Port of Philadelphia: Arrivals

This project is for all Port of Philadelphia Immigrant Arrivals. Please add your ancestors here.

Excerpt from "Philadelphia: Immigrant City by Frederic M. Miller

From the time of its founding in 1682, Philadelphia has been both an immigrant port and a city of immigrants. In fact, in 1683 when Dutch and German religious groups founded Germantown now part of Philadelphia they established the first settlement of non-British Europeans in any English colony. But that event proved exceptional, for the Germantown settlers not only landed in Philadelphia, but also stayed in the area. Historically, by contrast, most people who arrived in the city soon made their way elsewhere while most immigrants who settled locally had arrived through another port, usually New York, just ninety miles to the northeast. Because the latter group has predominated since the 1800s, the number of immigrants living in Philadelphia has been much larger than the volume of direct migration might indicate. Philadelphia as a port of entry has been very different from, and less important than, Philadelphia as an immigrant city.

In national terms, Philadelphia was certainly most important as an immigrant port in the eighteenth century. Beginning about 1717, when the Provincial Assembly ordered ship captains to submit passenger lists to officials, there were true mass migrations of Germans and of Scotch-Irish directly to Philadelphia. In 1749, for example, 22 ships with a total of 7000 immigrants from the Rhineland made the seven-week voyage to the city. In all, about 70,000 Germans landed there before the Revolution and Philadelphia also received the largest share of the over 150,000 Scotch-Irish who migrated from Ulster to the colonies. In both groups, the majority were so poor that they had come as indentured servants or as redemptioners" who had to work off the borrowed price of their passage. Many were thus forced to stay in the city, helping to make it the largest in the colonies by the time of the Revolution.

Links

Ships' Passenger Lists

Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at Philadelphia, 1800-1882

Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1891-1957

Pennsylvania Immigrant and Naturalization Records

Rev. H.M. Mühlenberg journals concern the Lutherans primarily but there is overlap.