Family History & Genealogy Research

The Immigrant Ancestors Project, sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University, uses emigration registers to locate information about the birthplaces of immigrants in their native countries, which is not found in the port registers and naturalization documents in the destination countries. Volunteers working with scholars and researchers at Brigham Young University are creating a database of millions of immigrants based on these emigration registers.

FamilySearch: Did your immigrant ancestors land at Castle Garden or Ellis Island? Or did they arrive in New York before those facilities existed? The answer matters because it determines where you should look for them in records. Don’t worry—New York passenger lists for all those eras are available for free on FamilySearch. This history of Castle Garden can help you understand which collections you should search and what your ancestors’ experience may have been like.

Part of BYU-Idaho's special collections, this resource provides students with thousands of records on the early Japanese immigrants to the United States.

ShipIndex.org tells you which books, magazines, and online resources mention the vessels you're researching. With 142,804 entries in the free database and 1,865,071 entries available with premium access, you're bound to find useful information here.