Once you find your immigrant ancestor, what’s the next step? Two things you will probably want to search for is your ancestor’s passenger list and naturalization record (if they became U.S. citizens). Depending on when your ancestor came to America, there may or may not be a passenger list.
Passenger lists, or ship manifests, are lists of each passenger who traveled on a particular ship from one location to another. If a ship docked at more than one port before reaching the final destination, some passengers may disembark or embark at various times though usually most would be on the ship until the last stop.
Some lists have lots of genealogical information, others not so much. Some lists no longer exist. There were many ports immigrants came into when they reached the United States. New York (Castle Garden, Ellis Island, etc.), Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, New Orleans, and San Francisco are the more prominent. Before 1820 (when ship’s captains were required to provide lists of passengers to Customs), the information on these early passenger lists contained minimal information. See our earlier post on passenger lists.
Websites with passenger lists include Ancestry, FamilySearch, Ellis Island, Castle Garden, and National Archives. Other records to check are border crossing records, immigrant servants database, newspapers, genealogy societies, ethnic societies, family and local histories.
Naturalization Records
The other record to check is naturalization records. The quickest way to find out if one exist, check the U.S. Census records. The 1900, 1910, 1920, 1940, and 1940 census ask year of immigration and if the person was naturalized. The 1920 census also asks year of naturalization.
Many immigrants when they landed in the United States filed their first papers or the Declaration of Intent. If they were naturalized in 1920, for instance, check where they lived around that time. That is the location to check courthouses for the paperwork. Once they were living in the country for five years, they could file the Petition for Naturalization. They could be in the same location or moved. It will be in that location that you would need to find the petition. Later, many records were filed with the US Citizenship and Immigration Service.
Two other papers may be available. The Oath of Allegiance and the Certificate of Arrival. The oath is the document the person signs to become a citizen. The certificate, after 1906, was to check the accuracy of the statements of the immigrant. There would be a check of the passenger list to verify that the immigrant arrived on this date and the certificate was sent to the District Court.
The process changed over the years, so you may have first (Declaration) and second (Petition) papers only or a variation. The list of websites above also have some naturalization records plus Fold3.
FamilyFinders