Entire Ellis Island immigrant New York Passenger Arrival Lists for 1820-1957 now available online

The records of more than 100 million people who immigrated through Ellis Island or one of the New York Harbour stations that preceded it are now available online via FamilySearch and the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

Originally preserved on microfilm, 9.3 million images of historical New York passenger records spanning 130 years were digitized and indexed in a massive effort by 165,590 online FamilySearch volunteers. 

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The result is a free searchable online database containing 63.7 million names, including immigrants, crew, and other passengers travelling to and from the United States through the nation’s largest port of entry.

Stephen A. Briganti, President and CEO of The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, said: The Foundation is delighted to make these immigration records accessible to the public for free for the first time. This completes the circle of our decades-long collaboration with the team from FamilySearch, which began with providing the public with unprecedented access to their genealogy and sparking a world-wide phenomenon linking past and present."

The ship manifests list:

• passengers
• their names
• age
• last place of residence
• who is sponsoring them in America
• the port of departure
• their date of arrival in New York Harbour
• sometimes, other interesting information, such as how much money they carried on them, number of bags, and where on the ship they resided during its sail from overseas

How to explore the passenger records

The expanded collections can be searched at the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation’s website or at FamilySearch in three collections, representing three distinct periods of migration history.

• New York Passenger Lists (Castle Garden) 1820-1891
• New York Passenger Arrival Lists (Ellis Island) 1892-1924
• New York, New York Passenger and Crew Lists 1925-1957​

An estimated 40 percent of Americans are descended from those who emigrated, primarily from European countries in the period from 1892 to 1954. Millions of them passed through Ellis Island’s immigration center in route to lives in “the land of the free”.