May_16_2006

Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors in Census and Passenger Records

(This meeting is co-sponsored by the Skirball Cultural Center.
There is no charge.)

Monday, May 15, 2006, 7:00 – 9:30 p.m. at the Skirball Cultural Center
The Skirball food cart will be available prior to the meeting.
(for directions)

Program: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors in Census and Passenger Records

SPEAKER: Stephen Morse

Charting one’s family history can be a daunting project. An important first step is tracing your ancestors’ journeys to the United States and discovering facts about their early years in America. In April 2001 the Ellis Island website containing passenger records from 1892 – 1923 went online. A few weeks later Stephen P. Morse created the “One-Step Ellis Island” search engine to facilitate using this resource to locate passenger manifests. But what happened when your ancestors disembarked in New York City? A large percentage ended up living there, even if they eventually moved on to other cities or states. Along with the federal census records taken at ten year intervals, there were also several New York state censuses—the most valuable, for genealogical purposes, being those from 1905, 1915, and 1925 when there was a large influx of immigrants. Morse’s One-Step website offers a universal finding aid for searching in each of the three census years in all boroughs.
This two-part lecture will explain how to use these tools to navigate both the Ellis Island and New York Census records with fewer tears and greater success so you can track down your elusive ancestors and continue building your family tree.
For more information about the “One-Step” tools, go to www.stevemorse.org.

Stephen Morse is an amateur genealogist who has been researching his Russian-Jewish origins for the past few years. Several years ago he developed some web-based searching aids that, much to his surprise, have attracted world-wide attention. He was the recipient of the IAJGS Outstanding Contribution Award in 2003 and has given presentations for many Jewish Genealogical Societies and for IAJGS international conferences.

In his other life, Mr. Morse is a computer professional with a doctorate in electrical engineering from NYU, and has held research positions at Bell Labs, IBM Watson Research, GE Corporate R&D, and Compagnie Internationale pour l'Informatique in France. He has been involved in development at Intel Corp., Alsys Inc., and Netscape. He has taught at CCNY, Pratt Institute, UC Berkeley, SUNY Albany, Stanford and San Francisco State. He has authored numerous technical papers, four textbooks and holds three patents. He is best known as the architect of the Intel 8086, the granddaddy of today's Pentium processor.