Q: There's a family story that an ancestor "went down with the ship." No, it's not the Titanic. I checked. It was sometime after 1910 because I found him alive and living in a boarding house full of immigrant day laborers in 1910. I find no evidence of this person in the United States after that though I do find a possible wife coming to the US a few years later so let's say he was possibly alive in 1912. I've checked census, city directories, county birth records to see if he fathered a child in the U.S. I know his name could have been Anglicized but I've tried under variations of the most obvious spellings. What do I do now?
A: There could be a manifest that includes him as a passenger or CREW MEMBER, that is if the book was left at port. Many of the databases that have ship records fail to show the CREW LIST because they are focused on the immigrant. Ellis Island for instance shows steerage passengers, but not the passengers on better tickets. New York ship records should show all passengers but we might have to use a utility to read the manifests from page one all the way through, starting with the Captain, the ship Doctor/Surgeon. (The Ellis Island story is in our minds and we forget there were many other ports operational including in the Great Lakes, Galveston Texas, and Baltimore and Philadelphia.) Even if the manifest went down with the ship too, if you can prove this person was a crew member on a particular ship or for a particular ship line, that will help move your research to a possibility that he was working for that ship line or the ship that went down on another trip.
Besides the United States, check the manifests of ships that crossed the Atlantic leaving from ENGLAND, Liverpool or South Hampton being the most popular ports.
There is also the possibility this person was a MERCHANT MARINE or a sailor for the United States Navy, or the Navy of another country.
I'd like to see more on the net about shipwrecks and passenger lists!
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