Tuesday's Tip - Use Ancestry.com's Free Offerings

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This week's Tuesday Tip is to:  Take advantage of Ancestry.com's FREE offers to use their collections.

This week, Ancestry.com is permitting FREE use of their Immigration collection, in honor of Labor Day (you do have to register for a free account, but not provide a credit card).  There are 331 collections in the Immigration and Travel category in the Card Catalog.  The collection is available for free until 5 September.

At other times, Ancestry has opened specific collections for limited periods of time, usually for a one week period.

Ancestry.com also offers a 14-day free trial to their entire collection for non-subscribers.  You do have to enter a credit card number and cancel before the end of the 14 days if you don't want to subscribe to Ancestry.com. 

The Immigration and Travel collection includes records from the United States and other countries, including England, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, etc.  The collection includes Naturalization records also.  If you don't have an Ancestry subscription, you can use this free week to find records of interest to you from all countries.

Here is a screen shot from my search for surname = Seaver (exact match) in the Immigration collection (from my non-subscriber account):

That list includes record collections for the USA and other countries.

I have a paid U.S. Deluxe subscription to Ancestry.com, so I don't have access to the other record collections.  This week, I'm going to "mine" the Immigration collection for Seaver, Carringer, Whittle, Vaux and several other surnames in some of the non-USA collections.  My target collections include:

*  UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960
*  Canadian Passenger Lists, 1865-1935
*  Border Crossings: From U.S. to Canada, 1908-1935
*  England, Alien Arrivals, 1810-1811, 1826-1869
*  Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934

*  England & Wales, Criminal Registers, 1791-1892
*  Canada, Ocean Arrivals (Form 30A), 1919-1924
*  New South Wales and Tasmania, Australia Convict Musters, 1806-1849
*  New South Wales, Australia, Assisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1828-1896
*  New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists, 1787-1834
*  New Zealand, Naturalisations, 1843-1981

I had a fun moment last night - my 88-year old neighbor came down to visit on his evening walk.  He escaped from Austria in 1939 and came to America.  I asked him what year he came, and he said 1939.  I quickly found him in the New York Passenger Lists arriving on the ship Comte de Savoia.  I printed out the record summary, the passenger list page, and the picture of the ship and gave it to him.  He had tears in his eyes and thanked me profusely.  He said he had always wondered if there was a record of his immigration.  Then he said that he and his wife went to Europe to visit family in 1949, and returned.  I went and found them on the ship Vulcania and printed that for him too.