Immigration Record Commentary

For a long time now, I have been looking for records related to my great-grandmother's immigration. Passenger list indexes have been incomplete and often contain errors that can hamper finding someone. Before I launch into specifics, let me summarize some key ideas about my search: 1. If an immigrant ancestor sailed from the port of Hamburg, you should be able to find a record of their departure in the Hamburg passenger lists AND in the lists for the port of arrival. I discuss a strategy to find someone who appears in one index but not the other. 2. Sometimes there are happy coincidences in searches (finding something interesting I wasn't really looking for).

Now the specific details. The surname I was looking for is Turalski or some reasonable sound-alike or look-alike. I believe I found the immigration record of my great-grandmother's brother, Michael, listed in the Hamburg passenger list index. I can't be sure it's him for certain because it says he's from Exin (Kcynia) when he should be from Koschmin (Kozmin). This same person was not in the New York passenger list index. With the name of the ship and date of departure (SS Australia, 20 February 1883), I used Steve Morse's website to find the date of arrival and image frame number where the NY passenger arrival list for that ship started. Since the ship took weeks to make its voyage, I found its arrival date (13 March 1883). The site also told me that the passenger list for this ship began on image frame 670. Once I knew the date of arrival, I used familysearch.org to select the image group containing lists for my date of arrival. Within the chosen image group, I entered the frame number given by Steve Morse's site to begin browsing the images of the list for the ship. I was frustrated because I could not find the person I was looking for. I wasn't even sure I was looking at lists for the correct ship! I paged backwards checking the lists and trying to get a sense of which ship I was dealing with. To my surprise, I found several children of my great-grandfather's (on the opposite side of the family) first marriage had arrived in New York on the same day (but not on the same ship I was looking for). Based on ship arrival number, I knew I needed to look ahead of where I currently looking. I found the ship and the person I was looking for. The problem was that the counting of image frames on the Morse site was not the same as the count on the Family Search site. Presumably the LDS started their counting with some preface material images throwing off the numbers. The amount of discrepancy should be same amount within that image group.

As I continued to look for my great-grandmother, Magdalena Turalska, I found a Line Toraelsky in the New York passenger list index. I figured that had to be her where Magdalena --> Lena --> Line. I looked at the NY list and was satisfied it was her. She set sail from Hamburg but she was not in the Hamburg passenger list index. I played the same game of using the ship name and estimating her date of departure (SS Gellert setting sail about June 1884). Since I didn't have an exact date, using Ancestry.com turned up too many "matches" to wade through. Instead, I selected a person (anyone really) who was on that ship to call up the image of their record on the departure list. Once I had entree into the images for that ship, I could move from image to image reading the names looking for Line. I was disappointed that it said she was from Berlin when she too was from Kozmin. As I read the record carefully, her surname was Israelsky-- not Toraelsky. I went back to the New York list for a second look and have to say that it's Israelsky there too even though it was indexed as Toraelsky. So, it wasn't great-grandma after all. And the search for her continues..

On the familysearch.org website, I checked their passenger arrival index and found Magdalena Turalska. I'm not sure it's her because they have her age as 11 and she would have been about 16 at that time. It also said she was from Russia instead of Germany (the partition Kozmin was part of). It did say her destination was Chicago which is consistent with what I know. This Magdalena set sail from Antwerp, Belgium. I hoped to find a departure list for Antwerp to get a record of the start of her journey but got the impression that there weren't too many lists that were extant.