Immigration Research

Were my relatives deported?

September 10, 2012 by Melody Lassalle Leave a Comment

I’ve looked up many cousins in the Ellis Island immigrant database. I’ve viewed many ship manifests. Every now and then I see something I’ve never seen before. Such was the case with the ship manifest for the Carreiro family.

Luiz Carreiro, his wife Francisca Julia da Conceicao Pacheco (aka Remigio Pacheco), their five children Maria, Jose, Manoel, Luiz, and Jacintho, and Luiz’s mother, Maria do Espirito Santo Carreiro, were on the ship the Reginia d’Italia which arrived at Ellis Island on 2 May 1910. Their final destination was Fall River, Massachusetts.

The ship manifest held a plethora of information including who they were going to meet in Fall River, MA, as well as information on Luiz’s brother and Maria’s son living in Maia, Ribeira Grande on Sao Miguel Island in the Azores chain.

What I didn’t expect to see was a word that was stamped by all their names on the ship manifest: DEPORTED.

I have never seen this before on a ship manifest. I guess the family was refused at Ellis Island and set back to the Azores. But why?

I decided to check to see if the family showed up in census records in the US. The ship arrived after the 1910 census, so that wouldn’t be any help. Searching for Luis Carreiro by exact name and Soundex turned up nothing in the 1920 census. Same with the 1930 census.

I had information on his daughter, Maria. She married someone named Andre Serpa. I do not know if they came to the US. Searches in the 1920 and 1930 census pulled up nothing.

It appears that my relatives were part of few who were turned away at America’s shores. I wonder what happened when theywere designated for deportation? Would any type of paperwork exist explaining why they were sent back to the Azores? This is a whole new research area for me. I’m not sure if this is worth pursuing, but I’m curious about it all the same.

If anyone knows how deportations were dealt with, I’d sure like to hear about it. If nothing more than to understand what the experience may have been like for this family.

Filed Under: About My Ancestors, Azorean Roots, General Genealogy, Immigration Research Tagged With: Azores, Carreiro, Deportation, Ellis Island, Immigration Research, Maia, Pacheco, Pacheco Remigio, Remigio Pacheco, Ribeira Grande, Romiza, Sao Miguel, Serpa

FamilySearch Adds California Passenger List Records

September 13, 2011 by Melody Lassalle Leave a Comment

This is a good day for Hawaii researchers! :D As many of you realize, there was considerable travel between Hawaii and California from 1890 onward. Many of our Portuguese relatives migrated to California. Many traveled back and forth between Hawaii and California visited family. So, these passenger list records are very important.

The records can be found under California, San Francisco Passenger Lists, 1893-1953. This corresponds to the NARA microfilm number M1410. The records cover ships arriving in San Francisco, California. Each group includes a list at the beginning of the group that lists the ships included and the date of arrival in San Francisco.

Please note that there is no index to this collection. Unless you have a lot of free time on your hands, you will need to know at least the month and year of arrival in San Francisco.

Although many of these records are also available through ancestry.com, you need a subscription to access them. The familysearch.org database gives researchers another option for located these valuable records.

I have done research in these records. Not only did I find families migrating from Hawaii to California, I found several instances of relatives going back to Hawaii on vacation. I also found what looks like older family members going back to Hawaii to bring younger members to California.

Enjoy!

Filed Under: California Roots, Immigration Research

New Ship Indexes Added to YourIslandRoutes.com

February 26, 2010 by Melody Lassalle Leave a Comment

Tonight I worked on another Winter Games Challenge: Participate in an indexing project.

I’ve been working on my own indexing project for the last 2-3 years. I’ve been extracting Portuguese names from ship lists for ships from Hawaii to California.

This involved extracting the name and putting them into spreadsheets for each ship. This took some doing as the nativity of the person was not always noted. Sometimes a determination had to be made as to whether the person was Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Rican, or Filipino. Sometimes that was obvious, sometimes not. Those spreadsheets were converted to csv files (thanks to the help of an online friend who made a nifty little app). These parts of the project have already been done.

I am working on editing the txt files and uploading them to my website. The csv files are then edited to replace commas and quotations marks with html code. This is a tedious process, but necessary