This is the flag of the Kingdom of Italy.
I show it here because my ancestors emigrated from the Kingdom
NOT from the current Republic.
There are basically two groups of New York arrival passenger lists:
The Customs lists are only indexed up to 1846, after that you must either
know the ship name and arrival date or "reel thru the years" until you find
your ancestor. The Immigration lists are indexed through 1948.
To be more precise, the Customs lists go through June 17, 1897, and the
Immigration lists begin with June 16, 1897.
My paternal great-grandparents all arrived between May of 1896 and March of
1897, so they are on Customs lists. I found them by diligent "reeling"
after getting some idea of their arrival year from Census records. My maternal
grandparents arrived in 1902 and 1904, and are thus on Immigration lists.
The Customs lists of the late 1890s period have the following columns:
Notice that the information is not as extensive as on the Immigration lists (see below).
The closest that you get to the home town is the port of embarkation (generally
for Italians this was either Genoa or Naples or Palermo - not much help).
"Protracted sojourn" (abbreviated as P.S.) - coming for an extended visit -
was the status for those immigrating.
The Immigration Passenger Lists were more detailed. One day I went to
the National Archives and was fortunate enough to
be able to get to use one of the microfilm readers after a wait
of only about 15 minutes. I picked a random reel of passenger
lists which turned out to be from 1906 and made a copy of the
pertinent part of the BACK of a page (the side we almost NEVER
copy because it doesn't pertain specifically to our "Nonno
Giuseppe").
The bulk of the instructions pertain to the definition of
"Race" for Immigration Service purposes under the laws and
regulations in effect at the time, and seem to indicate an
official or bureaucratic obsession with "RACE-ism." It might be
worth remembering that at the time, the Civil War was barely over
40 years in the past, and that women couldn't yet vote. Here's
the entire text transcribed for your information:
The information returned on the manifest [Forms 500, 500 A,and
500 B], so far as it relates to alien arrivals (including those
in transit and tourists), should be made in accordance with the
following classifications. The number of the column on the
manifest is given in these special instructions and is followed,
in parentheses, in all cases up to and including column 16, by a
descriptive title indicating briefly the subject to which it
relates.
Posted to the Comunes of Italy Mailing List by Gay Parisano Raab - June 13, 1998
I recently attended a genealogical conference and one of the guest speakers was a woman from the National Archives Mid-Atlantic Branch (Philadelphia). She was very well informed of all the records available and gave out some good information. One of the handouts that she gave to everyone was "Interpreting U.S. Immigration Manifest Annotations".
It has to do with all those little notes/scribbles/numbers that we see on passenger lists from time to time and have no idea what
they are! This article was written by Marian L. Smith for Avotaynu and here is some of what she had to say:
Family history researchers regularly obtain copies of ship arrival manifest that record their ancestors arrival in the United States. At times, immigration manifests raise as many questions as they answer, especially when they have handwritten annotations added years after the date of the immigrant's arrival record.
Logic dictates that if INS retrieved an old manifest and made notes next to an individual's record, there must have been renewed interest in that individual's case. Such interest might arise from a variety of causes, but most after-arrival annotations stem from three categories of activity. One is reentry, an INS term for the readmission of aliens previously admitted for permanent residence; another is certification of arrival, a step in the naturalization process designed to prevent fraud. Last is a routine activity called verification of arrival that was and is generally the first step in handling immigrant cases that range from the provision of benefits to the prosecution of legal violations.
Before 1924, U.S. Immigration law did not allow for simple readmission of aliens who had previously been admitted for
permanent residence. Aliens living in the U.S. took a risk when they traveled abroad, where it was for business or pleasure.
Returning residents rarely encountered problems, but no guarantee existed that a U.S. immigration official might not find some
reason to exclude them. This uncertainty caused many immigrants who planned to travel outside the U.S. to obtain some form of
travel paper to ensure their readmission. Often, they wrote to the Port Commissioner of Immigration at the port where they
originally entered and asked for a letter testifying to their legal residence in the U.S. At the port, clerks would check arrival manifests to verify the immigrant's claim and, if valid, the port commissioner could sign a letter to that effect. The traveler carried the letter with him on his trip and presented it to the Immigration officiers upon return to the United States. One of two types of manifest notations might result from this activity. In verifying the alien's original arrival on the old manifest, a clerk might have noted the date and/or the file number of the letter issued in relation to that record. The second type of notation is one made on the new manifest recording the immigrant's reentry into the U.S. In such a case, an inspector would note the letter presented by the alien as the legal basis for the alien's admission into the U.S. Such a notation usually appears as "C of I [date]." It indicates dated correspondence of the Commissioner of Immigration. Other reentry notations may be entered as "letter, [date]" or actually give the port correspondence file number. Unfortunately for the genealogist, U.S. port correspondence records were discarded decades ago.
The Immigration Act of 1924 provided for the issuance of reentry permits to resident aliens planning to travel abroad.
Immigrants who traveled frequently on business obtained the permits as a matter of routime. Reentry permit procedure required the immigrant to submit an application along with a fee and two photographs. The immigration service verified the immigrant's legal admission and issued the permit. As before, INS verified arrivals by checking manifests, and notations bearing that documents the immigrant's original entry and the manifest that shows the immigrant's reentry with the permit. Such notations usually appear as a serial number preceded by a P or RP.
Under immigration law, citizens of the U.S. could not be excluded from reentering the country, so naturalized citizens needed
only to present proof of citizenship to gain readmission. The most commonly used form of proof was a naturalization certificate. [The immigration inspector] entered an annotation of the U.S. citizen's (USC) naturalization court and certificate number, often with the date of naturalization. In cases, proof of citizenship could also be a birth certificate (if U.S. born). Notations on the records typically indicate that the individual was U.S. born (USB) and include the date and place of birth. Some even include serial numbers that probably are the state serial numbers shown on the face of the birth cerificate.
More common than reentry annotations are notations related to an immigrant's first step toward naturalization. Verifying that all
petitioners for naturalization were indeed legally admitted immigrants was ono eof the reforms instituted by the Basic
Naturalization Act of 1906 that established the federal naturalization service. Prior to 1906, no federal entity was responsible for the administration of naturalization by the courts, and, as most genealogists know, no uniformity existed in the naturalization practice, procedure or record keeping prior to 1906. Under the 1906 statute, naturalization procedure required a step whereby the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization checked ship manifests to verify the legal admission of every applicant for citizenship who had arrived since the passage of the act. Aliens submitted Declarations of Intention or Petitions to a naturalization court. On these forms, the immigrant named the port, date and ship of his or her arrival. Copies of the form were forwarded to the appropriate ports of entry to be checked by verification clerks who located the immigrant's arrival record among their immigration manifests. If the record was found, INS issued a Certificate of Arrival and sent it back to the naturalization court. It became clear to immigration officials that whenever a verification clerk used a specific manifest record for Certification of Arrival purposes, the clerk should annotate the record so that it could not be used to support anyone else's naturalization in the future (fraud). By the late 1920s, INS had developed a standard procedure for annotating manifests in Certificate of Arrival cases. These annotations, dating from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, typically included two types of information: the application number and date of verification. Some longer entries indicated whether or not a Certificate of Arrival (C/A or c/a) was issued. The application number is of no use in locating naturalization files today, but the nature or form of the number reveals that the record was checked in response to a Certificate of Arrival application (declaration or petition). The number also can be used to tell where the immigrant filed that application. When devising the number system and procedure, federal officials
assigned every INS district office a key number (see Table below). Every application filed at a given office carried that office number followed by a serial number. In addition, the two numbers were separated by either a dash or an x. A dash indicates that the alien had been required to pay a fee for processing the Certificate of Arrival request. For a variety of reasons, an alien might be exempt from paying a fee; if the numbers were separated by an x, the request involved no fee. For example, the annotation "9-35742 [date]" on a manifest record indicated that the immigrant paid a fee and field in Cincinnati, Ohio. The annotation "19x832 [date]" reveals that the immigrant filed in Salt Lake City, Utah, but paid no fee. The date next to an application number indicates when the verification clerk annotated the manifest.
1 - Boston, Massachusetts
Whenever an alien's case comes before the INS, officers must first determine the alien's status before they can proceed. For this reason, the INS made constant use of its manifest records to verify arrival information. Arrival manifests, especially those dating prior to July 1924, were checked in response to any application for immigration benefits. Such benefits might include issuance of the reentry permits discussed above or replacement of Immigrant Indentification Cards (after 1928), or they might relate to a nonquota via application for the relative of a permanent resident alien. Whatever the issue, verification clerks would check to see that a given immigrant had indeed been admitted at a certain port on a specific date and that they had been granted permanent residence.
Similar annotations resulted from law enforcement activities. Whenever immigrations officers arrested a noncitizen, they
requested a record check to determine the conditions of the alien's presence in the United States and local law enforcement
officials also could request a record check for any alien in their custody. If no arrival record could be found, or if the
arrival record indicated that the individual had been admitted for only a temporary stay, the INS might initiate deportation
proceedings.
Whether in response to benefit application or as a law enforcement measure, verification clerks issued a standard form to answer routine verification requests. Generally, the used Immigration Service Form 505, entitled either "Verification of Landing" or "Certificate of Admission of Alien", which had blank spaces for each item of information normally found on the manifest. The clerk transcribed all information found on the manifest to the form and mailed the form to the INS office requesting the verification. Obviously, it was more efficient to use this system than to transfer the original manifest record that by now was bound into a 20-pound book. Manifest records bearing the notation "[date] 505'" were checked at some time for some unknown reason. If a researcher is familiar enough with an immigrant's life, the verification date may serve to corroborate certain facts or events. Otherwise, verificiation annotations of "505" reveal nothing more than there was something that prompted a record check. Few Form 505 documents have survived because they were considered "housekeeping" records - tossed as soon as they served their purpose.
Well, I hope this has helped some of you who have a copy of the passenger list with a lot of writing on it! I guess these manifests can tell us a lot of what went on in an immigrant's life.
Scholarly Stuff
Websites of Scholarly Organizations Relating to Things Italian
IMMIGRATION INFORMATION
links to a wealth of information about immigration-related topics - HIGHLY recommended.ELLIS ISLAND
my series of pages dealing with Castle Garden, the Barge Office and Ellis Island.
INFORMATION ABOUT IMMIGRATION PASSENGER
LISTS
CIRCULAR NO. 43
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR FILLING ALIEN MANIFESTS
(Norwegians,
Danes, and Swedes)
"Interpreting U.S. Immigration Manifest Annotations"
2 - New York, New York
3 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
4 - Washington D.C.
5 - Buffalo, New York
6 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
7 - Cleveland, Ohio
8 - Detroit, Michigan
9 - Cincinnati, Ohio
10 - Birmingham, Alabama
11 - Chicago, Illinois
12 - St. Louis, Missouri
13 - New Orleans, Louisiana
14 - St. Paul, Minnesota
15 - Omaha, Nebraska
16 - Kansas City, Missouri
17 - Fort Worth, Texas
18 - Denver, Colorado
19 - Salt Lake City, Utah
20 - Seattle, Washington
21 - Portland, Oregon
22 - San Francisco, California
23 - Los Angeles, California
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