Find your roots with the immigration records
 

Unlike the other continents on the face of mother earth the continents of America has people of ‎mixed races such as Europeans or Asians. Though we have been hearing a lot about “pure blood” ‎but the truth is that only the Native American Indians are the pure-blooded ones. The irony of ‎the fact is that after living for thousand years people started recognizing the Native Americans.‎

On the basis of these theories it is proved that we are by products of mixed races and therefore ‎have several ancestors. Our past might be shaky and lineage difficult to trace but still we are ‎capable to give a strong base to our next generation by finding whatever we can of our past.‎

U.S. immigration records provides great assistance in tracking your family and the country from ‎where they started off their journey to America but that is not always confirmed. When people ‎immigrated to the United States their port of entry and the ship’s name was listed down.‎

On the eastern U.S seaboard New York, Boston and Baltimore are the three main ports which ‎can be the landing point of your antecedents. But records reveal that during 1830 and 1892 as ‎many as 10 million immigrants entered through CastleGarden (New York). So chances are that ‎‎73 million Americans including you can find your antecedents from this place. CastleGarden is ‎now popularly known as Castle Clinton National Monument which serves as a main milestone at ‎The Battery which is a waterfront park in Manhattan, N.Y.‎

CastleGarden became the immigration center of America and this project came into being after ‎the joint efforts of the city and the state. You can log into www.CastleGarden.org  to check out ‎the lists of several immigrants and the name of their ships.‎
When CastleGarden was closed for a year Ellis Island served as the chief port of entry for the ‎immigrants. 22 million immigrants are noted to have entered from it during 1892 and 1924. ‎
Volunteers belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) made ‎great efforts to write down the records of Ellis Island onto electronic public archives. They not ‎only had to simply write down the records but also had to be careful about the fact that they ‎were copied exactly as the original records though we can be sure that even the originals had ‎misspelled names.‎

Many reasons forced people to change the spellings of their names at the port of entry itself. In ‎‎1697, at the time of potato famine severe discrimination was witnessed against the Irish. The ‎same intolerance was experienced against the Jews which provided fuel to the World War ll. ‎From the fear, of this uncontrollable biasness, immigrants often “Anglican-ized” their names.‎

Elizabeth Bentley translated two books in 1999. The first book which is Volume l consists of ‎‎1,500 pages and the second one Volume ll has 1,160 pages. Both the books record the ‎information found on the actual lists about the 150,000 immigrants from the CastleGarden and ‎Ellis Island. The records had the person’s first and last names, their age, the country they ‎belonged and their destination place. Germans; Irish; Italians; Russians; Dutch; Armenian; Czech; ‎Greek; Luxembourg and Swedish people are grouped separately in Bentley’s books and the CD ‎ROMS. It has been made sure that the same names are registered on the particular ships.‎
One can log onto www.archives.gov/genealogy/immigration  to extract the Immigration records ‎from the National Archives.‎

If you think that your curiosity will end once your lineage is found out then you might be terribly ‎mistaken because by then your whole imaginary past has been wiped out by the bare truth. This ‎might make you go in search of the live blood relations you might still have. Don’t be surprised ‎to see the dead pointing towards the live. ‎