Immigrant Ships
Transcribers GuildNews and Awards
The Federation of Genealogical Societies, founded in 1976, has three major purposes: serving the needs of its member societies, providing products and services needed by member societies, and marshaling the resources of its member organizations.
ISTG has been referenced in their magazine FORUM (referenced in Part III (Internet & CD-ROM Resources) of a series titled "Sources: Finding Ship Passenger Lists, 1820-1897. Parts I and II appeared in FORUM issue 14:2 and 14:3 (Summer and Fall 2002). Part III is in 14:4 (Winter 2002).) and is expected to be
mentioned again in the upcoming Fall 2003 issue. We thank them.
By RAY WYCHE
Bette Dew sums up her thoughts on volunteerism in one short sentence: “I can’t stand idle hands.”
Dew was recently named Volunteer of the Year 2002 by the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (ISTG), a little-known national organization devoted to compiling passenger lists of the vessels that brought the ancestors of most Americans to the United States. The list of immigrants and where they came from extends from the 1600s to the current day.
After a career as a salesperson and working in clothing factories and in electronics, Dew was forced out of the working world because of medical reasons. She suffers from a lung condition that requires her to self-medicate several times each day by breathing medicated steam from a portable device. It’s a situation that would lead most people to a life in a rocking chair, but not Bette Dew.
“It doesn’t keep me home,” she says of her condition, which she treats while at her desk as a volunteer for the local American Red Cross chapter.
Dew works as a transcriber of the immigrant lists in addition to her volunteer computer work with the Red Cross. She’s at the keyboard of her computer in the office for part of each day.
The ISTG is strictly a volunteer organization (“It’s non-paying for everybody,” she says) that takes handwritten passenger lists of ships arriving in the U. S. and transcribes the names into a more easily read format on the computer. The lists are also alphabetized, something not done when the names and occupations of the passengers were handwritten by the ships’ captains as early as 400 years ago.
The ISTG passenger lists are just that – a roll of names of people immigrating to this country on a particular vessel. The writing varies from captain to captain; few are readily readable at first glance. Some are recorded in beautiful (but not necessarily easy to read) Spencerian script while other lists are more or less scribbled.
In transcribing the lists, Dew frequently uses footnotes to explain that the name as she typed it may not be accurate, but her rendering is as correct as possible. Rolls of more recent ships’ passengers are typewritten, but the job of volunteer transcribers is still tedious.
Copies of the lists to be transcribed are sent to her from the organization’s headquarters in Aurora, Col.
The transcriptions of the passenger manifests are valuable to historians as well as to the laypersons seeking information about their ancestors.
“People trying to find their ancestors can get help,” Dew says. “We are the eyes of the person searching.”
Dew’s transcriptions deal mostly with people who landed at East Coast ports. The number of names per ship varies as some smaller vessels carried few passengers. The longest list she has done was one of April 1915 of the Lusitania, a British ship that was sunk a month later by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland with the loss of almost 1,200 lives. That list contained more than 500 names.
The ships’ manifests list the type of accommodations the passenger had aboard ship. Many names are followed by the words, “between decks,” or “steerage,” both descriptive of the relative lack of wealth of the passenger.
Dew says she was not particularly interested in history while in school but since serving as a transcriber, “I’ve learned to love it, and I’ve always been interested in genealogy. You learn a lot about your nationality – you learn history.”
ISTG has about 500 volunteer transcribers in the United States. Since some passenger lists were written by foreign ship captains, some entries could present problems to the transcriber.
“We have people who volunteer who know Spanish, German – all languages, Dew says.
The volunteer transcribers, even though they seldom or never see each other, are a closely knit group. They receive a newsletter – required reading for volunteers – through which they can ask for help and suggestions from other volunteers.
“It’s a great group. It’s like a big brotherhood and sisterhood,” Dew says. “If anybody gets sick, we pray for that person.”
In the countless hours she has spent at a keyboard doing work that will enable a lot of people to determine their ancestry, has she bothered to look for any record of her own forebears?
She has tried, she says, “But I haven’t found them yet.”
Out of the 500-plus U.S. volunteer transcribers, how was Dew picked for the top volunteer award?
“I have no idea. I don’t know how I got it. I didn’t nominate myself,” she says with a laugh.
March 18, 2002 This is to inform you that your website has been included in the PORT Maritime Information Gateway. Developed by the National Maritime Museum, PORT is an online catalogue of high quality maritime-related Internet resources. Every resource has been selected and described by a librarian or subject specialist. Services and materials developed by the Museum's Centre for Research are also available on the site. For the ISTG entry see: http://www.port.nmm.ac.uk/ROADS/cgi-bin/tempbyhand.pl?query=921517616-9202
The History Channel's "THE ELLIS ISLAND EXPERIENCE" software August, 2000 ISTG was recently notified of their inclusion in a list of links recommended by the popular new software - The Ellis Island Experience, produced by The History Channel. We are proud to be included and highly recommend this software for those wanting to know more about their ancestors immigration to America.
FAMILY TREE FINDERS Thursday - 22 June 2000 The Ships that Brought Them Since those first intrepid passengers came to what would become the American colonies in the early 1600s, our ancestors have been traveling the oceans in ships to get to America. There have been many ships and to many people the ship is as much a part of their ancestry as the people they are searching for. Many times people want to know about the ship that brought their ancestor to what was hoped would be a better life. Perhaps the most well known volume on this is Michael J. Anuta's "Ships or Our Ancestors" which was published in 1983. This book is available at the Family History Library and is also available on microfiche (#6104022, 5 fiche), which means you can borrow it to your local Family History Center. And the best thing about microfiche is that it is automatically sent on indefinite loan. This means you get to keep at your local FHC for as long as you wish. However, many of us are also relying more heavily on the Internet for information on our ancestors. And so it is natural that we would like to find some of this same information online. First, as far as passenger lists go, there are a number of sites. One of the best is the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (site address) where they are actively transcribing the passenger lists. They have also begun to make available scanned images of immigrants accompanied by a short paragraph history. What a great way for our ancestors to come alive. There is also an informative listing of many of the ships that brought our ancestors. The Immigrant Ship Information site (http://www.fortunecity.com/littleitaly/amalfi/13/ships.htm) has compiled details supplied in either mailing lists or directly to the individual who is maintaining the web site. The information found for each ship may include: when the ship was built, to which line it belonged, how large it was, maiden voyage and other information. While the web page for this site has apparently been taken down, there is a list of scanned images that can be downloaded and viewed for a number of the more famous ocean liners. You can access this list at http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/2803/ . Another site for some of the most famous of the liners is the Cunard Line's web site (http://www.cunardline.com/). Finally, if you are interested in purchasing a reproduction picture of many of the ships that brought our ancestors, you will want to visit KinShips (http://www.kinshipsprints.com/). This site offers both a matted print suitable for framing or an unmatted one that can be included in the family history notebook. Rhonda R. McClure rhondam@sodamail.com Soda Mail - Family Tree Finder - http://gt.sodamail.com/cgi-bin/gt/ftf.shtml?user=ffffffffffff&nl_master=1
Story 2 of 8 THE KANSAS CITY STAR G2 Sun, 06 Feb 2000 Compass points you in the right direction MYRA VANDERPOOL GORMLEY SHAKING YOUR FAMILY TREE © Los Angeles Times Syndicate, 2000 Among the exhibitors at the recent GENTECH conference in San Diego was the ISTG, or Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild. To hear them tell it, the ISTG is just a group of volunteers having fun. But the group numbers more than 500 volunteers around the world, and what they have accomplished is a phenomenon. The ISTG deciphers and transcribes ship passenger lists and posts the information on the World Wide Web, making them available to all, free of charge. So far it has more than 2,000 lists posted on its site provided by RootsWeb.com. The group began its work in late September 1998 and a year later it unveiled "The Compass: A Guide to Help Researchers." This site is a guide to hundreds of other Web pages that have information on passengers, ship types, stories and pictures. In addition to various links to other ship passenger lists and databases are such topics as: Immigration and naturalization by country. Ship types and descriptions. Individual ships with their own sites. Ship images. Shipwrecks. Bibliographies, articles and memoirs. Sites of general maritime interest. Maritime Resources-Museums/libraries. "Our organization started because this sort of information was scarce and/or expensive and time-consuming to obtain," said Patty MacFarlane Prather, guild coordinator. The Compass links were researched for many months by Harriet Rosch, ISTG resource coordinator, and a staff of volunteers. ISTG is working on ships that arrived in U.S. ports simply because the volunteers have ready access to them. However, volunteers would love to include ships from other ports, if anyone has them available for donation. Volunteers are accepted into the ISTG on a regular basis. To learn more or to contact the organization, visit its Web site at [new] immigrantships.net, or write to ISTG, PO Box 461054 Aurora, Colorado 80046
