About the Sections

The Immigrant Ancestors Project, sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University, uses emigration registers to locate information about the birthplaces of immigrants in their native countries, since this information is often omitted in many port records and naturalization documents of the destination countries.

Currently the project is focusing on immigrants from France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Other nations will soon be added. Volunteers working with scholars and researchers at Brigham Young University are creating a database of millions of immigrants based on these emigration registers. Anyone with an internet connection can access this database for free. Additionally, funds are being raised to finance the project, in order to pay the wages of the student researchers, to purchase copies of microfilms, and to maintain the technical side of the project.