Chapter 2 · Leaving Poland · Agents & tickets
Most tickets were not bought in Poland. A brother, husband or cousin already working in Chicago, Buffalo or Pittsburgh bought a prepaid ticket from a steamship agent in America and mailed it home. The manifest records who that relative was, and that name is one of the best clues on the whole document.
How prepaid tickets appear in the records
Passenger manifests ask who paid for the passage and whom the passenger was going to join. A passenger travelling on a prepaid ticket names the relative in America, usually with a street address. That address leads to the earlier emigrant, who is often the key to the whole family’s chain migration.
Emigration agents
Steamship lines worked through networks of agents. In Galicia they were licensed and advertised openly; in Prussia they were tolerated; in the Russian partition they were illegal and operated through intermediaries. Agents sold tickets, arranged the train to the port and, in some cases, the border crossing itself.
- Agents’ advertisements in the Polish press show which routes a region used
- Some agents’ ledgers survive in local archives
- Court cases against illegal agents name the emigrants they served
- Letters from America often mention the ticket and the agent by name
Chain migration
One emigrant paid for the next: a brother, then a fiancée, then a cousin from the same village. Tracing the prepaid tickets backwards reconstructs the chain, and the first link is often the person who can be found most easily in both countries.
How we can help
Immigration & Passenger Records follows the tickets and the relatives named on them, on both sides of the ocean.