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Did Your Canadian Immigrant Arrive Via NY? Article posted: September 06, 2005 By: Rick Roberts, Global Genealogy & History Shoppe Recently, while searching the free online passenger lists at CastleGarden.org I encountered a result that left me speechless (not an easy accomplishment). 
Castle Garden, today known as Castle Clinton National Monument, is the major landmark within The Battery, the 23 acre waterfront park at the tip of Manhattan. From 1855 to 1890, the Castle was America's first official immigration center, a pioneering collaboration of New York State and New York City. The CastleGarden.org database covers a far greater time span.CastleGarden.org provides a free and searchable database for those researching passengers who arrived in New York between 1830 and 1912. The bulk of the passengers in this database arrived prior to the opening of Ellis Island in 1892. It is estimated that more than 73 million Americans can trace their ancestors to this early immigration period. Researchers are beginning to realize or recognize that many immigrants to Canada arrived via American ports, then moved by rail, canal or other means to their final destination in Canada. My search began by looking for one "Henry Beaumont" who arrived in NY in 1852. Henry continued on to settle in Cramahe Township in Upper Canada (Ontario) after marrying an Irish girl he met on the ship. He was easily found in the database, arriving on the ship George Washington. I noticed immediately that his recorded 'Destination" was listed as "USA". This was new information to me because oral family tradition reports that Henry had never intended to settle anywhere other than near family members who had already settled in Canada. It made me wonder if the database compilers had erroneously assumed all passengers to be "Destined" to USA by the fact that the ships arrived in the USA. I then clicked on the "advance search" button to search for all of those people in the database who's final destination was recorded as "Canada". I specified the full date range and left all other fields open. The result was astonishing! The CastleGarden.org database records 10,350,545 people that specified "Canada" as their final destination. That's right.... more than 10 million people. We know that the number of those who arrived at that port with a final destination in Canada is significant but, it is not 10,350,545 people. Cross-searching of the database confirmed that the search result of more than 10 million persons destined to Canada is wrong. The entire database is 10,350,545 passenger arrivals, regardless of the final destination of the passenger. I brought this glitch to the attention of the site's management and hope to report a fix in the near future. When searching for individuals under the usual search tool, the destination field for the person searched does provide you with an accurate result. It just doesn't work properly when you attempt to see what the aggregate number of those destined to Canada is. A search of where passengers arrived from seemed to give a reasonable result. there are 3538 people listed as arriving from Canada. That is a reasonable number because there was movement of passengers to and from the Atlantic ports on Canada's east coast. The site offers a terrific service at no cost to the user. You can bet I'll be spending a few evenings on CastleGarden.org looking for early Canadian immigrants over the port of New York. For a quick access to this and other helpful genealogy links, including the link to the Ellis Island web site, see: http://globalgenealogy.com/links For those wanting to learn more about the 19th century immigrants' experiences check out the book Across the Waters: Ontario Immigrants' Experiences, 1820-1850 by: Frances Hoffman & Ryan Taylor. The book gathers together selections from firsthand accounts of more than 150 individual immigrants so that today's readers can discover what it meant to be a pioneer in Upper Canada (Ontario). Canadian Genealogy & History Resources
The Global Gazette is sponsored by GlobalGenealogy.com: 
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