I should have looked at my dates more carefully. Here's a breakdown of what passenger manifests exist for the Port of New York: Series M1066 - Registers of Vessels Arriving at the Port of New York from Foreign Ports - 1789 - 1919. This is a sometimes chronological, sometimes alphabetical series that is helpful if you know the name of the ship and the approximate year. From this series you can make a list of arrivals of that particular ship and then go on to examine the manifests, if they have survived. Series M261 - Index to Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York 1820-1846. This is an alphabetical index, by passenger surname, for the period. Series M237 - Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York 1820-1897. These are the actual ship lists, filmed in chronological (most of the time) order, by date of arrival. Series T519 - Index to Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York June 16, 1897 - June 30, 1902. Alphabetical Index of passengers by surname. Series T621 - This is a SOUNDEX index to Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York July 1 1902 - December 31, 1943. Arranged in Soundex Code order and then by FIRST name of passenger. There are three possible types of index cards to be found in this series. See below*. Series T715 - These are actual ship passenger lists arranged in VOLUME order (and subsequently by date, but not always...<g>) 1897 - 1920. These "volume" numbers appear on the index cards in series T621. *The three types of index cards that exist in series T-621 can be confusing at first. Two types have an actual ship name and (usually) a date, pretty straightforward. The third type doesn't have either. It may look like this (I'm going to use Nara's own example here): E 430 Elliot, Charles E. 26m 12 53 4660 That's about all you'll get. What this translates to is that after the Soundex Code and the name, you have a 26 year old male, on line 12, page 53, of volume 4660. You then take this information to the list that accompanies series T715 and look up volume 4660. You will find out that volume 4660 translates to a 1913 arrival and the actual volume (and therefore the ship list) will appear within reels #1999-2246. There is a further breakdown of this system available at NARA. Hope this is helpful... Best regards. Nancy. NColeman NYC/Long Island Family History Research Services http://www.genealogyPro.com/ncoleman.html http://www.familytreemaker.com/users/c/o/l/Nancy--Coleman/ ncroots@worldnet.att.net NYGenExchange: www.genexchange.com/NY/index.cfm