Hi everyone, I hope you don't mind my adding my two cents to the immigration discussion. I may be able to be of help. Castle Garden was indeed the forerunner to Ellis Island. It operated from, I believe, 1870ish to 1892. Then Ellis Island opened. Prior to Castle Garden, emigrants would simply disembark at the piers in New York City. New York State felt that since so many emigrants were being robbed at the piers, that there should be an official processing station. Hence, Castle Garden was born. It is my understanding that there are no official records surviving from Castle Garden. I may be wrong. If anyone knows differently, please let me know. New York City saw it's largest influx of immigrants starting in the 1880s. The National Archives on Varick St in NY will not even conduct a search of ship's passenger lists for that decade unless you can narrow the arrival date down to within one week! There are no indices for this time period, so it's very important to know the date of arrival or at least approximate the best you can. All of my ancestors came through Castle Garden in the 1880s. I've managed to locate most of them on passenger lists. What helped me was to work with the date of immigration from the 1900 federal census. Then search for naturalization papers. Some, but not all, naturalization papaers contain the date of arrival in the US. Remember, it was required that an emigrant fulfill a 5 year residency before they could petition to naturalize. So take the date of immigration off the 1900 census, add 5 years and then begin your search for naturalization info. Another way to go about it is to search voting records. Usually once an emigrant naturalized, they ran out to vote. Voting records will give you the date they first registered, which can be a very big clue as to when they naturalized. Which of course can lead to immigration. The Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild, off the Rootsweb site, has done a fantastic job transcribing passenger lists. However for NYC, the lists are far from complete. There were just too many ships coming in and not enough volunteers to transcribe them all. But I strongly recommend them as a starting point. Sorry to drag on and on. I've been at this ten years. I have to admit that searching NYC immigration prior to Ellis Island is the biggest headache I've had! I hope this is helpful to someone. If I can be of any help to anyone, please let me know. Take care, Tracy