German Emigration Database

Bremerhaven, Allemagne Photo by Free Nomad on Unsplash

One of my focuses this year is to sleuth out more information about my German ancestors. In researching, I found this database that I thought you might find interesting. Let’s look.

The Home - German Emigration Database (deutsche-auswanderer-datenbank.de) contains emigration records based on passenger lists in the United States for people who traveled from the Bremerhaven in Germany.  Bremen was a main port that German emigrants used to book passage to America. According to the site: “Since 2000, the German Emigration Database (DAD) has been the result of a research project by the Center for Immigration Research at Temple University Philadelphia/USA and the Historical Museum Bremerhaven on European emigration to the United States of America.”
 
Before you begin, you’ll want to change the page to English unless you can read the German instructions. Most browsers have this translation option now. It is an interesting site, and you can search by first and last name, year of immigration (if you know it) and fine-tune with gender or try only the last name with the year or just the last name. If you have a rare name that might work but a name like “Hoffmann” will bring back many entries. In my search, the first name was Andreas which I’ve seen spelled Andrew or abbreviated And. The system does not account for that so you must put your creative cap on and try those variations.
 
It is quite easy to use this database search, but I would have liked for a bit more detail in the return results. For example, you might just get their name, year of sailing and their age. If you are unclear about that information to begin with, it would be a guessing game to determine if that is your ancestor. At a fee of 15 Euros per request, I would want to be sure it was my person.
 
An alternative would be to look for your ancestor in one of the commercial database sites like Ancestry ($) or try FamilySearch (free). From the example of what you would receive, it looks very much like the passenger lists we see on these sites. It is another resource to try.
 
I did like that they provided some history about Bremen harbor. You can do online research, go to their facility, and search or hire a researcher to look up your people for a fee. I like to have some options when doing my research and this is another for those trying to find the passenger list of their ancestor. Have fun researching!