Germans to America Immigration Index 1850-1897
The data for this database was collected at the Center for Immigration Research (CIR) at Temple University Library and Balch Institute for
Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia, PA. While the data is mostly for the port of New York, it also includes data for Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore. The National Archives loaned the original ship manifests to CIR in 1977 and the data was extracted from the manifests. Over time, some of the criteria for choosing what to index changed so one cannot assume that every person who immigrated has been indexed (One set of my great-grandparents arrived in 1872 and are on a passenger list but not indexed in this database!). The manifests were returned to the National Archives upon completing the extraction. The National ARchives received digital copies of the data in the early 2000s. There are over 4 million records in the database.
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. For a while, the Castle Garden (New York) website hosted the database and supposedly expanded it but its current status is not known. 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. It appears that some of the indexed records also have an image of the passenger list associated with it. That's good news because finding the image otherwise can be challenging.
Most of the columns on the results page will be self-explanatory. The Age column is a bit tricky. An 'age' of 800 means the age is not known. An 'age' in the 900s means you are dealing with an infant less than one year old. The two digits after the 9 is the age in months. Other ages are understood to be in years. A 'U' in a field means unknown. Of course 'M' and 'F' are male and female respectively.
Note: 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 or show all the fields.
My rendition of this database was designed to be consistent with how the other databases on this site work and to show ALL the fields summarized on one table.
exact match: enter the name exactly the way you want it found (e.g., Adam will find ONLY Adam).
match first: enter the first part of name to be matched (e.g., Adam will find Adam, Adamik, Adamowski).
wildcard search: enter any part of the name (e.g., Adam will find Adam, Adamik, Adamowski, and Hadam).
Provided you are using "match first" or "wildcard search", you may use the % character to represent any number of letters and the _ (underline) character to represent one specific letter. Additional explanation here.