Here are a few responses to my inquiry about the "Germans to America" series. Kathy - --------------------------------- The column for place of birth on the Germans to America that shows "000". If you will read the introduction to this series, the authors explain that the material for these volumes was taken from the Passenger Manifests that the US Government required the master of ships bringing in people, to provide the Immigration Service a list of its passengers with the other data. So when the "Purser" on later ships, whose duty was to do this, did not assertain the village of origin of the passenger he put in "000". In earlier times, the First or Second Mate had to do this job, and again the same reason for putting in "000" for the village of origin when the immigrant was asked. Frequently the recording person found that the name of the village was too long to put on the space on the manifest, he put "000". Al and Margaret - ---------------------------------------- Here are a couple of web pages that discuss some of the problems with the GERMANS TO AMERICA series: http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/nausa/pitfal.htm http://www.genealogienetz.de/gene/misc/emig/gta-revu.html Brian - --------------------------------------- In our previous e-mail we forgot to mention that the Germans to America series was transcribed from microfilms of the actual handwritten Manifests. Any time transcriptions are made from source microfims, the authors caution that many of the 35mm microfilms of the Manifests were difficult to decipher. Al and Margaret