Passenger Arrival Records

Until January 1, 1820, the United States federal government did not require captains or masters of vessels to present a passenger list to officials. As a general rule, NARA does not have passenger lists of vessels arriving before January 1, 1820.  There are two exceptions to this rule:

Arrivals at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1813-1819

Arrivals at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1800-1819

To locate other passenger lists from 1538-1819, consult these books (among many others), which are found in libraries with genealogical collections:

Indexes

• Filby, P. William, ed. Passenger and Immigration Lists Index: A Guide to Published Arrival Records of ... Passengers who Came to the United States and Canada in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. 3 volumes plus annual supplements. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981-__. This series is a finding aid to published passenger lists. Be sure to read the "front material" to understand how to use the information you find.

Bibliographies

• Filby, P. William, ed. Passenger and Immigration Lists Bibliography, 1538-1900. 2d ed. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1988.
   
• ​Lancour, Harold, comp. A Bibliography of Ship Passenger Lists, 1538-1825; Being a Guide to Published Lists of Early Immigrants to North America. 3d ed. New York: New York Public Library, 1978.
   
• ​Wood, Virginia Steele. Immigrant Arrivals: A Guide to Published Sources. Revised. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Local History & Genealogy Reading Room, n.d.).

Compilations

Carl Boyer and Michael Tepper, each using a different format, have undertaken to publish the names in Lancour's lists. [Note: Tepper's coverage of Lancour is not comprehensive: an inventory of those articles omitted appears on pages viii, ix and x of New World Immigrants.]

• Boyer, Carl. Ship Passenger Lists, National and New England (1600-1825). Newhall, CA: C. Boyer, 1977. Covers Lancour entries 1-71.
   
• Boyer, Carl. Ship Passenger Lists, New York and New Jersey (1600-1825). Newhall, CA: C. Boyer, 1978. Covers Lancour entries 72-115.
   
• Boyer, Carl. Ship Passenger Lists, Pennsylvania and Delaware (1641-1825). Newhall, CA: C. Boyer, 1980. Covers Lancour entries 116-197.
   
• Boyer, Carl. Ship Passenger Lists, the South (1538-1825). Newhall, CA: C. Boyer, 1979. Covers Lancour entries 198E-243.
   
• Tepper, Michael. New World Immigrants: a Consolidation of Ship Passenger Lists and Associated Data from Periodical Literature. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1979.
   
• Tepper, Michael. Passengers to America: A Consolidation of Ship Passenger Lists From the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1977.
   
• ​Tepper, Michael. Emigrants to Pennsylvania, 1641-1819: a Consolidation of Ship Passenger Lists from the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1978.
   
• Tepper, Michael. Immigrants to the Middle Colonies: a Consolidation of Ship Passenger Lists and Associated Data from The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1978.

Ethnic Groups

There are numerous published name indexes to 16th through 19th century arrivals of persons of various ethnic groups, including persons of Czechoslovakian, Dutch, English, German, Irish, Italian, and Russian descent. For a listing of some of these indexes, see:

• Wood, Virginia Steele. Immigrant Arrivals: A Guide to Published Sources. Revised. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Local History & Genealogy Reading Room, n.d.).

Two online guides to immigration by particular ethnic groups are:

• Douglas, Lee V. Danish Immigration to America: An Annotated Bibliography of Resources at the Library of Congress. Research Guide No. 28. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Local History & Genealogy Reading Room, n.d.).
   
• Douglas, Lee V. A Select Bibliography of Works: Norwegian-American Immigration and Local History. Research Guide No. 6. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Local History & Genealogy Reading Room, n.d.).

• Partial list of survivors of the Titanic who were taken aboard the Carpathia, which arrived at the Port of New York, NY, April 18, 1912
   
• Passenger Arrival Records of the von Trapp Family

For useful guides on the historical and legal background of passenger arrival records, explanation of what information they contain, and search strategies, see:

• Colletta, John P. They Came in Ships. 2d ed. Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry, Inc., 1993.
   
• Tepper, Michael. American Passenger Arrival Records. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1988.
   

For more detailed examinations of immigration in U.S. history, see:

• Handlin, Oscar, ed. Immigration as a Factor in American History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1959.
   
• Handlin, Oscar, ed. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. Reprinted, 2d edition enlarged, Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973.
   
• Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1963-1981.
   
• Konvitz, Milton R. Civil Rights in Immigration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953.
   
• Wittke, Carl. Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Press, 1952. Examines German immigration to the U.S. following the failed 1848 revolution in Germany.