While individual passengers may be listed as "from" Ireland or Great Britain, it can sometimes be fruitful to determine where the vessel came from. You can find this by looking at microfilm of the manifest itself. While the majority of ships left from Liverpool or Queenstown, sometimes smaller vessels are shown as having originated in places like Youghal or Waterford, or even Galway. This information can help you focus your search on a particular region. For example, with so many vessels picking up passengers in Queenstown, why would someone take a boat from Youghal unless they lived near there. And it's unlikely that anyone from the southern counties would make their way to Derry to get a boat for America. None of this is definitive. It's just deductive reasoning. It's also worth looking at the manifest itself to learn how big the vessel was and how long the voyage took. It doesn't add genealogical information, but it does tell you something about their experience. -dja

padraigogealagain@rogers.com said: For example, entering just the surname Galligan for the period 1830-1912 brings up 611 results, of which none indicated the place of last residence, but just four (4) results indicated the port of departure as Limerick. They don't indicate the manifest numbers, so one can't check that aspect out. I'm not sure about the 1830-1912 listing being exclusively Castle Garden as it ceased to function as an immigrant processing center in 1890. As for "manifest numbers" I'm not sure what that means, but when I am looking at manifests for a given port of arrival and time period on microfilm from the National Archives, they are arranged by date. The manifest is what gives the port of origin and type of vessel. This information is generally not available on microfilm indexes available from the National Archives. See http://germanroots.home.att.net/ellisisland/ for information on Immigrant Processing Centers for New York City. For Records of Famine Immigrants to New York, see "The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving at the Port of New York, 1846-1851" edited by Ira A. Glazier and Michael Tepper, published 1983 by Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., Baltimore, Maryland. There are seven volumes and it's indexed by individuals. See http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~aherns/ahimmig.htm#famine for an example of data collected from this source. -dja