Source:New York Port, Ship Images, 1851-1891

Description

Ancestry has provided an index to a collection of images of ships that transported immigrants to the Port of New York from 1851-1891. The images available have been obtained from the Mystic Seaport museum.

Source Information:

Ancestry.com. New York Port, Ship Images, 1851-1891 [database online]. Provo, Utah: MyFamily.com, Inc., 2004. Original data: Ship images obtained from and reproduced courtesy of Mystic Seaport.

Usage Tips

This database is an index to images (photographs and artistic renderings) of some of the ships that arrived from foreign ports at the port of New York from 1851-1891.

What makes this useful is that the images are also connected to an index of the passengers arriving on these ships. Thus, if you are looking for an image of a ship that a particular person travelled on, you don't have to search this database already knowing the ship's name. Instead, you can search by name and be linked to an image of the ship. You can also browse this database and look directly at the ship images, which are sorted by arrival date.

According to Ancestry.com:

Additional ship information includes the ship photo, build date, shipping line, tonnage, mast/funnels, and route. It is important to note that some ships were reconfigured after their initial build out. Therefore, a photo of a ship may not always completely match the description of it. In some cases a photo of a sister ship has been substituted in place of an actual photo of a ship. A sister ship is exactly the same except for the ship's name, so it's as if the photo is of the actual ship.

It is important to note that the port of departure listed on the passenger lists is not always the original port of departure for many of the individuals on the list. A ship could make several voyages throughout the year, making several stops along way. Oft times the port of departure found on these lists is the most recent port the ship was located at prior to arriving at the port of New York. Therefore, if your ancestors emigrated to the U.S. from Germany, they could be found on a passenger list coming from Liverpool, England (if, in this case, the ship left from Bremen, Germany then continued on to Liverpool, England before arriving in New York).