The first four volumes of Migration from the Russian Empire cover the period from January 1875 through May 1889 (the work will eventually comprise numerous volumes and extend to the year 1910).
Volumes One through Four contain data on 200,000 persons of Russian nationality who emigrated to the United States from Russian territories. The information was extracted from the original ships' passenger lists held by the Temple-Balch Center for Immigration Research. These passenger lists--customs passenger lists and immigration passenger lists, as they are known--are the only records that furnish proof of the arrival in the United States of all 2.3 million immigrants from the Russian Empire.
Information in the first volume corresponds to the information given in the passenger lists--name of passenger, his age, sex, occupation, country of origin, place of residence, and destination; additionally, each passenger list is headed by the name of the ship, the port of embarkation, the port of arrival, and the date of arrival. By the 1890s, information furnished by the passengers would include their last place of residence in Europe and their precise destination in the U.S.
For researchers investigating their Russian family origins, this type of information is the very bedrock on which all American family history is built.
