Neither the United States nor Canada kept passenger lists for outgoing ships, as incoming ships’ passenger lists were considered more important. However, there are a few places you can look to see if your relatives did not remain in the US.
Even though there is less documentation of those who left the US in ships than those who arrived in the US. More and more documentation of outbound ships is becoming available online.
The Genealogy Spot is a site that posts passenger lists of outbound ships from the United States, largely thanks to volunteers who submit lists they come across. However, few ships currently have their passenger lists documented here and it is a time-consuming process to search through, as the passenger lists are not entered into any searchable database.
Currently, The Genealogy Spot has passenger lists of some outgoing ships from the USA in the period 1851-1906.
Many Norwegians settled in the central states of the Midwest, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Dakota and Iowa. In other words, they were relatively close to Canada. This may be reason enough to take a look at Ancestry’s database of people who left the US for Canada in the period 1908-1935.
The New York Times is one of the older newspapers from the USA that still exists. In its time, the newspaper published the names of passengers who traveled by ship from New York and eastward to Europe. On The Genealogy Spot’s website you can find lists of publications made in 1851 and 1921.
Read also: 10 sources for historical newspapers
It may be an idea to search through other newspaper publications from the USA. Fortunately, there are several databases that have scanned and OCR-processed historical newspapers from the USA.
The Elephind service has an ambitious goal of being able to offer a search for all the world’s historical newspapers. They have a long way to go, as the offer currently only includes newspapers from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Singapore and the USA.
You can access Newspaper.com free of charge for seven days. If you want access after the trial period, you must take out a subscription if you still want access. Here you will find over 118 million newspaper pages from more than 5,400 newspapers, some of which date back to the 18th century.
The Library of Congress, which is the US national library, has the Chronicling America portal. They have digitized a number of newspapers from the period 1789-1925.
Google News Archive may also be worth a look. The newspapers are listed alphabetically, but you can use the search bar at the top to search them all. With a few exceptions, the newspapers range primarily from the 1800s to the 2000s.
These were some tips, but it can quickly become a kind of “needle in a haystack” project to find out if your relatives did not stay in the USA. Some did stay, but were little documented.
Either way, good luck!
