Product benefits

• Discover the homelands of your immigrant ancestors and learn more about the journey to America.
• Search more than 22 million names from ships' passenger lists and naturalization records spanning the 1600s to the 1950s.
• Access exclusive records like the never-before-indexed Nineteenth Century New York Passenger Lists.
• View actual ships' passenger lists and learn the names of those who traveled with your ancestors.
• Watch this collection grow in value. We'll continue to add new records on a regular basis.

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• Every major port of arrival in the US and Canada is represented in this collection – includes Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans.
• Passenger lists represent one of the largest and most consistent forms of record keeping for the entire nation.
• Study the histories of various immigrant groups ranging from the Mayflower pilgrims of 1620 to the Irish famine refugees of the 1840s.
• Study the histories of various immigrant groups ranging from the Mayflower pilgrims of 1620 to the Irish famine refugees of the 1840s.
• Learn the names, ages and physical characteristics of your ancestors and their family members.

Learn More About U.S. Immigration Collection

What are passenger lists?

In 1819 the United States Congress enacted legislation to regulate the transport of passengers from foreign ports to the United States. As a provision of this act, ships’ captains were required to submit a list of passengers to the collector of customs in the district in which the ship arrived. The legislation also required that captains note "the age, sex, and occupation of said passengers, respectively, the country to which they severally belong, and that of which it is their intention to become inhabitants."

From a passenger list, a family historian can learn an ancestor’s age, occupation, port and date of departure and arrival, destination and the name of the ship on which the ancestor traveled.

What are naturalization records?

Naturalization records captured the timeline of events wherein an immigrant to the United States declared his or her intention of becoming a full-fledged citizen. Under the Basic Naturalization Act of 1906, naturalization forms became standardized and were sent to the U.S. Bureau of Immigration, later the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), for examination. The formalized process required that a prospective citizen file a declaration of intention in which he or she renounced allegiance to foreign sovereignties. Following a waiting period of five years, an immigrant could then petition a federal court for formal citizenship.

Naturalization forms typically included the applicant’s name, age, place and date of birth, allegiance, and the date of the declaration. After 1866, the forms usually offered a physical description (including height, weight, eye color, complexion, and identifying marks), a current place of residence, last foreign address, the name of the ship, and the port and date of entry.

Why search these records online?

Traditionally, online family historians have had to deal with a discernable lack of immigration information available on the Internet, turning instead to endless rolls of microfilm housed in faraway and inconvenient archive offices. Ancestry.com has compiled this exclusive collection of historical records and databases to help you overcome your research roadblocks.

Take a Flash tour of the U.S. Immigration Collection.