This is worth a visit if your travel leads you to Europe this year. Visiting there could be easily incorporated with a flight arrival at Amsterdam and taking the train to Hamburg. The European Train system offers quick connections at every hour from their well serviced railroad stations. In most Cities of Europe you have a train departure every 15 minutes to various destinations. Often you do not have to wait longer than 1 hour to go into the direction you wish to go. Intercity Service is listed as ICE and stops only at large cities facilitating very quick travel from one destination to the next. Often you can spend your travel time eating at the Dining car (facility listed on the train schedules posted in the railroad station). There are taxis at every train depot. It is easier than renting a car. All train ticket-offices have English speaking staff. The key is to travel with a small carry on, sending your luggage to the house of relatives or a chosen hotel. Aida Ballin-Stadt Emigration Museum Hamburg Many families can trace their ancestry to the successive waves of immigration from Europe. Seeking religious freedom, escape from famine, war or persecution, the chance for riches or just the opportunity for something better. Before 1850 much of the immigrant ships which carried the hopefuls from Germany embarked from ports in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Bremen. In 1847 the HAPAG shipping line "Hamburg American Packet Company" was founded in the northern Germany port city of Hamburg. Convenient to reach by the Elbe River from the east and by railroad, Hamburg rapidly became the most important emigration port in Germany from 1850 to 1934 and the HAPAG line one of the most successful shipping companies in the world, renamed the Hamburg-America Line in 1893. Between 1846 and 1857 more than one million Germans emigrated to the United States, mostly small farmers from Southern Germany and farm laborers from East Germany and by 1814, over five million had left, most on ships of the Hamburg America Line (Hamburg Amerika Linie). In 1901 the shipping line opened an "Immigration City", a complex of buildings with lodging and dining halls to handle the rush from Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia with room of 5,000 immigrants at a time in its Immigration Halls (Auswandererhallen) waiting for the next ship to America, even including a synagogue for the many Jewish immigrants escaping the Czarist pogroms of Russia. In 2007 three reconstructed buildings of the former Immigration Halls of the Hamburg-America Line re-opened as a museum exhibition dedicated to this past and named for the company's managing director Albert Ballin who guided it. The BallinStadt Emigration Museum Hamburg located on Vedel Island in the harbor complex of the Elbe River (See Hamburg Harbor) with an S-Bahn station at the Wilhelmsburger Bridge nearby will present photographic displays and records of Hamburg's part in the immigration story, in both its hopeful and darker sides. For those seeking their ancestral history from a European past whose ancestors left Europe from Poland, the Baltic states, Russia and even Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland between 1836 until 1934, may discover relatives passed through the portals of the HAPAG "Auswandererstadt".