Crossing the Border

It may well be that political boundaries have always existed since the very first human organizations. It is a certainty that, at least, for the last one hundred years, individuals had to obtain some sort of permission to move across an international boundary or even internal political boundaries within a single country. At times, some countries imposed and still impose travel restrictions on their own citizens and even the process of moving from one city to another to work, requires documentation. That need for permission generates a whole slew of documents that genealogists can use to identify and track individuals. Even if permission was not necessary, there are still documents that track the movements of individuals and families.

The list of documents that record the efforts of your ancestors to cross a border is extensive. The list includes some of these categories of documents:

• Ship manifests or passenger lists
• Border crossing records
• Passports
• Visas
• Work permits
• Travel permits
• Exit permits
• Immigration and emigration documents
• Church records
• Business records
• Police Records
• Military Records and/or Failure to report for service records
• Citizenship records including, but not limited to naturalization records
• Port of departure records
• Approval to emigrate before departure
• Published announcements of emigration
• Pre-departure records
• Consular records
• Home town censuses and emigrant lists
• Illegal and extralegal emigration

A common challenge for genealogical researchers in the United States is determining the place of origin of the immigrant. Any of the above record categories and many more types of records can contain that sort of information. I recently identified the birth place of a Great-great-grandfather from a church record. So where would I begin?

The first step, as is commonly taught to budding genealogists, is to start with the records your family has preserved. Any surviving records should be carefully examined to determine if the record contains information about the place of origin of the ancestor. But if these home sources have been exhausted, then there are many websites containing vast amounts of information about international and even local travelers. 

The first place I would look for ancestors' movements would be the Immigrant Ancestors Project. Here is the description of the project from the website:

Immigrant Ancestors is a project sponsored by Brigham Young University's Center for Family History and Genealogy. To create the database, images of emigrant records are transmitted over the Web to volunteers who extract their contents and send them back to the project team at Brigham Young University (BYU). BYU students are hired as part of the project team to supervise the volunteers and edit their work before adding it to the database.

This database already contains hundreds of thousands of records from France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. You can see a list of the archives that have been used to create the lists by clicking here. See the information on Records and Laws on this website.

Next, I would recommend following the links contained in the FamilySearch.org Research Wiki on United States Emigration and Immigration. In addition to links for each state in the United States, the Research Wiki contains the following list of resources:

• Canadian Border Crossings
• Europe Emigration Records
• Finding the Place of Origin
• Legal History of Immigration
• Mexican Border Crossings
• Online Genealogy Records
• Other Published Sources
• Passenger Arrival Records
• Pre-1820
• Starting in 1820
• Passports
• Ship (Vessel) Arrival Records
• Searching Passenger Lists
• Surname Distribution Maps
• Web Sites

See also United States Immigration and Naturalization Online Resources. Of course, you should search the large online genealogy websites, including FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and findmypast.com. Here are a few other very useful websites to get you started:

• Ship Passenger Lists and Records Online
• Pilgrim Ship Lists Early 1600s
• U.S. National Archives Immigration Records
• Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild
• Immigration and Passenger Arrival Records
• Cyndi's List, Ships and Passenger Lists
• US Ports of Arrival and their Available Passenger Lists 1820-1957
• The Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundations, Inc.
• Shipping - Passenger lists - Australia
• Passenger Lists and Immigration Records, Government of Western Australia

This is only the barest beginning of a list of place to search. I included the Australian records because I have two lines of ancestors who came to the Unites States from Australia and also we are coming up on the celebration of Australia Day on the 26th of January. See #AustraliaDay.