A Guide to Interpreting Passenger List Annotations

by Marian L. Smith
Historian, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service

with the assistance of
Elise Friedman,
Flora Gursky, and Eleanor Bien

Passenger Lists or manifests. Every genealogist and his sister wants to find one. But after years of searching, many find a document that raises as many questions as it answers. This is especially true of passenger lists dating after 1892, which are frequently found to have a variety of markings, codes, and annotations squeezed into the margins and small blank spaces above and behind information written in the list form's columns.

These web pages are intended to provide a comprehensive reference guide to interpreting the markings, or annotations, found on immigration passenger lists. It is written for researchers with a U.S. passenger list in hand. To learn more about finding passenger lists, see JewishGen's Immigration InfoFiles and the Passenger Lists section of the JewishGen FAQ. The information is generally organized by where the annotation is found on the record--in the left margin, for example, or in the occupation column. Within each location category are examples of the various types of annotations found in that space, and an explanation of each. Every attempt has been made to provide several examples of each annotation type so that researchers may come to recognize the form and pattern that characterizes each type. Each page also has a link to a glossary of commonly-found acronyms and abbreviations.