Ellis Island Database Fact Sheet

Source: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The focal point of the American Family Immigration History Center at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is a computerized database that provides visitors with access to more than 22 million historic Ellis Island passenger records.

The process of extracting these records began in 1993 when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began the volunteer effort of digitizing records that cover individuals who entered through the Port of New York from 1892 to 1924. This process was completed in late 2000, and the data was shared with the National Park Service and The Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.

• Some 12,000 volunteer Church members from 2,700 congregations in the U.S. and Canada donated approximately 5.6 million hours to complete the entries. The Church also devoted 100 full-time volunteers to work on the project.

• A total of 22 million names were taken from the microfilm of New York passenger arrival manifests dated January 1892 to December 1924, including aliens, U.S. citizens, crew members, nonimmigrant aliens, deportees, and those who literally missed the boat. This process covers 71% of all passenger arrivals to the United States from 1892 to 1924.

• Information provided for individual records usually included the following: traveler names, name of vessel, ports of departure, ports of arrival, and dates of arrival. Other information recorded includes age, gender, marital status, nationality, relative or friend outside the United States, relative inside the United States, exact birth date, and place of birth. The information recorded on ship manifests became increasingly detailed with time. An average of 15 information columns were used in the early years of Ellis Island, while up to 36 columns of facts were collected in the later years.

• The most frequently listed departure ports were located in the following countries: Italy, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Finland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Newfoundland, Germany, and Poland.

• The automation of these significant records will contribute to the efforts of genealogists around the world, making the records of immigrants to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries more easily accessible.

• It is estimated 100 million descendants of the Ellis Island immigrants live in the U.S.