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Texas Seaport Museum
07/01/2007
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(in tsm22) Login at Pearland (full screen) TEXAS SEAPORT MUSEUM was the nation's very first computerized listing of immigrants and is the only computerized listing of immigrants to Galveston, Texas. The museum’s immigration exhibit features text and historic photographs illustrating Galveston’s role in immigration history and the major organized immigration movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Two computer terminals in the exhibit area allow visitors to search for information taken from ships’ passenger manifests pertaining to their ancestors’ arrival in Texas. Use of the two computer terminals is free when you visit the Texas Seaport Museum. The terminals are on the second floor of the museum and are easily available to all visitors including wheel chair access. The Immigration Database was very expensive to develop. The data was input by a full time paid staff of up to 6 data input people over a period of more than one year. The Museum exhibit used two of the fastest computers available (very slow by today's standards) and two VERY large monitors (25"). The actual database system & software for data input and display program were developed by Joel Hokanson of Pearland, TX. Joel donated his time and efforts to TSM and now he is developing this On-Line version as a donated service to TSM. You can contact Joel at Immigration Database Webmaster or Joel. What information is provided? The database includes names of passengers and members of their traveling parties, age, gender, occupation, country (or area) of origin, ship name, dates of departure, original port of their departure, date of arrival, and destination in the United States as well as the source of the information listed. In all, the names of 132,119 passengers from the period of roughly 1844-1954 have been entered. There was a total of 83,072 pages of input with a total of 50,371 different last names. The largest single last name was Schmidt with 540 people with that last name. 27 names had 100 or more people with that last name. Over 2% of the records have neither a departure nor an arrival date. There are about 810 different ports of origin for the ships coming to Galveston. 33 of the ports of origin had 100 or more family arrivals into Galveston. However the majority (71%) of the immigrants to Galveston had Bremen, Germany as the port of origin. The largest single destination was Galveston (with over 14,000 families), but more that 13,000 families do not list a destination. Other high number destinations include Houston, San Antonio, Ft. Worth, San Francisco, Los Angles, Kansas City, Dallas, New Orleans, Beaumont and New York (in THAT order). There was a total of almost 5,000 different destinations in the 83,000 families. There is a lot of information in the database, it just takes time and thought to evaluate what is there. Initially, the On-Line Version of the Immigration Database will only let you lookup by last name, but if there is sufficient interest expressed, you will be able to build complex searches with any portion of any field of the data. It might still be better to actually go to the Texas Seaport Museum in Galveston for extensive searches, but the On-Line version will give you much of the abilities of the exhibit computers. If you have special or unique search needs, then contact Joel . The On-Line system is very fast, especially when you consider it is searching though 132,000 records, pulling out up to 100 records that match the search criteria, and then generating a custom HTML page, all in less than one half of one second. THAT is fast! On a modem it will seem to take longer since your machine has to receive the data over a modem and each search is a completely new custom web page. On a high speed connection, the search for "HOK" will return 9 records in 0.031 seconds. THAT is fast and the server it is running on is NOT a "state of the art" server. The "trick" is using a new version of the database system that Microsoft will use in the new Visual Studio Dot NET which should be released sometime late 2001/early 2002. Click here to go to On-Line version of the immigration database. Ship Arrivals Database. During the process of doing the data input for the Immigration Database, we also developed a small database of ship arrivals. The Ship database includes ship name, type of ship, master, home port of ship, arrival date at Galveston, port of departure, destination port, tonnage, number of immigrants, ship owner, and citation source. If there is sufficient interest expressed, then in the near future we could put a live version of the Ships Arrival Database on-line. Let us have your thoughts. Feedback page How was this information gathered? The data (for both the immigration database and the ships database) was input by the paid data input staff (up to six people) who worked full time on data input for the database. It took over a year to complete the data input. The data source was from microfilm of Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service passenger manifests from the National Archives, books containing additional source material and isolated passenger lists published in The Galveston Daily News. Additional sources continue to be researched for future inclusion in the database. List of sources. The microfilm was very difficult to read and, normally, input was done by teams of two people who actually would discuss each page before it was input. Naturally, passenger manifests were handwritten and the handwriting style then was significant different from the current handwriting. So each page was discussed and evaluated before it was input. In some cases the pages were so hard to read that all 6 people would look at one page or one line of data to try to determine what it said. Generally, each page represents a family unit coming into Galveston. Most pages have one or two people in the family unit, but some families had up to 7 people. If there was more than 7 people in a family unit, it was split into two different records. The database lists only those who first disembarked in Texas. Many immigrants came through New York or one of the other East Coast ports and trans-shipped to Texas. Family legend may hand down a Texas port of entry, while immigration records reflect an Eastern port. Are the records complete? An unknown percentage of the records are missing for various reasons, such as Court House fires, lost records and the 1900 storm. There are very few entries between 1871 and 1894 and other years have large gaps in the number of records. Get answers to more frequently asked questions about the Galveston Immigration Database.
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