Double Immigration

While the chapter gave a very brief overview of a double immigration involving two different countries before an immigrant arrives in the United States, it provides a basic understanding of the problems involved. While there are many more sources to be covered, and even some indexes for Canada, notably the 1871, 1881, and 1891 Ontario census index, we will discuss these sources in a later set of lessons.

If you don't have Canadian ancestors, try to glean an understanding of a double immigration problem for you may find such an ancestor in your own family going from Russia to Germany to the United States; or from France to England to the United States, etc.

Family Histories

In past lessons, we have discussed how immigrants were not alone; that they often immigrated with others, or followed friends and family to the New World. The same is true about family historians. Usually, they are not the only persons interested in a particular ancestor. Others are also researching your ancestors, and especially your immigrants. Finding those other researchers is an important part of immigrant origins research. Indeed, the concept of locating the results of previous researchers' efforts is a primary axiom of genealogical research. But nowhere is it more important than with research into the origins of immigrants.

While the origins of earlier immigrants is not often found in family sources, the more recent immigrants may have left a record somewhere which includes mention of the home town. If this was retained by a computer-savvy descendant, you may just find the answers you have been looking for in his or her data base. It doesn't take long to search massive collections today as this lesson pointed out; and in the meantime, you may learn much more about the friendliness of electronic sources.

In a future lesson, we will discuss using the wide variety of compiled records published on paper, but for now let us focus on electronic file because while they are useful for immigrants from any of our four time periods, they seem especially useful for these early 20th century immigrants.