Sunday, November 12, 2006

Collecting Immigration Records

With Ancestry's free access (until 30 November) for their Immigration Collection (records from 1820 to 1960, over 100 ports), I decided it was a good time to collect as many Seaver records as I can.

The Search box on the Immigration Collection page allows the user to choose Exact Searches and specify a year range. I started out with surname SEAVER and years 1900 to 1909, thinking I can do 10 years every night.

From reviewing the records, there is significant data of genealogical interest after about 1915, at least for the major Atlantic ports. Birth dates, birth places, US addresses, etc. are provided.

I chose to use the Save button to save the images on my hard drive (The other options are Print and Share, or write everything down). I set up an Immigration folder on my Seaver surname folder, and saved the images (for example: "1912-NewYork-Thomas Seaver.jpg"). This was pretty easy, and I have about 60 images saved from 1900 to 1915 at present. I will go back and extract genealogical data from them at a later time, and input them to the Seaver database.

Have you started using this collection yet? Only 18 more days for FREE!

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