Chapter 2 · Leaving Poland · Departure lists
The American arrival manifest has a European twin, written at the port of departure, and the twin sometimes says more. When the manifest in New York says only “Russia”, the Hamburg list for the same ship may name the village.
Hamburg, 1850 to 1934
The great survivor. Hamburg’s departure lists record each passenger’s last place of residence, frequently the actual village, and they have been indexed. Most emigrants from the Russian partition sailed from Hamburg, many through the emigrant halls on the Veddel island that the Hamburg America Line opened in 1901.
Bremen: the great loss
Bremen was the port for most emigrants from the Prussian partition and many from Galicia. Almost all of its passenger lists were destroyed, partly by the port authorities themselves to save space and partly in the Second World War. Only fragments from 1920 to 1939 survive. For Bremen passengers, the American manifest is usually the only list.
Other ports
- Rotterdam: Holland America Line lists survive from 1900 and name the destination and the payer
- Antwerp: Red Star Line records survive only in fragments
- Trieste and Fiume: used by some Galician emigrants on Austro-Hungarian lines
- Gdynia: Poland’s own port from the 1930s, with emigration paperwork kept by Polish authorities
Matching a departure to an arrival
The ship’s name and the date of departure link the two lists. Spellings will differ, because different clerks wrote them in different countries, and the difference is itself useful: two independent attempts to write the same village name.
How we can help
Immigration & Passenger Records searches the departure lists alongside every American arrival, and Ancestral Village Identification uses them to read the village name twice.