Castle Garden in New York City was one of the processing centers where immigrants from all over the world passed through when they immigrated to the United States. Castle Garden immigration records are available for the 10 millions plus immigrants to the United States passing through this port even before Ellis Island was opened. Castle Garden was in operation from 1830 to 1892, which was when Ellis Island was opened.

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Once you’ve started making progress in your genealogy research, you will quickly start to notice that you have a growing pile of papers and notes that will need to be organized. Early on in your research, you should locate some free genealogy templates to help you keep track of the families in your tree. Genealogy charts and forms are useful to pencil in names and dates as you come across them to give you a quick visual of how the information fits into the bigger picture. Some people prefer to keep all their research on paper. Others like to transfer it to genealogy software. I personally do a little of both – I like to keep the paper charts as a quick reference if I am going to library. I’m not one to take my laptop with me. I spend too much time in the stacks and don’t want to worry about it walking off! But I do love genealogy software to stay organized overall, especially with hundreds of names.

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The most well known site on the Internet for finding your ancestors in free passenger lists is the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (ISTG). The ISTG has been online since September 1998 with a few volunteers who transcribed passenger lists. The ISTG now has over 500 volunteers who are completing this important work to be published on their website. As of today, there are over 9,000 passengers lists that have been transcribed! The lists that they transcribe are mainly from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) microfilm collection.

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If you have not run across the site Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (RAOGK) while searching your ancestors for free online, you are in for a real treat! The RAOGK has over 4000 volunteers who are willing and able to perform a variety of genealogy research tasks for free! The volunteers donate their time just to help out other genealogists. However, you are required to reimburse the volunteer for items such as postage, copies, or mileage, which seems only fair if someone is going to drive out to a cemetery and take pictures for you! Only recently did they allow volunteers to charge for mileage since fuel prices have gone up.

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