BYU NewsNet - BYU Immigrant Project to Add 10,000 Names

BYU's Immigrant Ancestor project is about to add 10,000 names that will help people to find ancestors who emigrated from Europe to anywhere in the world.

The newly expanded project specializes at extracting information from documents written at time of departure from the native countries, rather than the country where the immigrants arrived, said Leandro Soria, executive director of the IAP.

Soria said one of the problems when doing genealogy is that many of the documents available are from the countries where the immigrants arrive. Those documents usually provide general information such as nationality, gender and number of people in the family, but don't specify form what city or town people were from. They did not specify what their occupation was either. Soria said.

"That complicates the search for a single person, because it's very likely to find more than one person with the same name in the same region," she said.

This project not only facilitates genealogical research in general, but it has a bigger impact in Latin America, where there are fewer records available about people who arrived to the country.

"Many of the people in Latin America have ancestors that came from Europe," Soria said. People know from what country their ancestors were, but they don't know from what town.

"This project is unique, because you can get original information," said Cynthia Doxey, associate professor of church history and doctrine and supervisor over the British project, "not only the information that somebody else indexed,"

Doxey said the students involved in the research look for any kind of document that specifies arrangements a person made before leaving the country, like certificates of no-debt and police reports, which certified that the person leaving had no debt and had nothing pending with the justice system.

"Sometime you go to those countries [South European countries] and you ask them for emigration documents, and they say they don't have any," Doxey said. "But if you ask for these documents [police reports and certificates of no debt], they do."