I am looking for information on an ancestor from France who came to America abou

Question:

I am looking for information on an ancestor from France who came to America about 1857.?

I specifically want to know what ship he came to America on. Also I would like to know the names of his family in France. I have been told his sister came to America with him and I would like to know her name and what happened to her.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Have you tried www.rootsweb.com?

The search fields on the left are free. Just type the name in there and look for information in whatever results appear.

The fields on the right are for Ancestry.com. You will probably get results there, and some of them may be in the shipping lists for that period of time; but Ancestry is a paid service, so your access to those records may be restricted unless you cough up some bucks.

Or, you could post the name (or send it privately to someone like me) and anyone who has an Ancestry subscription might send a query and get those results back to you.

Your ancestor's immigration occurred before Ellis Island, so try here as well:

www.familyhistory.org

That's the LDS (Mormon) genealogy site. It's free. Just enter the first and last name on the "Search" page and take a stab at what comes up. You may have to do further research at a Family History Center near you in order to get complete information, or to find out who the submitter was, but one step at a time.

Just bear in mind that it's a point-and-shoot effort at the outset.

Good Luck!

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In reading the response directly before mine, I realized that I should have pointed out that the census records for that period of time are online at Ancestry. For free, you can at least find out if someone with your ancestor's name appears in the 1860 census or later.

That won't help you with the name of the ship, though.

If you don't feel uncomfortable about it, send the name of your ancestor to me and I'll run it through Ancestry for you. You don't need to send any personal info about yourself and I don't need or want to know that anyway. I'm mainly curious about ports of entry that may have been used at that time. That will help me with the research I'm doing at Ancestry.

Anything's possible, though.

Good luck again!