Welcome to Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild

Welcome; we are dedicated to helping you connect with your past. You may be working on your family tree, looking for ancestors who left their homeland long ago or hoping to reunite with an adopted child, a birth parent or siblings; we offer many resources to help you in your search. In keeping with our mission to bring our ancestors home and reunite our families, The Adoption Experience is a new addition to ISTG.

New content is added to this homepage on a regular basis, sometimes daily. All the blue boxes down the center of the page are clickable. Please refresh the page when you sign on.

Here's one of the best offers to come around in a very long time. World Vital Records nka Familylink.com is offering its new World Collection at 20 % off. The World Collection also includes the U.S. Collection so you don't have to pay for two separate databases.

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Updated March 3, 2008.

Keep up to date by reading the Captain's bLog. I try to update this bLog at least once a week. It will tell you what I am doing behind the scenes, what's new at ISTG and all sorts of other goodies.

I post press releases as I receive them and news about what's being offered by our affiliates, especially the freebies from which you can benefit. It's all near the bottom of this page and this drop down link will take you there. Important News from the Captain Look for this tag.

You can Join the Ancestry Community and participate on their many message boards or create your own story pages at Footnote.com. Both are free!

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We have over 8000 passenger manifests which have been transcribed by our dedicated volunteers. You can search easily by surname, captain's name, port of arrival/departure or name of the ship. This link will take you to Volume 1, from there you can access all nine volumes.

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You will find helpful immigration information and links in the Compass, emphasis is on passenger lists, ships, ships images and descriptions, ethnic databases and many other resources.

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Often passenger manifests or a series of passenger manifests, unique to one place, are contributed to ISTG. We place them here rather than distribute them among our many volumes. They include a collection of New York immigrants from Austria, Galicia and Poland, WWII refugees to Australia, Irish to Argentina, Passengers arriving and departing Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada between 1851 and 1872, the 1903 Project and German Departures. 

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Maritime Newspaper Articles often provide information that cannot be obtained through other sources. Occasionally the news was written long before passenger lists existed. We hope you find these articles helpful.

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If you are among the millions of people whose life has been touched by adoption, please visit this new section of our site (currently under construction). Adoptees and birth family members wishing to reunite can find many resources.

You can also Join the Ancestry Community for free. They have a wonderful adoption message board.

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Take a look - everything you need cannot be freely found on the internet. It pays to invest in good books, databases on CDs containing information not otherwise available and to subscribe where your money will best be spent.

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You may submit pictures of your ancestors along with information about them. As you and others browse through these pictures, you may make a new connection or find a new branch on your family tree.

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Guild Information will tell you more about Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild and direct you to an application if you wish to join. We also list many of the awards we've received and explain how to contact our Research Team.

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The Guild wishes to thank Genealogical Publishing Company for hosting this site. Please visit them in appreciation.

Genealogical Publishing Company has just republished, for the first time since 1994, Emigrants In Chains by Peter Wilson Coldham. England viewed the new colonies as the perfect place to discard their undesirables - and they simply relocated destitute children, beggars, felons, and religious and political non-conformists by the thousands to North America and places in the Caribbean.

Coldham details the process involved, the prisons and the courts of the day as well as the lives of those forcibly transported. The book lists captain's names, dates and ports of arrival of all known ships used to rid Great Britain of its "problem residents" who were sold into forced labor upon their arrival; many survived to leave millions of descendants.

Emigrants In Chains is an excellent read at a very good price. Coldham uniquely presents the facts and adds the human touch as he tells of our ancestors who survived the voyages and went on to become fine citizens in many walks of life.

WorldVitalRecords.com (a service of FamilyLink.com, Inc.) released today its flagship product, the World Collection, an online genealogy database containing more than 1.5 billion names from 35 countries.

WorldVitalRecords.com’s World Collection launch includes significant collections from countries such as: England, Canada, Australia, France, Ireland, Scotland, Hungary, and Portugal.

“All over the world there are wonderful people who are digitizing and preserving historic records,” said Paul Allen, CEO, FamilyLink.com, Inc. “During the past year we have traveled and met with these content providers from more than a dozen countries. We are pleased today to announce that many of them have chosen to let us distribute their genealogical databases on the Internet.”

More than 20 companies have partnered with WorldVitalRecords.com to make this new collection possible. They include Find My Past, Genealogical Publishing Company, Archive CD Books Australia, British Origins, Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, Archive CD Books Canada, Eneclann, Quintin Publications, Gould Genealogy, Familias Argentinas, Godfrey Memorial Library, and Moravian Heritage Society.

“This is a very exciting announcement for our WorldVitalRecords.com members. As we enter our second year, we have accomplished much including having more than 24,000 paid subscribers, 2 million users on our We’re Related application on Facebook, and have announced 2 billion names in our two major content collections, the US and World Collection. The number two seems to be common theme in this announcement as we enter our second stage,” said David Lifferth, President, FamilyLink.com, Inc.

The World Collection includes birth, marriage and death records, census records, passenger lists, immigration lists, emigration records, foreign newspapers, cemetery records, reference materials, land records, family histories, historical records, city directories, business directories, township histories, civil service records, telephone directories, government records, war records, and maps, atlases, and gazetteers.

Census records from the UK comprise WorldVitalRecords.com’s largest database in the World Collection. These records include the 1851, 1861, 1881, and 1891, 1901 censuses. These records are the official civil registration records for England and Wales from 1837 to the present. All of these censuses will be periodically posted county by county throughout the year. These censuses include images, and also a key-word searchable index.

“Alongside birth, marriage, and death records, census records are the most important building block for family historians,” said Elaine Collins, Commercial Director, Find My Past. “We feel WorldVitalRecords.com is set for success, and we are excited to make our census records more accessible to an American audience who wouldn’t normally think of Find My Past as the first place to look for census records.”

The Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (ISTG) lists is another large database containing almost 9,000 passenger lists and millions of names. The ISTG records include information such as surname, captain's name, port of arrival/departure, and name of the ship. These records are the result of the work of more than 500 volunteers over a ten-year period.

“I am very excited about this partnership. I remember when ISTG was one-year old, and everyone was supporting us. In return, I’m happy to partner with WorldVitalRecords.com because they provide a service that is affordable and easily accessible on the Internet,” said Patty MacFarlane McCormack, Founder, Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild.

The World Collection also includes newspapers from Australia, the Bahamas, Canada (over 80 newspaper representing all provinces), Chile, Ecuador, England, Ireland, and Mexico (more than 150 newspapers from 15 states).

Genealogical Publishing Company also adds more than 600 large databases to the World Collection including colonial and Irish genealogy, royal ancestry, and family history.

“We have been publishing at Genealogical.com for 55 years, and we look forward to expanding our work into new territories, such as WorldVitalRecords.com,” said Barry Chodak, President, Genealogical Publishing Company.

Individuals can access more than 5,000 genealogical databases, more than 2 billion names (these names are being added throughout the year), and the World Collection at http://www.worldvitalrecords.com

New counter July 20, 2003 - previously 397,379 visitors since Sep 15th, 1999

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If you find an ancestor on a ship on ISTG and would like to
link to your email address or home page, please submit a short
paragraph about the passenger, where settled, children, etc.,
with the name of the ship and date of arrival, and send to
the transcriber at the bottom of the manifest or to the
ISTG Production Coordinator.

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Get all your genealogy books and CDs at one convenient location:

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The New Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild logo was designed by Patty McCormack.

The ship logo, which is still used in part, was designed and contributed by Pat Walker and Sheila Tate.
The ship logo and other genealogical graphics are available on tee shirts, mousepads and tote bags from: AncesTees.
ISTG does not profit in any way from the sale of these items.

Copyrights, Trade Marks, & Registered Trade Marks within this web site are protected under international copyright law. All rights reserved by the respective holders of any ™ © ® included within this site. 1998-2008

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