Working With Immigrants
Your family's immigration stories changed them forever and are a shared American experience.
Even if you cannot find ALL the details of exact parentage you can often learn much of the story.
These narratives are gifts to further generations.
We have more tools than ever before to be successful
Practical Tips for Immigrant Research:
Identify the group you would like to work on. If you know their ethnicity do some reading - websites with articles on Germans to America or books from online book collections that tell about ethnic groups in America or a specific region or state.
If this family is in early America you may not be certain of their country of origin. Don't get too attached to a place simply because of surname. A McAllister COULD be from Scotland... or England... or Ireland.
Many immigrants got tired of people mispronouncing their German name and anglicized it so it was easier to say.
Do you have any families where the immigration story remains in memory?
Most families lose their immigration memory in about three generations but sometimes we are lucky enough to have family papers.
Are you finding online trees that say this ancestor was the immigrant but no evidence is shown? Be skeptical.
If you have a DNA test are you seeing a lot of shared matches in the country you believe they came from? Do they show any pattern?
Focusing on your Immigrant Group:
1. Gather the family. Do not just focus on one grandparent. View Grandpa as a man with a wife and siblings and children. Lone immigrants are very hard to follow.
Make two lists:
1. Family and associates with the same ethnicity born in the previous homeland. Below is an example of a (pretend) list:
Botteler, Matthias b. 1842 Germany (your target immigrant grandfather)
Botteler, Maria (Trautman) b. 1832 Germany sister to Matthias
Bottler, Abram – relationship unk. B. 1833 Germany – seen near Matthias on census
Bottler, Magdalena (Metzgar) b. 1838 Germany sister to Matthias
Bottler, Peter b. 1844 Germany brother to Matthias
Botteler/Butler, Johann b. 1846 Germany brother to Matthias
Botler, Jacob b. 1852 Germany brother to Matthias
Hornbach, Elisabet Hombach b. 1846 Germany – wife of Matthias – they m. in NY
(your immigrant grandmother)
Metzgar, Jakob, b. 1830 Germany husband of Magdalena – brother-in-law of Matthias
Metzgar, Peter b. 1854 Germany – nephew of Matthias
Trautman, Johann b. 1830, husband of Maria – brother-in-law of Matthias
2. Make a second list of GIVEN names used by this immigrant family
– include the children of the immigrants even if born in the U.S.
This is important because when you move back to their previous homeland naming patterns are an important tool.
Abram
Felix
Jacob
Johan/John
Karl
Peter
Wilhelm/William
Barbara
Christina
Dorothea
Elizabeth
Magdalena
Maria
Monika
BUILD OUT THE TIMELINE:
DO YOU HAVE THEM ON A PASSENGER LIST?
the best place to begin is always Ancestry. Here are more possibilities.
Did they all come together? Look carefully at that list vs. your list. If you have 12 people on your immigrant list you should attempt to find when each of them came.
If you found Grandpa on the passenger list did you look carefully at the ENTIRE list to see if other family members were on the same ship? Anyone sharing the same surnames should be noted.
WHAT IS THE FIRST RECORD YOU HAVE FOR THEM IN AMERICA?
Besides the passenger list, when do you first have them in a document? If later records say they immigrated in 1856 but you have no record of them till 1880 you are missing crucial years in an immigrant’s life.
CENSUS:
Start with the census. Look for everyone on your immigrant list in all available census. Look carefully at their neighbors and households – ESPECIALLY in the first census after they arrived.
If there are reoccurring names or names of unknown German people in their household add those people to your immigrant cluster list.
Take special care with the 1900 census. Any of the people on your list who lived to be recorded in 1900 will tell year of arrival, year of naturalization and approximate year of marriage
If they say they naturalized in 1863 the date could be slightly off but do you know where all of them were in 1863? Who was the last person to get naturalized – the later the record the better the information.
Since First Papers/Declaration of Intent were usually filed at 3-5 years before naturalization where were these people when they filed intent? Sometimes immigrant families stayed in port cities like NY the first few years and filed first papers there then moved to Michigan where they were naturalized.
DEATH RECORDS – If your immigrant family lived late enough that there are death records you want to hunt down as many as you can for the people on your list.
Look for
Death record databases
Find A Grave – and search the cemetery for relatives
Obituaries
Funeral Home records.
While funeral home records are harder to track down they are especially helpful for immigrant ancestors because they are sometimes the ONLY record that shows an exact birthplace. Since few are online a good plan is to call or write a genealogy society in the area and ask where those records might be found.
Marriage Returns after about 1880 often give birthplace. Sometimes it is only the country. Sometimes it is the town as well. Make sure you have seen ALL the documents the marriage could produce. Returns and applications may have this information where certificates and registers might not.
COURT RECORDS
In early America, Oaths of Allegiance and Naturalization might not be in any sort of separate book. They could be in the court orders. Check in the book collections first as many of these are in printed sources.
If you have no luck there many court orders are filmed at FamilySearch if you pull up the county in a catalog search.
Most court order books have an index at the beginning. It is not an every-name index but it SHOULD index a person taking the oath or being granted citizenship.
An exception to this might be if whole groups of people came to take the oath together the clerks might not have gotten all their names in the index.