The Filby Books


 
They are mustard yellow.
There are volumes of them.
They have very small print!
If you have a common named ancestor, you are doing much searching through many books!

William P Filby and Mary Keysor Meyer published Passenger and Immigration Lists Indexes in 15 volumes.  These indexes refer to published passenger lists.  The first three volumes are combined alphabetically and were printed in 1981.  Each volume contains three separate books.  These volumes combined contain approximately 2,000 plus pages.  There have been 13 Supplemental volumes printed to date (2013).  These Supplemental volumes have 1,000 plus pages to each volume. 

The Filby books list each passenger and then direct the researcher to the published source of the passenger lists.

Contained for each entry, if available, is the following information (see picture below):
  • passenger surname
  • given name
  • age
  •  place of arrival
  • year of arrival
  • a code that refers to the source of the record
  • page number in the record

Copy of a page of the Filby Books, 1986-1990 Vol 3, O-Z


The Filby books just pointed you in a direction to find a source of immigration.  Immigration records are so much easier to find with computers, but keep in mind, not all passenger lists have been added to databases on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

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