From Seth Kohrman, Student
Supervisor of the German Immigrant Ancestors Project:
The German Immigrant Ancestors Project began in 1996 under the
direction of the esteemed Dr. Raymond S. Wright III. Dr. Wright is the
director of the world's largest family history library-the Salt Lake
City Family History Library. He holds a PHD in European history and is
an accredited genealogist from ICAPGEN with an emphasis in German
research.
The greatest reason for the importance
of the German IAP Project is that American arrival records often do not
record the ports of departure or places of origin for those immigrating
to America. Our project will help those searching for their immigrant
ancestors to find their places of birth and residence.
The goals of the German IAP Project
consist of finding original, undocumented immigration records and
extracting the vital information from these records to place them in
our growing database of immigrants. It is our hope that people around
the world will be able to come to our website for free and find their
immigrating ancestors.
The extraction process for the project
includes the scanning of the original immigration records into
digitalized images that are placed in our extraction software.
Volunteers world wide come to our website and sign up to extract the
vital information which will include the above mentioned dates of
birth, places of origin, and ports of departure.
If you are interested in volunteering
for the German IAP Project, you can sign up at our website: http://immigrants.byu.edu
If you have questions or comments concerning this information or
anything regarding the project, you can email the student supervisor,
Seth Kohrman, at the following address, IAP-German@byu.edu
Note from Brother Westra:
I can see a real need for such a
project. We talk to so many people who come in to the Salt Lake
City Family
History Library with foreign ancestors,
and cannot make the link from the US back to the originating
country.
They usually only have the country name, which is generally derived
from a US Census record. To continue research in the originating
country, we usually need a complete birth date and birth place (city or
county), not just a country. Then we can go to the Family History
Library Catalog for that city (or county) and perhaps locate birth or
christening or marriage or death data. I went into the main page
of
the Immigrant Ancestors Project and noted that it listed six
languages they will be working in.