ROOTS & BRANCHES

We’ve been taking about passenger arrival lists for the last few weeks in “Roots & Branches” and this fascinating record group has many angles to it.

Column reader Michael Lilla of Hollidaysburg e-mailed in a question just as the series was starting.

“What happens to passengers who die on board the ship?” he asked.

He said he was told a story by his 91-year-old cousin that her mother, uncle and aunt were on board a ship to Boston arriving 21 Feb 1921.

“Her aunt went into labor and died on board the ship, she is not listed on the passenger list arriving in Boston,” Lilla related. “The baby lived and is also not listed. Her mother took the baby and he was given up for adoption. The aunt was buried in a potter’s cemetery in Boston.”

The family left Europe from Rotterdam in the Netherlands but Lillia says he has not been able to get list of passengers that left from there.

As far as Lilla’s initial question about passengers who die aboard a ship, I have seen in my browsings through arrival lists that what generally happened is that these deaths were recorded in the passenger arrival manifest. If someone died while the ship was in the middle of the ocean, the procedure also included a burial at sea.

However, because the passenger arrival lists were actually compiled when the ship embarked (and then revised to include births and deaths at sea), it’s doesn’t seem outlandish to believe that some lists weren’t properly updated.

This might especially be the case in the type of situation he’s citing where the death occurred once the ship reached port.

On Lilla’s question about embarkation lists for ships leaving from Rotterdam, the news is potentially better.

For ships sailing out of that Dutch port aboard the Holland-American Line, there is a collection of more than a thousand microfiche at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a digital version of the fiche is available for use in the Family History Center system.

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While embarking on this passenger list project, I did take a little bit of time to firm up information on my only 19^th century immigrant couple, Heinrich Hiller and Maria Niethammer.

The couple arrived with a few other Hiller families in 1831 in Baltimore (the exact date unknown because what has survived for the port of Baltimore in this period are “quarterly abstracts” that lump many ships together).

His naturalization papers, however, were more specific: His petition states that his family arrived on 20 September 1831.

He filed a declaration of intent to become a citizen on 6 August 1834 and presented Jacob Gopler and John Moyer as character witnesses when he presented his petition for naturalization on 10 Aug 1838.