The Immigrant Ancestors Project: Gathering and Indexing 900,000 Names

Abstract

The Immigrant Ancestors Project (IAP) is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University, which is located in Provo, Utah, United States. For eighteen years, students have served summer internships in Europe to acquire images of emigration records, focusing on those containing information about the emigrant’s hometown. In a mentored-learning environment, hundreds of students have worked on this index to help people all over the world discover their ancestors’ hometowns. The IAP database currently contains over 900,000 names, and it is available to the public free of charge. This paper discusses the history of IAP, as well as the benefits to those who use this significant online index.

Keywords

• immigrant
• ancestors
• genealogy
• family history
• Europe
• Britain
• name index
• emigration
• immigration