This was a nice surprise in my mailbox today...and something I've been waiting for anxiously. The new U.S. Historical Immigration Records database at Ancestry.com includes more than 100 million names and about 7 million passenger list images taken from all readily available U.S. Passenger Lists from 1820 - 1960. This includes the complete Ellis Island collection, as well as passenger lists previously only available on microfilm such as records from the port of Baltimore and Philadelphia. The three-year, $100 million project involved acquiring microfilm records in the public domain, digitizing and indexing the information and building the technology to display that information and make it searchable online.

A quick search turned up a record of my maternal grandmother coming to America as a "war bride"." But two new discoveries were really cool. One was the wife and infant children of my husband's Powell ancestor. Family stories always had them immigrating through the port of Galveston, but they actually came in through the port of New York. The second was my paternal great-grandfather who came to this country from Poland a year before the rest of his family. I had previously found his wife and children in the microfilmed passenger lists from Philadelphia but had been unable to find any record of him immigrating into Philadelphia or New York. My next guess was Baltimore, but I hadn't gotten around to ordering the microfilms through my Family History Center. Now I don't have to!

Even if you aren't an Ancestry subscriber, they are offering free access to the new Ancestry Immigration Collection through November 30th.