Phew, it took ages, over the ages, to locate the passenger list for one pair of my great great grandparents Elias and Rachel. Some time ago I had already found the ship manifest for his emigration voyage. It’s indexed under the name Elias Perbolner, which is not too far off from a valid surname spelling. But where to find the New York arrival list.

Today I took a different tack. And I think that is an appropriate verb considering I was looking for a ship. Some in this family used a completely different surname and I have not figured out why. That is another story, however.

Today with the sailing date and an approximate number of days they would be expected to be at sea, I searched under a first name only. I figured that leaving Hamburg with the first (given) name of Elias, he might arrive and have the same recognisable name on this side of the Atlantic. From the departure list, I could not tell the name of the ship but I had enough information to plug into one of Steve Morse‘s databases. And from there I got to a next step which eventually led me to use his first name and find not too many records to look at.

It’s no wonder to me now that I could not locate his name or the other family members. Their surname is entered as Vorlobna. From the image, I included here you can understand how the spelling was indexed incorrectly. I can see how that mistake was made, and it took me a long time to use different methods to find this record.