As part of the Immigrant Ancestors Project, sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, students and faculty identify records produced in Europe that document the emigration experience and provide the place of birth of the emigrant.
This research has revealed a mosaic of laws, regulations and practical applications that produced a wide variety of records documenting the emigration experience of individual emigrants as they worked through requirements imposed on them before they could emigrate. These laws and processes and the records they generated not only tell the emigrant story, but reflect on the cultures of the countries that generated them.
Even the differences between the lack of emigration controls and programs of forced emigration in the British Isles and the tightly controlled police approval procedures of Continental European countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain await further studies that will be possible using data gathered in the Immigrant Ancestors Project Database.
Records dealing with emigrant departure have been located in municipal, provincial, state and national government archives, as well as in university and private archives in Germany, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
These records can be classified based on their functions in the departure process:. Passenger Lists, Passports, Passengers-in-transit lists, Health records, Passenger contracts, Records of Approval to emigrate before departure, Published Announcements. Just as passengers were recorded in most ports as they disembarked, so they were often listed as they sailed from the ports of Europe.
