Heads up genealogists and family tree researchers, because here at Castle Garden, you can get free access to the amazing database of immigrants who arrived between 1830 and 1892, which of course, falls in the time period of Ellis Island’s opening. According to the site, over 72 million Americans should be able to trace their relatives to this period of immigration.
How does it work? Well, you can type the first and last name of who you want to find into the search engine on the left side of the page. If you don’t know either of those, you can use an * in either field as a wildcard. Then select the range of dates you’d like to search. Now, click the Search Now button.
The results are displayed in a table, where you will get a listing of people by that name. You will also find their occupation, age, sex, arrived (the date they arrived), origin (country of origin) and the ship they came in on.
Just searching for folks with my last name generated 191 results and let me tell you, I was amazed. I didn’t find any relatives, but that’s still a good amount of results generated. So, I think if you have specific names and dates, your results would be fairly zeroed in on the correct area.
What else can you do here? Well, you can check out the Timeline, which is not completed at this time, but has tons of interesting information on it already about the history of Castle Garden.
This is a truly amazing site filled with useful and interesting content that can help you trace your roots!
~ Amanda