Located in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and on the World Wide Web, the American Family Immigration History Center (AFIHC) allows visitors to explore the extraordinary collection of immigrant arrival records stored in the Ellis Island Archives.

Searching their archives can help inform your own family's story--inspiring a new sense of your place in the larger story of American immigration.

More than 22 million passengers and members of ships' crews entered the United States through Ellis Island and the Port of New York between 1892 and 1924. Information about each person was written down in ships' passenger lists, known as "manifests." Manifests were used to examine immigrants upon arrival in the United States. Now you can search these millions of records for information on individual Ellis Island passengers.

In the Passenger Record Archive, you'll find:

• passenger records, giving passenger name, date of arrival, ship of travel, age on arrival, and more
• original manifests, showing passenger names and other information
• ship information, often with a picture, giving the history and background of each ship that brought the immigrants

You can keep copies of the passenger records, manifests, and ship images in your very own Ellis Island File--which you can open on Ellis Island or at the Center's Website. The exhibit is made possible by, The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.