Saturday, October 6, 2007

Canadian Manifests

Discovered this resource today. If you have any ancestors who arrived in Canada by ship:

From the Canadian Archives Passenger lists 1865-1922

You can search by: Name of Ship, Year of Arrival, Port of Arrival, Shipping Line, Port of Departure, Date of Departure, and Date of Arrival.

Once you find a particular manifest, it's not indexed by names, so you will have to read the images carefully to find your ancestor. And personally, I'd like the ability to enlarge the images a little. (Yeah, I know, magnifying glasses are cheap at the local store, but I'm talking about a key I can press...*)

I know my great-grandfather Barney, and his father Samuel, should appear on the manifest for the SS Tunisian in May of 1904. At least when they crossed over into the US in 1907, that's the information that was provided for their arrival in Canada. The fact that it does match up to a real ship is hopeful, but my first reading of the 36 pages of names hasn't been successful.

Other databases at the Canadian Archives:

including immigration records from 1925-1935 which are indexed by name.

You can also search all their genealogical databases at once. And the search engine has the feature where as you type, it displays all the results for what you have typed so far. This didn't help me with my Newmark ancestors since they didn't stay in Canada long enough, but my Loyalist ancestors who skedaddled North after The Revolution ended are there.

*Update: I haven't looked at the 'world' in 800x600 for a few years, I briefly forgot I could, but that does help. They still aren't there, and I doubt 640*480 will make them appear suddenly. Now I have to figure out why they aren't.

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