First a correction: Last month I implied that immigrants who didn’t want to become citizens don’t have immigration records. Actually, ship manifests — which are records — exist for them, regardless of naturalization.
What if you don’t know which of your ancestors was the first to arrive?
In genealogy, a general principal is to work from the present to the past, or the known to the unknown. We start with ourselves, and work backwards, to our parents, grandparents, etc. In that process, we find their birthplaces, and that tells us who was the first immigrant of that branch.
Finding our ancestor’s birthplaces means using documents such as vital records (birth, marriage and death records), along with census records. Vital records are sometimes more specific as to birth place, but census records tend to give a state or country as birthplace.
For most Jews, census records say “Russia.” Few Jews lived in what is Russia today (or the former Soviet Union) — rather, they lived in the former Russian Empire, which encompassed most of Eastern (and some of Central) Europe.
Occasionally census records will indicate something different, such as Poland or Austria. You might find the country changed from census to census — that’s because borders changed.
Keep track of those changes because they are clues about location.
Concerning an immigration date, the census can help out. Between 1890* and 1930 (peak immigration years) the US government asked on federal censuses about when someone immigrated and their immigration status.
During some of those years, immigrants often had one of three designations: Al = Alien; P=First Papers (Declaration of Intention) or Na = Naturalized. This status can help us create a timeline of their immigration process, and aid in tracking down immigration documents, which can contain their specific birthplace — a key to locating records from “the Old Country.”
It wasn’t at all unusual to see arrival dates change from census to census; in fact, it was rare to see consistency. Like our own memories today, our ancestors didn’t always remember, especially after being asked every 10 years.
Additionally, someone else in the household other than the immigrant who gave information to the enumerator may have not known what year the immigrant arrived in.
So expect it to vary from census to census — but at least it will narrow the range of years.
Where do you get these records? Declarations of Intentions and Naturalization Petitions are court documents. A good portion have been digitized and indexed on the major databases (i.e. FamilySearch, Ancestry, etc.).
However, many have not been digitized or indexed.
You may have to figure out which court your immigrant ancestor might have gone to and contact that courthouse. If it was before September, 1906, it could have been any local, county, district or federal court.
If it was after that date, it could have only taken place in a federal court.
Just to make your detective work more interesting, immigrants may have started the process and never finished (the census may help you figure that out). They may also have started in one court and finished in another court.
Finding your ancestor with a common name (“Sam Cohen”) and not someone else’s might take some intermediate sleuthing skills.
The first step is to gather every piece of unique identifying information: birth, marriage and death dates, birthplace, residence, family members, immigration year, etc.
For example, I might know that Sam was born 1895-1900, in “Russia,” he lived in the Bronx, had a wife named Bessie with two children, David and Sarah — but I have no idea when he came here.
Well, that’s a good start, and after going through the genealogical databases, and looking at other Sam Cohens in the Bronx, it will help you narrow them down to maybe one or two Sam Cohens.
There are many more details to the immigration process and finding their records, but this is a good start.
Whole books have been written about the immigration process for our ancestors, so needless to say I can’t cover everything, but I’ll do at least one more column on the subject.
*Sadly, the 1890 Federal Census was mostly destroyed by fire and water damage.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
