Saturday, June 27, 2015

Find Scottish Emigrants to the Americas Using Published Lists at Ancestry.com

Passenger Lists, David Dobson, Scottish Emigrants, AncestryMost people are aware that Ancestry.com has passenger ship lists available at their website. These database indexes and the accompanying images are of invaluable help to academic and family historians. What may not be so well known, is that Ancestry also has database indexes for many books that include details of Scottish emigrants to the Americas. Unfortunately, no works by Donald Whyte, compiler of A Dictionary of Scottish Emigrants to the USA, appear on this list. Most of these titles are by David Dobson and his books are useful because he has examined various sources (like wills and correspondence) in the United Kingdom that mention emigrants. These sources might provide a clue about an ancestor or help you identify a community to use as a case study for an academic project.

Ancestry is a subscription site so the links below will only work if you already subscribe to it; they might also work if you are in library that provides access the Library Edition of Ancestry. If you can't access these databases, then you can probably find most of these titles through your local library.

Search for name you are interested in on the search page. The results will include a list of names and links to the actual pages from the book. Once you get to the digital book images, you can browse it like an actual book.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have an ancestor (John McArthur) who is in: Directory of Scottish Settlers in North America, 1625-1825, Vol. II, by David Dobson .

However, the source Dobson gives for his info ("Virginia Genealogies"), upon inspection of the source, does not actually contain the information that Dobson wrote about my ancestor. This has led me to doubt the veracity of the information.

Always check the sources!