The place of birth of each ship passenger appeared on the ship manifest forms used for immigration to the USA starting in 1906. In the case of Armenians born in Turkey, the stated birth place may have been the village or town, kaza, sanjak, or vilayet. Determining which administrative division was intended is often difficult when the names are the same (i.e., does "Sivas" refer to the town, kaza, sanjak, or vilayet?). When it was unclear, I chose the highest level administrative division with that name. In some of the early records, the passenger's stated birth place was incorrect, and actually referred to their original port of departure (e.g., Trebizond, Samsun, or Batum) instead of their birth place. Where the name of the village is given in the ship manifest, I show the name of its kaza, followed by the village name in parentheses (e.g., Keghi (Sergevil), which is in the vilayet of Erzurum). In this database, the administrative division of sanjak (a subset of a vilayet) is not used. The political entities are as of the beginning of World War 1; Turkey refers to the Ottoman Empire, Russia to the Russian Empire. (For birth places in the Ottoman Empire, the value in the Town column often refers to the kaza.)

The Ship Manifests database table currently represents some of the estimated 100,000 to 125,000 arrivals of Armenians to seaports in North America through 1930. Most of the abstracts are from ship manifests to New York (Castle Garden before 1892, Ellis Island in 1892 and later). Other important seaports for arriving passengers include Providence, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco in the USA, and Halifax, Quebec, and St. John (New Brunswick) in Canada. Passengers also arrived at a number of smaller seaports. Armenians boarded ships from seaports on the Atlantic Ocean in western Europe, from the Mediterranean Sea, from American seaports in Cuba and Argentina, and Pacific seaports in Japan and China. Some even left from seaports on the Black Sea, Arctic Ocean, and Baltic Sea. Most of my early research consisted of a systematic abstraction of ship manifests for steamships traveling from French ports on the Atlantic Ocean (Le Havre, Cherbourg, Boulogne, and Bordeaux) to New York, between 1892 and 1914. That was followed by a focus on steamships bringing Armenian refugees to America after the end of WW1, primarily in the period between 1920 and 1924. Over 4,000 "ship trips" have been searched so far. (A ship trip is a voyage between a source port and a destination port. Many steamships gathered passengers from multiple source ports on the same voyage.) As I research Armenians in other primary sources (like military draft registrations, censuses, and naturalization records), I try to find those same individuals on one or more ship manifests. When I research a ship manifest, I abstract all Armenians on that particular ship trip. Thousands of more voyages remained to be researched.

I have also started adding entries from border crossing documents from Mexico and Canada to the USA into this table. These are especially important for those Armenians who came to the USA through Mexico, since ship manifests into Mexico from overseas are not available (as they are for Canada). You can distinguish a border crossing from a ship arrival by the absence of the ship name.

To see what ship trips have been searched for inclusion into this database table, select the following link: Ship Manifests Scope

Several options are presented below for customizing this report. By default, the report is created at the V/S/P (Vilayet/State/Province) level, sorted in descending order by total count for the row, and the entries whose row count is less than 1% of the grand total count are suppressed (not shown). The scope of the report can be expanded to the Town/Kaza detail level by checking that box. The suppression filter can also be unchecked to show all rows, the percentage threshold can be increased, and the sort order can be changed (to alphabetical by Country, V/S/P, and Town/Kaza). Some ship manifest entries named an individual village within the kaza (e.g., Sergevil within Keghi). By default, these are shown as separate rows but may be combined into the kaza to normalize the counts, by selecting that check box.

Detail by Town/Kaza?:  Yes

Sort by Totals?:  Yes (Descending Order)     Suppress Lowest Counts?:  Yes  %

Combine Village Counts into Kaza?:  Yes