Missouri Emigration and Immigration

A few thousand French settlers remained in the area after the United States bought Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, but most pre-statehood settlers were Americans of English and Ulster Scots origin. They came mainly from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Settlement spread up the river valleys into central Missouri by the 1820s and into western Missouri by the 1830s. Mormon immigrants settled western Missouri in 1831 but were driven from the state in 1839.

If your ancestor was an early settler in Southwest Missouri, Rising's books likely discuss your family and it's origin:


 * Rising, Marsha Hoffman. Opening the Ozarks: First Families in Southwest Missouri, 1835-1839. 4 vols. Derry, N.H.: American Society of Genealogists, 2005..

Rising learned that most early settlers in this section of Missouri had moved there from Tennessee.

Both the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail began at Independence, Missouri. Many Missourians followed these trails westward to California, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In spite of this emigration from the state, Missouri was the fifth most populous state in the United States at the close of the Civil War.

The Oregon-California Trails Association is an educational organization that promotes the story of the westward migration from Missouri, among other places. Their site includes a personal name index to trail diaries, journals, reminiscences, autobiographies, newspaper articles, guidebooks and letters at Paper-trail.org

Overseas immigration to Missouri began in earnest in the 1830s when large numbers of Germans began to settle the farm country west of St. Louis and south of the Missouri River known as the "Missouri Rhineland." Beginning in the 1840s German and Irish immigrants settled in urban centers. After 1880, St. Louis and Kansas City attracted groups of Italians, Greeks, Poles, and east European Jews. The St. Louis Public Library has a collection of death notices from 1878-1892 taken from a German newspaper called Westliche Post has a helpful website with obits of German emigrants to Missouri.

An especially helpful description of settlement patterns in Missouri is in Milton D. Rafferty, Historical Atlas of Missouri (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982) ).

Before the Civil War the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri river system was the major migration route to Missouri. New Orleans was the favorite port of entry for early German immigrants to Missouri. After the war, most settlers came by railroad through the lower midwestern states. To find an immigrant ancestor, you may want to check ship passenger lists for East Coast ports and for the Port of New Orleans.

St. Louis Public Library (City) owns the following NARA passenger list indexes:


 * Baltimore, 1820-1897 (Federal Lists)
 * Baltimore, 1833-1866 (City Lists)
 * Boston, 1848-1891
 * New Orleans, 1813-1866
 * New York, 1820-1846
 * New York, 1897-1943
 * Philadelphia, 1800-1906

St. Louis Public Library owns these NARA passenger lists:


 * Baltimore, 1820-1891
 * (also on FamilySearch)
 * New Orleans, 1813-1902
 * New York, 1820-1906
 * Philadelphia, 1800-1902
 * Miscellaneous Gulf Coast, Atlantic, Great Lakes Ports, 1820-1874

The National Archives (Central Plains Region) also has passenger lists and microfilm (as previously mentioned, indexes can be found at the St. Louis Public Library as well).

Web Sites
Cyndislist.com

St. Louis Public Library Passenger Lists

Rootsweb.com Passenger Lists

FamilySearch.org

Ancestry.com

FindMyPast.com

StevenMorse.org

Missouri Digital Heritage: http://www.sos.mo.gov/mdh/

Missouri State Archives: http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/