Ellis Island

(Links to files are at bottom of page if you want to cut through the waffle)

Currently I have been spending time going through the immigration manifests at Ellis Island (https://www.ellisisland.org), New York, the first port of call for many immigrants to the United States, and trying to get as much information on Richardsons who left Ulster.

Ellis Island is free to search however as they have had to digitise over 25 million records, there are a lot of mistakes in their transcriptions from the manifests, and much of the information in the manifests wasn't transcribed. At least you can still view the manifest image itself. Obviously due to the sheer scale and scope of their mission and no doubt a lack of expertise from the home country of the immigrants mistakes were bound to happen.

Another problem is that their search parameters are limited with "Last Residence" as the only geographic reference you can search for and in many cases the country of the residence was not recorded. It would of helped greatly if they had of included "Place of birth" which is in many records or even "Nationality" and "Country".

Yet another issue is that the manifests and the information they contained changed over the years. Manifests from the 1890s contain the least information, and aren't too helpful, whilst those of the 1900s gradually contain more information. By the 1910s we get a good deal of information and by the 1920s we get the best results as instead of being hand-written manifests we have typed out ones making it far, far, easier to read.

Quite a few hours has gone into compiling what I have so far, and I have used my local knowledge of places in Ulster along with 1901/1911 Ireland census information, the Internet and other information to ensure that the information I have is as accurate as possible. There is more information to dig out and I will try to get it all, but no doubt there will be some Richardsons lost due to the limitations of the Ellis Island search system and the recording in the original manifests.

I can find quite a few of these people in the aforementioned census' and I intend to cross-reference them with the applicable records in this file in the future. I also intend to add other articles and files I can find and interpret to the cross-reference to build as detailed and useful a list of Richardsons as possible.

Map

I'll also be creating some maps to accompany the Ellis Island file. So far I've created one which depicts the number of Richardsons to visit the states of the USA based on the final destination of those I have compiled into the below file. You can click on the map thumbnail below to view it full-size and read it better.

Note: As of the 10th March 2014, I've changed the colours so that they are more distinct and stand out from each other better.

Version: 10th March 2014

 

About the file

A key of some things in the file:

• As the hand-writting of those of who wrote the manifests wasn't always the neatest, and the fact there is some over things scribbled over the top of things, there are still entries that may be wrong or not sure, and so I have put a question mark in the relevant place.
• N/A in an entry means that there is either no entry for or that the field was not part of the manifest.
• An entry in red means that I could not find the manifest image as the wrong link was provided by Ellis Island. 
• An entry in blue means an entry that I am not sure if they are from Ulster at all but the ship has still sailed from Ulster. Many do state Ireland or Irish which helps to a degree.
• An entry in green means a combination of red and blue.
• As it is styled as table, it is possible to click the arrow at the column header and select the information you would like from the table, for example to show all females or a specific place of birth. To get back to the full table, just "Select all".
• New and updated entries can be found by checking the last column of the table "Update Version" which will state the date of entry and whether it is new.

I have saved the files as an Excel database file. I have also saved it as both an xls (1997-2003) and xlsx (2007) Excel file so that if you don't have the latest version of Excel you can still access the information with it hopefully detailed properly in the table format. If there are any problems then please let me know and I'll fix them!

Just click the link to mediafire where the files are hosted and click download as their online viewer doesn't display it at its best and sometimes the online viewer Mediafire has doesn't work with a file but will on the computer.

Current version

I've added 7 new records to the file, giving a total of 131 in total so far. There are also a few minor corrections such as spelling mistakes etc.

• Ellis Island (10 Mar 2014).xls (Updated: 10 March 2014)
• Ellis Island (10 Mar 2014).xlsx (Updated: 10 March 2014)

Previous versions 

All previous versions of this file will be listed below for posterity.

• Ellis Island (27 Feb 2014).xls (Updated: 27 February 2014)
• Ellis Island (27 Feb 2014).xlsx (Updated: 27 February 2014)
• Ellis Island (21 Feb 2014).xls (Updated: 21 February 2014)
• Ellis Island (21 Feb 2014).xlsx (Updated: 21 February 2014)
• Ellis Island (18 Feb 2014).xls (Updated: 18 February 2014)
• Ellis Island (18 Feb 2014).xlsx (Updated: 18 February 2014)