Hamburg, Germany Passenger Lists in The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library

by Don Litzer

It has been estimated that from 1850 to 1934 more than 5 million people from eastern and central Europe emigrated through the port of Hamburg, Germany to the United States. Lists of passengers departing Hamburg prove particularly helpful by providing a specific place of origin for those emigrants, information crucial to continuing research in European records.

The Genealogy Center has 115 microfilm reels of Hamburg “direct lists,” that is, passenger lists of ships that traveled directly from Hamburg to a destination without stopping at other European ports. These films run from March, 1850 (the earliest available records) to the end of 1900, and are complete except from January through July 14, 1853, a period for which records are missing.

The lists—written, of course, in the German language—can be quite illuminating. A Hamburg passenger list, while varying slightly over time, generally asked for the following information: surname, given name, gender, age, previous residence, state or province, occupation, destination, number of persons, adults and children over ten years, children under ten years, and children under one year.

This author can offer a testimonial from personal research. On an 1860 Hamburg passenger list, an ancestor’s residence was recorded as “Papiogorroe”—a rendering of Popia Gora, a tiny hamlet in the province of West Prussia—and neighbors traveling with his family gave the names of two nearby villages as their residences, thereby making it possible to determine an ancestral hometown in present-day Poland.

Lists for 1850 to 1855 do not require separate indices, because they are arranged alphabetically by the first letter of the head of household’s surname. For the period from April, 1855 to April, 1901, the Genealogy Center has 63 microfilm reels of indices to the Hamburg direct lists. These indices are arranged by the first letter of the head of household’s surname, and then chronologically by the date the vessel left Hamburg.

There are also online alternatives to using the microfilmed Hamburg lists and indices. An index to direct and indirect lists for the year 1872 is available online at http://www.progenealogists.com/germany/Hamburg/index.html. The 1850 to 1934 lists have also been digitized and are available at Ancestry.com, but only the 1890 to 1914 records are accompanied by an electronic index. Ancestry also recently posted digitized images of the handwritten indexes covering 1855 to 1934. By scanning the microfilm or utilizing the digital images and indexes, researchers in the Genealogy Center should be able to identify ancestors that came through this important European port.

Article taken from the Genealogy Gems[1]: News from the Fort Wayne Library
No. 40, June 30, 2007