By using Stephen Morse's Ellis Island Database One-Step Search Tools [freely available at JewishGen.org], you can improve your results still further. And while I suggest starting with the EIDB for generic situations, if any of the following circumstances apply, you'll probably save time by beginning with Morse's site. Either way, you'll want to add this site to your bookmarks.

You know some details of the immigration
Many of us know a few details of an ancestor's immigration from naturalization records, family tales or other sources. In such cases, the EIDB allows you to specify certain criteria (i.e. name, gender, date of arrival, age at arrival, name of ship, port of departure and ethnicity) to help you zero in on that individual. But the EIDB site forces you to make these decisions sequentially, whereas Morse's One Step search form lets you specify all these criteria at once.

For instance, I knew that my great-grandfather, Gregorz Sydorko, had emigrated as a young man of perhaps 24-28 sometime in the period 1910-13. So I requested the following search:

First Initial: G
Surname: Sydor
Gender: m
Year of Arrival: 1910-1913
Age at Arrival: 24-28

I typed just the first five letters of the surname because I knew the last syllable had a tendency to be spelled different ways. Both led me to my great-grandfather's record, but entering each of these details via the EIDB required four steps as compared to Morse's one.

Moreover, Morse's search form lets you specify any combination of criteria while the EIDB will only allow you to select from the ethnicities, ports or boats corresponding to passengers with the exact surname of the leading characters you entered. For instance, if I type the leading letters of Szmolen to try to flush out those with my surname, the EIDB then permits me to narrow my findings by selecting relevant ethnicities. However, the EIDB only gives me the ethnicities for people whose entire surname is Szmolen. None of the choices given is Hungarian or Ruthenian which is how the Szmolenyaks in the EIDB are classified, so I would have missed them. The versatility of Morse's search form circumvents such hard-to-spot limitations. These and other nuances of his One Step search are provided in his FAQs (frequently asked questions), which are well worth the few minutes they take to read.

You want to find people from a particular town
When the EIDB made its appearance, many were disappointed that the town of origin could not be searched. In the advanced search portion of his page, Morse incorporated this option, but you'll need to have Netscape to use it (see his FAQs to learn more). Even if you generally work with another browser, this feature is so useful that it is worth downloading Netscape just for this purpose.

For example, I had always been told that the Shields in my family were from Ballymoney in Northern Ireland, but because they had come so early, no confirming evidence was available through naturalization, port or other records. It occurred to me that if I could locate others named Shields from Ballymoney, I could follow their paper trail in the hope of establishing a link. I was delighted to discover that the EIDB contained 1,827 Shields, but was less thrilled at the prospect of mining these 25 at a time. Fortunately, Morse's town option quickly plucked out the only one from Ballymoney.

This feature is also a boon for the growing field of genealogists exploring the origins of an entire village or town and, as with the surname field, it's possible to enter just the first few letters of the town name. Since foreign town names were just as prone to misspelling as unfamiliar surnames, this flexibility is critical. In searching for people with roots from a village called Osturna, I limited myself to just the letter O. Doing so turned up variations such as Oszturneya and Osztuonya that I never would have tried.

Before attempting to find all the people who emigrated from a particular town, though, it's necessary to know the surnames associated with it. Theoretically, it would be possible to type in a town name and the letter A in the surname field to generate a list of the people with a surname beginning with A hailing from that town. Then you would repeat the process with B, C, etc. The obstacle to this working is the large numbers involved. Morse's site begins such a search by querying the EIDB for all the people with the surname you've provided, and then whittles down this list by town. If you indicate that you want names beginning with S, you're asking it to sort through a whopping 2,442,735 people and the communication with the EIDB will time out. When searching for Smolenyaks, therefore, I tried first with Sz, but this still produced 120,998 possibilities. Szm finally brought me to a more reasonable population of 2,502. So rather than try to unearth all the As, Bs and Cs from a village, it's better to have a good idea of the local surnames and to enter at least the first two or three letters of each.

Next Page > Morse Tools Tactics Continued