Hi, Has anyone found some tricks to get around the Ellis Island site rapidly - possibly using the page numbers, or the passenger names or the numbering system used in listing each passenger??? Leitrim, Please note -- I noticed many travellers that were said to be from "Leitrim," but were leaving from Liverpool. Anway, I got lucky at the Ellis Island website almost immediately, was thrilled to find members of dad's family travelling from England to NY using their nifty surname database. In one case, I found that dad's brother (Harold Denis Ford) was a member of the crew (which supported earlier information) and that he waited on passengers at meal times in third class. You can't believe how thrilled I was to find a snippet on "my" family. I also had no trouble matching up the text version of a manuscript page and the same original ship manifest page. I even eventually figured out how to use the magnifying feature after fooling around with it for awhile. Still I found the whole experience a little cumbersome. You can request pages printed and sent to you but it is expensive; you can also find many of these manifests on LDS FHC microfilms for only $3.75, once you have the port, date, ship's name. In another case, the text version of a manifest page and the original handwritten version did not match up. Per instructions, you are supposed to search backwards and/or forwards to "match them up." A person would want to see both the original manifest page and the text page, to get all the data. Anyway, I found original manifest pages that seemed to have the names of passengers in alphabetical; order, some pages in person by person order with each passenger assigned a number, some pages just had the members of the crew. There must be some way to be able to quickly find the original ship's manifest page you want without having to search for an hour! As far as I can tell, with ships carrying many, many passengers you have to search backwards and forwards from the text version page, waiting for each page to load to see if you have the "right" original manifest page. Has anyone figured out a quicker way? There are passenger numbers and page numbers, and I would think that there would be a way to get to the page you searching for quickly. Anyway, after searching for a a long, long time, I finally gave up looking for all the information on my family from that particular trip. Any comments? Jean ----- Original Message ----- From: "tkmcfadden" <tkmcfadden@yahoo.com> To: <drumkeeranfolk@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 3:26 PM Subject: [drumkeeranfolk] (unknown) > --- In drumkeeranfolk@y..., "Bernie Cunningham" <bcunning@g...> wrote: > > I found my Mothers half sister on the Ellis Island site, I wanted > to copy off the > > ship mainfest that is typed out. I have done it before. The only > one I see is the > > "original ship manifest" which is in long hand and hard to read. > What happened > > to the other form.?? Bernie > > Bernie, > > They changed the way it works. It used to show the text version of > the manifest, from which you would go to the original. Now, > from "Passenger Record," click on "Original Ship Manifest." On the > next screen, right below the ship's name, there are two boxes, "Add > to your Ellis Island File," and "View Text Version Manifest," which > is what you want. You'll notice that the text version is not in > numerical order. I don't know why. > > -Tom McFadden >