{"id":530,"date":"2006-08-29T22:57:20","date_gmt":"2006-08-30T05:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/29\/the-bremen-emigration-lists\/"},"modified":"2019-01-27T16:12:25","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T00:12:25","slug":"the-bremen-emigration-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/530","title":{"rendered":"The Bremen Emigration Lists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doug Bowerman left a comment on the August 27 post Stefania Chmielewska Arrives at Ellis Island<\/a>, where I mentioned that my Great Aunt Stefania had sailed on the SS Barbarossa from Bremen to New York .\u00a0 Doug\u00c2\u00a0had read that the records for Bremen had been destroyed in a fire during World War II bombings and asked if there is any way to access the records that survived this catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The short answer to this question is that, yes, some emigration records from Bremen did survive and one\u00c2\u00a0may be able to\u00c2\u00a0obtain those records.<\/p>\n

To begin,\u00a0Bremen\u00c2\u00a0was\u00c2\u00a0once a major port for emigration from Europe, processing over seven million emigrants\u00c2\u00a0over the past two centuries .\u00a0 Bremen is located on the Weser River and served as\u00c2\u00a0a major\u00c2\u00a0port of departure until silt in the river began to restrict access to Bremen’s docks .\u00a0 In 1825, the mayor and senate of Bremen purchased land for a new port at\u00c2\u00a0the mouth of the river and, in 1830, the port of Bremerhaven opened and served as the actual place of embarkation for those emigrating through Bremen.<\/p>\n

Beginning in 1832, all companies transporting emigrants from Bremen were required to file lists of emigrants with Bremen’s emigration department .\u00a0 Between 1875 and 1908, these passenger lists were purposely destroyed for lack of space, and only the most recent three years of passenger lists were maintained .\u00a0 Thus, all Bremen Passenger Emigration Records prior to 1905 were destroyed, but the records from 1905-May 1914 were preserved .\u00a0 Unfortunately, even these records were destroyed during an Allied bombing raid on Bremen on October 6, 1944.<\/p>\n

However, Bremen Emigrant Passenger Lists for the years 1920-1923 and 1925-1939 still exist .\u00a0 The\u00c2\u00a0surviving passenger lists are maintained at the Handelskammer Archiv<\/a> in Bremen, and, although these lists are not indexed, the archives personnel will search these lists on request .\u00a0 The lists have also been transcribed and are searchable online at Die Maus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some other lists, indexes, and historical materials\u00c2\u00a0for earlier years also\u00c2\u00a0exist .\u00a0 Some ships that departed from Bremen provided copies of the emigration lists to officials at the ports of arrival .\u00a0 The information on these lists is summarized in Lists of Passengers Bound from Bremen to New York<\/a><\/em> .\u00a0 The reference works Germans to America<\/a><\/em> and Migration from the Russian Empire<\/a><\/em> also include information on emigrants who passed through Bremen .\u00a0 These works are available through the Genealogical Publishing Company<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and many public and private libraries.<\/p>\n

In addition, some information may be obtained directly from Germany .\u00a0 The\u00c2\u00a0City Archives of Bremerhaven<\/a> holds some records on emigrants, the Bremen State Archives<\/a> holds copies of passenger lists for ships involved in court cases, and the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum<\/a> holds plans, photographs, and logs of emigrant ships.<\/p>\n

Finally, the Family History Library<\/a> holds a few microfilms of indexes to the Bremen Emigration Lists under the title\u00c2\u00a0Namenskartei aus den “Bremen Schiffslisten” 1904-1914<\/em> .\u00a0 These indexes were prepared in\u00c2\u00a01941 and contain mainly information on\u00c2\u00a0emigrants from Germany, but not on the 80% of emigrants who were Slavs, Jews, and Hungarians.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2006 by Stephen J. Danko<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doug Bowerman left a comment on the August 27 post Stefania Chmielewska Arrives at Ellis Island, where I mentioned that my Great Aunt Stefania had sailed on the SS Barbarossa from Bremen to New York .\u00a0 Doug\u00c2\u00a0had read that the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[402],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-journal","tag-emigration"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pyBfX-8y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20912,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions\/20912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}