Every so often, online genealogy giant Ancestry.com offers the public access to a section of its vast online genealogy resources for free. It’s time for free access to some of the Ancestry.com collection again, so from August 29th through September 5th you can access immigration and travel records on Ancestry.com for free. It is a great opportunity to learn about the journeys of your ancestors and the stories of how they came to America.
In case you are wondering what kinds of records you can get into on Ancestry.com for free this week, the collection includes a diverse selection. Passenger arrival lists, naturalization records, emigration records, border crossings, passports, and even prisoner transport records from the United States and several other countries are all included. You can even see pictures of the ships that may have carried your ancestors to America.
Imagine the possibilities. You could discover that your family did not arrive all at once. Chain immigration was fairly common. One or two family members would make the trip and get themselves established. They would get jobs and set up a home, and often they would finance the trip for others to follow them when they could. A few more folks would arrive, and so on until everyone that wanted to make the trip. Of course, during the years that the family voyage was in progress there were times when some people may have perished before they were able to make the trip, such as those that experienced the potato famine in Irelend.
Sometimes, family stories were made during the passage to America. People became ill on ships and died, children were born during voyages, and sometimes single travelers found love all while traveling to their destination. Is it possible that someone in your family experienced one of these things as they traveled?