Prepare for your search

When you’re looking for an ancestor’s migration record, you should already have an idea of when they arrived based on:

• Answers to immigration questions in census records
• Their birthplace (as reported in draft, marriage, birth of a child, or death)
• The birthplaces of their closest family members

You also have to know enough about your ancestors to be able to identify them in a document.

There may be several people living in the U.S. with the same name as your relative. You can distinguish them by their ages, occupations, location, and the names of their closest kin. It also helps to know as much as possible about everyone with that name.

Tip: Create a profile for anyone who you might easily confuse with your ancestors and know what distinguishes them. When you find a new record, you’ll have data points to compare.

Step 3: Access online databases

When you begin genealogical research on an ancestor, make a list of the kinds of papers you expect to see based on their age, residence, and the years they lived there. Use this catalog to create a checklist of the files you need to find.

Next, search online databases like MyHeritage’s Immigration and Travel Collection. It can access passenger arrivals, naturalization documents, border crossings, emigration records, passports, and even convict transportation forms.

MyHeritage also offers a vast library of data beyond immigration records. The detailed inventory includes censuses, obituaries, and birth, marriage, and death certificates.

Tips for using online resources

• Fill out search boxes with known details about your immigrant ancestor. Be mindful of potential errors, like incorrectly spelled names, especially in older records or those involving language barriers. The MyHeritage’s search engine can help you by finding variations and alternate spellings—even in foreign alphabets.
• Combine keywords like names, locations, and date ranges using the smart search feature to narrow results and identify potential matches.
• If initial results are limited, explore alternative terms like nicknames and variations in spellings. Additionally, you can use wildcards to help account for unknown or variable characters in names and other keywords.
• You can also adjust dates and locations in your search terms. Because older records typically have less detail, you need to be flexible to capture potential matches.

Step 4: Interpret immigration records

Before interpreting the information you find in immigration records, make sure you understand the historical context of your data. Think of what expectations a person and their family have for them at different stages of life. Also, reflect on how larger events like technological innovations, natural disasters, and political unrest affected the choices they made.

These insights can tell you about some of the challenges and opportunities your ancestors faced in those generations. For example, steamship travel rapidly became more comfortable, faster, and affordable around 1879. This development inspired more people to choose immigration to improve their lives.

Tip: In your research, start big by finding the major global events for the period during which your ancestors immigrated, like the Irish Potato Famine, for example. Then, magnify your focus. Ask yourself: What was going on in their country, region, town, and family?

Additionally, try these tricks to enhance your research and uncover more details about your ancestors:

• Check every column of data: Sometimes, it’s important to an individual’s story. Other times, it provides context or shows you where else to look for your ancestor. For instance, the notations for previous visits to the U.S. are squeezed into column 15 on a typical early 20th-century passenger list. If you haven’t already looked for that voyage, this is the prompt to do so.
• Compare birth and residence locations: Typical early 20th-century passenger lists also have separate columns for where they were born and last resided. But someone’s last known location may not be their birthplace. So look for vital records in every residence for evidence of your ancestors living there.
• Narrow down unreadable place names: If you’re having trouble reading a place name, try to narrow it down to a region by analyzing the other place names around it on the passenger list, finding a list of municipalities for that zone, and looking for matches on the letters you can read.

Note: An intact family might’ve not immigrated together. Look for each member who relocated and consider their fellow travelers and contacts just as you would for the head of the family. Important relationships can emerge from a study of how a group migrated, in what order, and with whose aid.

Step 5: Document and organize your findings

To document and organize your findings from immigration records successfully:

• Create a research log or spreadsheet: Develop a system to organize your findings. Consider using a dedicated research log, a genealogy software program, or even a simple spreadsheet.
• Develop a system for each ancestor: Dedicate a section or sheet to each ancestor you’re researching. This allows you to keep their immigration-related details separate and easily accessible.
• Include images: If you can access digital scans of the original records, save them alongside your transcribed information. This can be particularly helpful for future reference and verification.
• Use consistent formatting: Develop a system for recording information in your log or spreadsheet. This might include using abbreviations for specific details or highlighting key pieces of information. Consistency will make it easier to navigate your research findings later.
• Document illegible entries: Use workaround strategies to make sense of faded text. You can post hard-to-read entries on genealogy forums or social media groups where experienced researchers might help decipher them, for example. Partial notes on illegible items are better than nothing.
• Backup your data: Save your research logs, spreadsheets, or digital images on a secure computer drive or cloud storage service. This safety measure will protect your valuable information from accidental loss. It also makes it easier to share your findings with other generations.
• Leave space for additional information: You might stumble upon new details later in your research. Allow space in your system to add further information as you uncover more about your ancestors’ immigration story.

Step 6: Cross-reference your findings with other records

Every record is prone to error for one reason or another. This is why you should always confirm your findings with additional documents — mainly when a file represents secondary evidence. (Think: When you use a passenger list to prove a marriage or a person’s age.)

Search for your ancestor in other historical documents, such as census records, marriage, or death certificates. Do details like age, birthplace, and family members align with the immigration record?

If the documents mention a specific birthplace, you can explore historical resources from that region. You might learn about standard naming practices, migration patterns, or local events that could confirm details. This data can help you create chronologies that include their likely whereabouts.

Tip: You can verify nearly every piece of data you find on an immigration paper. But the most important thing to confirm is the birth — it’s the foundation of your ancestor’s identity. It also establishes their existence at a specific point in time and location. The reported age, birthplace, and the passenger’s name are usually enough information to find a birth record.

Passenger lists and naturalization records are particularly useful in cross-referencing and confirming your findings:

Confirming family relationships using passenger lists

As you progress through your family tree, you may confirm relations claimed in these documents, whether for another passenger or a contact person. For instance, if your ancestors traveled with their family, their names will appear together on the passenger list and in other files. They may have lived in the same home and come up in a federal or state census record. Or one of them may marry or die and name your relative as a parent, spouse, informant, or witness.

Tip: When taking notes from a passenger list, record the details of your ancestors and anyone they traveled with. Sometimes, you’ll see a bracket surrounded by lines or notations like “wife” and “daughter” next to names. Other times, you need to look at who else came from the same town — especially if they were going to the same place.

From Giovanni to John: How to verify ancestral identities

You can match the details on these papers with key documents for each family member to find discrepancies in their birthdate or -place, nicknames, Americanizations, and middle names.

Your ancestors might’ve wanted to sound and appear more American. Or perhaps native-born Americans found it difficult to say or spell their names. These factors could all have led to them adopting new ones with altered spellings.

So, how can you confirm that, for instance, “Giovanni Cascio” — who emigrated from Italy with his wife and children — is the same person as “John Cash” from Texas? You can compare other data points, such as the members of his family and their ages, immigration year, and naturalization status, to see if they match up with the members of John Cash’s family in the census.

To cross-reference and confirm the information you find:

• Familiarize yourself with the original sound, spelling, and other versions of your foreign-born ancestors’ names. This includes Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions used in religious life and regional nicknames associated with a given name. This will help you recognize a name that’s been transliterated or spelled phonetically.
• Look at the whole family and their naming conventions to discover patterns that make the family recognizable. “John Cash” might be a common name. But of all the John Cashes in Texas, there’ll be few or just one whose wife and children have the same names as your research target.

Recognize which documents contain the most valuable information and focus on them. I usually start with naturalization papers, draft registrations, and marriage certificates when doing searches. These files have the most information to identify individuals.

Challenges when tracing immigration records

Missing data

If you can’t find evidence of your immigrating ancestor’s name, there may be no record of your relative’s arrival in this country.

But before you reach that conclusion, look for naturalization petitions that can narrow your search to a year or even a specific voyage. They may not have arrived where you assume. Search all seaports and land crossings, not just Ellis Island — the primary immigration processing center for the United States from 1892 to 1954.

» Find Ellis Island and other New York passenger lists on MyHeritage

Record availability

The availability and type of records for immigration research vary significantly depending on the historical period. Here are search strategies to consider:

• Pre-1800s: Focus on published genealogies and town/church records. Many municipalities either didn’t officially exist or weren’t required to maintain vital records for their residents before the 1800s. Other institutions were in place which did take on this obligation, such as churches and synagogues.
• 1800s: Use census documents and probate them alongside immigration papers. Although census records from the 1800s are less complete than those from the 1900s, they still contain valuable information, chiefly about families, the heads of households, and their geographical locations on an exact date.
• 1900s: Explore vital records and newspapers in addition to standard immigration resources. Immigrants create many of the same records that native-born residents do. School sporting events, academic prizes, amateur tournaments, taxpayer records, and legal notices of sales and marriages can all contain mentions of your ancestors.

Voyage to heritage with immigration records

Immigration records can uncover a fascinating chapter in your family’s history. They reveal your ancestors’ arrival in a new land — but the tale doesn’t end there. Include census documents, birth certificates, and other historical documents in your research for a complete picture of your ancestry.

Family lore about where your family came from, how they arrived, in what order, and what they did when they came here aren’t all completely accurate. Use it as a guide to begin your search, but let the documents tell their own story.

» Start tracing your roots by searching through immigration records