Barbara Hanville replied publicly to Pete Mattli's private query to Barbara Hanville about the two "Germans to America" CD-ROMs. Pete included the query > > Does the book have something that the CD-ROM's don't? > > Pete One thing lost from the book is the original order of the passenger list. This is important, so one may want to find the ancestors in the CD-ROM, then look at the appropriate volume of the book, which preserves the list ordering, then, lastly, order the microfilm which contains the actual passenger list. Families from the same area, often related by marriage, often travelled together. Those families often appear sequentially in the ships list. A second problem is that when we scan a printed index, we easily spot spellings similar to the spelling we are looking for. The CD-ROM search has no Soundex capability that I could find. So, one must search sequentially for all plausible spellings of a name, and even then, one may miss the garbled name which was incorrectly read by the transcribers. Somebody goofed when the CDs were created. There are many double entries for individuals, one with the manifest number and one without. It appears that they made a bad data conversion run and then added to it the corrected run. There are many incorrect spellings (incorrect reading of the original list) in GTA, so it is always important to get the original handwritten list. The original list also includes information about deaths during the voyage, which usually do not appear in GTA. Microfilms of the original lists can be obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) or the LDS. NARA information can be viewed at http://www.nara.gov/research The LDS microfilms are associated with the port of entry placename and can be found by a placename search within the LDS catalog at http://www.familysearch.org/ The expert Michael Palmer wrote an extensive review of GTA in 1990 after the first nine volumes appeared. It can be viewed at http://www2.genealogy.net/gene/www/emig/gta.revu.html Like many other sources, GTA cannot be viewed as the last word, but it should always be checked when one is looking for the ship an ancestor travelled on. Michael Palmer mentions that only ships with an estimated 80% or greater Germanic (includes Switzerland) population were included. However, it is a great resource, and the CD-ROMs make it possible to quickly scan the whole set of volumes, a laborious task if one is going through the indices of the individual volumes. Lyle G. Hartman Landenberg, Pennsylvania