Best Website for Immigrant Research
The good news: Zillions of genealogy websites exist to help you trace your family tree. The bad news: Zillions of genealogy websites exist to help you trace your family tree. With so many resources available for your family history quest, how do you know which sites to click and which to skip? Leave it to our genealogy experts! We constantly scour the web for great resources, and once a year, whittle those down to our annual list of the 101 Best Genealogy Websites. Here, we’ve compiled our picks into a handy directory that makes it easy to find the top sites for your family history goals: Just choose the category that matches your interests to see the best sites to visit.
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Bremen Passenger Lists
http://www.passengerlists.de/Find later-departing ancestors among 738,000 searchable entries, mostly from 1920 to 1939; some date from as far back as the mid-19th century.

Castle Garden
http://www.castlegarden.org/US arrivals through the port of New York from 1820 through 1892—before Ellis Island opened (see page 21)—came here, and now you can search all 11 million of them for free.

Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court
http://www.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org/Even if your Midwestern family didn’t live in Chicago, they may have been naturalized there. This searchable collection of more than 500,000 naturalization petitions covering 1871 to 1929 primarily contains declarations of intention, which may be the only public record of an individual immigrant.

Digital Danish Emigration Archives
http://www.udvandrerarkivet.dk/soegeside/Start by finding your Danish family in Copenhagen police records of nearly 400,000 emigrants (1868-1908). Then explore the emigrant experience in digitized letters and multimedia.

Ellis Island
https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/After a dramatic makeover with lots of graphics and photos, this is the new home of the free Ellis Island passenger search website. The changes go far beyond appearances: Now numbering 51 million records, the site has added passenger records from the years 1925 through 1957.

Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild
http://www.immigrantships.net/Can’t find your kin at Ellis Island or Castle Garden? Your next stop should be this volunteer-transcribed collection of more than 11,000 passenger manifests, plus other special projects.

Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/Visiting this Harvard site is like taking a virtual course in immigration history, drawing on over 400,000 pages from more than 2,200 books, pamphlets and serials, over 9,600 pages from manuscript and archival collections, and more than 7,800 photographs.

Institute of Migration
http://www.migrationinstitute.fi/en/genealogy/emigrantregisterFind your emigrating Finnish family in this online collection of 318,000 passenger-list records, 268,000 passport records and other resources. Searching is free, but full access to the resulting data costs about $22 a year.

One-Step Web Pages
http://stevemorse.org/From censuses to vital records, foreign calendars to alphabets, Steve Morse empowers visitors to drill down into genealogy and related databases. You can skip intros and tedious forms and use more-flexible search options. To view results on a fee-based website, you do need a subscription to that site.

TheShipsList
http://www.theshipslist.com/Since 1999, this site has been serving up passenger lists, now numbering some 3,000 pages and growing every month. It’s also a good source to learn more about the ship your ancestors arrived on; it might even include a picture.