An interesting and fun project is to track those people who left your ancestral villages to come to America.  Although immigrants from these villages, as well as from all of Galicia, travelled to many ports in many countries, the most popular destination by far was the port of New York....and Ellis Island!

By doing so, you can see chain migration in action!  Chain migration is the term used to describe the immigration of people from one village or region to the same village or region in the new home.  From reviewing all these records, we can see that the most popular destinations were New York City, Amsterdam New York, Newark New Jersey, and Erie Pennsylavia.

I used Stephen Morse's excellent search engine to look for immigrants from two of my ancestral villages, Czeremosznia and Usznia, who came to America through Ellis Island.  (I also expanded the search to other American ports.)   

To see my results, or to find your own ancestors from these two villages, click on the various indexes below.  I included columns for both the correct spelling of the name (using modern day Polish and Ukrainian/English languages transliteration of Ukrainian), as well as the name as it is spelled on the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation website, in case you wanted to pull up the record yourself.

By conducting such a study, we can learn some interesting facts:

    Roughly 49.9% left from the port of Hamburg, 28.5% from the port of Bremen, 11.5% from the port of Rotterdam.

    Roughly 19.2% came on the ship Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, 10.7% on the ship Amerika.

    Roughly 32% of all the Ukrainians listed Amsterdam, New York as their final destination; while only 12% of all Poles listed Amsterdam, New York.

    Roughly 36% of all the Poles listed New York City as their final destination.

List of immigrants, including ports, age, marital status, ethnicity

A - F    G - L    M - P    R - Z

List of immigrants, including who they left behind and who they were coming to.

A - F    G - L    M - P    R - Z