New York Immigration Records Prior to 1892

A couple of databases of immigrants to the ports of New York, Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, and Philadelphia were created by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies (probably in the 1970s). They used the original passenger lists on loan from the National Archives. For Poles, the most useful database is the Germans to America series. Before Ellis Island opened as an immigration center in New York in 1892, immigrants were processed at the custom's office at Castle Garden. Fortunately, Family Search offers access to this database where it appears that ? and * are allowed wildcard characters. Wildcard searches offer search flexibility where German spellings of Polish names and handwriting issues otherwise make it difficult to find one's ancestors. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the index does not include page numbers or line numbers to help locate the actual record. You will know the date of arrival and the ship name from the database results. With a bit of work you can find images of that passenger list . Click on Browse All Images and locate the entry for the date of arrival. When you select that, you may need to scan the images to find the arrivals on the exact date the index said. You will then have to scan the list for find your ancestor. The New York passenger lists were filmed in the late 1950s and I conclude that they are not complete.

A Castle Garden website made the Germans to America database searchable but the entire site now appears to be gone. The National Archives hosts the database but I have found it difficult to use-- they don't seem to allow wildcard searches.