Immigration vs travel

LegacyUser

Christophe Lambinet said: I came to notice that travel information (passenger lists, etc) are systematically generated as an immigration events. Some of our ancestors would travel back and forth between the US and their native country, so immigration would only be valid for the trip when they actually emigrated to the US (or wherever else country).
Is there a way to distinguish the 2. Also, in the case of travel, is there a way to indicate the departure place/date and arrival place/date and not only the arrival. Name of the ship is also interesting to record.
Thanks for your thoughts/suggestions.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The only way that travel v immigration can be determined is by a statement from the individual. That kind of thing is not declared on passenger lists.

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Adrian Bruce said: I excused this difference on the grounds that people (at least these days) "go through Immigration".

There is a difference there but it's virtually impossible to decide, as Tom says.

Oh, and as a Brit, to confuse matters further, I don't record "Immigration", I record "Emigration"!

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Emigrate is when a person leaves and immigrate is when a person enters... Arrival passenger lists are considered immigration, while departure passenger lists are considered emigration.

The problem, of course, isn't with the term, but whatever purpose may lie behind that trip -- whether it is truly an immigration (arrival) or just a vacation or pleasure cruise.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Quite agree with your description of the problem Tom.

My comment on recording Emigration was based on my typical viewpoint. Here we see people leaving for the States so I usually record the emigration event (only) in my desktop system with a comment "7 days later they arrived...." All a question of perspective - what do I think of first?

Having said that, of course, the comment-based process for recording the later arrival depends on having notes available against the departure / emigration. Since FS FT for reasons best known to themselves have no notes against events, then on reflection, I'd have to record both emigration and immigration as events in their own right.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Hi Adrian,

In cases like that, I generally never both recording the travel. It is a judgment call on my part, because I view those as nothing more than an excursion or holiday type of thing.

If the register has home or target addresses, then of course, they are useful to establish a residence either the traveler or whomever they may be visiting.

I hadn't thought about this, but I have run across newspaper clippings that I have otherwise ignored about an ancestor who "is visiting at the home of" another relative. This small-town reporting was not unusual a century or more ago.

I think I'll stick with my practice of not recording either departures or arrivals when they are, to me, nothing more than a holiday or something similar.

Good discussion, by the way. I appreciate having your thoughts on the matter.

LegacyUser

Christophe Lambinet said: Hi, very interesting indeed. Would still be happy to have fields for entering departing port and destination. Even though simple trips, i think that in the earlier times, those trips were not that common and usual.

LegacyUser

M Geesey said: My grandparents were married in 1934. For their honeymoon they took a cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda and back. I found this information in the "Immigration" index where they were recorded upon their return from Bermuda. I would venture that no one on board their ship was an actual immigrant. Their home address was listed in New Jersey.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: What to label these ships' lists is apparently a common problem for archives, not just Family Search. I use the Norwegian Digital Archives a lot. They also use "Emigration" as the title for their section which covers ships' registers.



My wife has one great-uncle that is listed in these Emigrant lists three times. Once when he emigrated from Norway, once when he was back to Norway for a visit, and once, if I remember right, when he went back and got married. I did put all three listing in the sources even though technically the second two were just travel because of the insights they give to his life.

(By the way, if anyone doing Norwegian research has not come across these on-line archives, they are a tremendous resource, all completely free. Since they deal with a relatively small volume of records (Norway has just never had that big of a population), their practice is to create nearly complete transcriptions of most records, such as the emigration records:



They have also digitized and posted on-line all the FamilySearch Norwegian microfilms, also all viewable for free. As I understand it, their basic philosophy is that these public records belong to the public, not the archive, and the public as the right to see them. Their site is: http://arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Dig...)

LegacyUser

Malik Darim said: I also thought that immigration is good, but then I realized that it’s better to make good money and travel. Understand one thing, if you can’t do anything at home, then there you will be nobody. Now I work and travel by car in different countries. Always take a car in one company san diego airport car rental by the way they are in many countries of the world. So find a normal job and earn money.