Passenger Manifest – Jane Foulk

One of the long sought-after pieces of information in genealogy research is the migration trail. How did my family get here?

I found a novel source for my in-laws in a ship passenger manifest. My father-in-law was a career Navy doctor and stationed in Japan in the mid-1950s.  I found a passenger manifest documenting the journey of the rest of the family to join him.  A fabulous find in and of itself; however, it offered the added bonus of listing the birth locations of each of the children.  And there in lies a migration path.  As a military family, they moved fairly frequently from base to base at the same time the family was growing.  Plot the birth locations and dates on a map, and voila! you have a migration trail.

Incidentally, my husband, Robert, was born in Japan.  His was the last child’s birth to be plotted in this migration trail.

Happy researching!