Thursday, August 3, 2006

California Bound - 1848-1873

While browsing through the Google Genealogy Groups (used to be the Usenet newsgroups) today, I found an interesting note about passenger lists for ships and wagon trains traveling to California between 1848 and 1873. The "California Bound" web site description says:
The lists are transcribed from microfilm of the New York Daily Times, the New York Herald, the New Orleans Picayune, the Panama Star, the Panama Herald, and the Boston Daily Evening Transcript.

Further down the page are links to The Maritime Heritage Project and Early American Sailing Ships.

There is a Search Box at the bottom of the "California Bound" page to search for surnames or ship names. If you have ancestors or relatives who came to California in that time period, you might want to take a look here. Or just look anyway because it is a good site with an interesting subject.

The Google Genealogy Groups I subscribe to are alt.genealogy, soc.genealogy.computing and soc.genealogy.methods. There are many others, and you can subscribe to as many as you want.

You can read the groups online rather than with a newsreader (the way I used to do it, but haven't for about 5 years now). There are many steadfast contributors on these groups - many names that I recognized from the genealogy world.

You can search each group for key words. Since these groups go back into the early 1990's, there may be posts from those early years that you have missed.

You can also search for other genealogy groups using the main Google search box at the top of the page.

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