Ellis Island Records

kelsibm7

Is there a site that will show you your ancestors who came to America through Ellis Island? I know there's this site (https://www.familysearch.org/campaign/saintsbysea) but I don't know if there's a way to specify Ellis Island as the port. Any help with this is greatly appreciated!

Alan E. Brown

You can look up people on the manifests of ships that brought immigrants to Ellis Island at https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/

Harleynut97

Keep in mind if your ancestors arrived before 1892, they would have arrived in NYC. at Castlegarden. This was the NY immigration center before Ellis Island was opened in 1892.

Cousin Vinny

If you use the record search screen of FamilySearch, enter your ancestor's name (perhaps a range of years in the birth field), and "Immigration and Naturalization" as the record type:

On the results screen you can filter by collection and just select New York Passenger lists (Castle Garden is 1820-1891, Ellis Island are the others):

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Steve Morse's search forms for immigration records use the same databases of index entries, but are a bit more flexible and detailed than FS's: https://stevemorse.org/.

Then of course there's the Ellis Island Database at The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation's site (https://heritage.statueofliberty.org/passenger); again, it starts with the same indexed data as what's on FS, although they have a different index-correction function that as far as I know is not communicated elsewhere.

But whichever site you use, keep in mind that what you're searching is an index. It's the result of untrained volunteers doing their best to decipher names in dozens of different languages written by harried clerks with varyingly-atrocious handwriting. Or rather, variable-quality images (scans or films) of that handwriting. The result sometimes bears basically no discernible relationship to what's actually recorded, so you cannot make any conclusions based on just your search results.

I am not aware of any sort of "verified" database of any subset of Ellis Island arrivals. Given the sheer numbers and the nature of the records, I would be highly surprised by such a thing.