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FILBYS PASSENGER LISTS - STILL GOOD - STILL AVAILABLE ALWAYS ADDED TO! BUT NOT FINDABLE ON ANCESTRY TM DATABASES BY THAT NAME

Before there were databases that attached to original ship manifests... there was FILBY's.  Well Filby's still exists. Covering immigrants to the U.S. and Canada, the 1500's forwards to the 1970's, every calendar year it's supplemented with more information. Many big city libraries, colleges, and genealogy specialty archives, have the entire binder set, a vast number of volumes. 

Filby's best use is for finding those who came before the 1820's, before there was any lawful requirement that such records be kept. The immigrants on sail ships trickled in well before the steamship era, sometimes just a few at a time on a ship intended to transport cargo. Information in these books comes from a variety of first resources including family diaries, naturalization documents, even indentured servant lists.  An important source was also the passenger lists that were published in newspapers.

The places referenced do not always equate to a port or port city. The place might be a destination city or the first place the person appeared in a public record.

The information in Filby's can and should be cross referenced with other documents.  For instance, I would attempt to cross reference based on lists for Philadelphia or Boston of incoming passengers.

Primarily, it is a way for people with ancestors who arrived in the United States, the colonies, and territories, to move to finding the location they left and potentially records held in other countries.

However, I recently went looking for some German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania some time between 1795 and 1820, most likely closer to the 1820.

The person I sought did not come up on Ancestry TM, the popular database in a general search.  So I headed to Los Angeles, the Central Library in downtown LA, where there is a genealogy and history floor. The Filby's book set there was not entirely complete or undated and the wonderful and earnest genealogy librarian there said to me "Filbys is on Ancestry TM now." We went onto Ancestry TM from there, and using the card catalog (which is confusingly called New Collections on the main page of Ancestry TM) and tried again. No - Searching for Filbys did not bring it up.  But there are numerous other databases that bring up early America arrivals on sail ships.  I individually searched through these and up came a few names.

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