1400+ Ship Extractions from Batschka - Contributed by Brigitte and Gunther Wolf

Links to the information: By Name

Special PDF file – People who died in the USA

---

Introduction

Passenger ship records, especially in the last decade of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, constitute a major resource for determining place of origin for immigrants to North America.  U. S. passenger ship record are readily available on microfilm from the National Archives or from the Family History Library(FHL) in Salt Lake.  For practical purposes European departure records do not exist except for the North Sea ports of Hamburg and Bremen.  The Hamburg records are indexed and have been microfilmed.  They are available on microfilm from the FHL.

The Bremen records are a different story.  Prior to World War I the Bremen authorities, due to the lack of storage space, only preserved the preceding two years worth of records.  Thus, with the passage of a year they would destroy the records of the year three years previously.  In 1909 this practice was discontinued and all records were saved so that records were complete starting in 1906.

During the late 1930’s a modest card index was started of these records from the pre World War I period by the Auslands Institut in Stuttgart.  These cards were eventually deposited in the Koblenz archives and have been microfilmed.  This microfilm is available from the FHL.

During World War II the Bremen passenger lists disappeared and it was widely believed and accepted that they had been destroyed in the war.  After the demise of the Soviet Union and improved relations with Russia it was learned that indeed the Bremen records had survived having been stored in a salt mine during the war where they had been recovered by Soviet forces and removed to the Soviet Union.   As part of the program to restore cultural material to their previous owners these records have been returned to the Bremen authorities.  They are being indexed and the results made available on the internet at;

http://www.genealogienetz.de/vereine/maus/auswanderung/index.html

The entries in the database which come from this source are indicated by the term “ab Bremen”.  All other entries come from the Ellis Island website accessed through the Morse site at;

http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB/ellis.html

These Batachka passenger ship entries compiled by Brigitte Wolf were collected for tracking inhabitants for her forthcoming family book on Selitsch/Batschka and those wishing more information on people in the database can contact Brigitte and her husband Gunther at;

[email protected]

Since the ports of departure and arrival are not given in the database checking these results for any given entry is not straight forward.  However, buy checking the name of the ship and date of departure or arrival in the "Morton Allan Directory of European Passenger Steamship Arrivals"(1931, Genealogical Publishing Co) one can quickly determine the shipping line and date of arrival.  Knowing the port and date of arrival one should be able to quickly find the original records in U. S. passenger ship records.