Immigration & Emigration Books

Well before records were available online, family historians have been working to preserve immigration records by publishing indexes, extracts, and transcriptions. Many of these publications have now been digitized and brought together on Ancestry. The original records in some of these books no longer exist, and in other cases they serve as alternate indexes to records found elsewhere, making this an important category.

These records also include registers and record books that weren’t created as immigration records, but that still include valuable immigration details. The records of the Emigrant Savings Bank and England & Wales Criminal Registers are good examples. The Emigrant Savings Bank in New York used immigration details along with other family information for identifying account holders. In the UK, criminal registers can contain details of convicts who were sentenced to transportation to penal colonies.

• Some of the collections within this category are browsable in book form. This is helpful for locating ancestors who are not coming up through search due to name variants, but also useful in that you can browse the introductory materials which often contain historical details and important information as to the scope and coverage of the publication.
• Check at the end of the book for an index. Browsing the index is a good way to get a feel for the contents of the book and you may find some things you didn’t think to search for.
• Many of the books in this collection were converted to database form by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In cases where the print is faded or hard to read, the computer can misinterpret the letters, so if you’re having trouble locating an ancestor in a particular collection, try replacing letters with others that look similar or that are similarly shaped.