LESSON FOUR
Important Record Sources for Finding the Homeland

READING ASSIGNMENT: Click here for Chapter 4

We have discussed how to properly, and fully, identify the immigrant, how to search the records, and how to interpret the place names you eventually hope to find. However, all of this is just preliminary to the core of our course: a discussion of the various sources you can use to learn the place name of an immigrant's home town.

Although we have identified, and will discuss, at least 20 different sources for finding that elusive town name, not all sources are created equal. For that matter, source A may be better than source B under some circumstances, while B may be better than A at other times. Knowing which sources to search, and when to use them will be the focus of our discussions in the following lessons.

In determining which source might be the most effective for providing the name of your ancestor’s home, it is very important to determine the time period of your ancestor’s arrival in the new country. Using this approximate year, many sources can then be determined, but as Chapter 4 pointed out in your reading, the value of those sources depends on whether or not:

• The source was comprehensive in listing immigrants.
• If not comprehensive, did it include the ethnic group of your immigrant?
• The source included indexes to both males and females.
• The source only included adults and left out children so you would need to know the parent to find the child.

Also, this chapter reminded us that what source we must search depends on the immigrant’s ethnic group, religious preference, time period of immigration and other factors. This chapter pointed out some of those “other factors,” such as other family members who immigrated.

But the focus of this week’s lesson, is understanding that the type of sources we could use are heavily dependent on the time period the ancestor arrived. We are going to study four major time period of immigration, and the records that are used in each of these periods.