Genealogist Joel Weintraub will present Finding Difficult Passengers on the Eillis Island Manifests. Have you tried and failed to find your ancestors’ names on immigration manifests from Ellis Island? (Using a case study published as an InfoFile on Jewishgen). Joel will demonstrate eleven different strategies to help you locate the records of your elusive immigrant ancestors. We will start with a 12 year old boy on his 1907 voyage from Hamburg Germany to New York, and then find out why some search strategies cannot find his record (includng the Ellis Island search database) and surprisingly (!) why some other strategies can find his record. There will be several take-home messages here for researchers, even those who have done many such searches, so be prepared to hear about the assumption behind the databases we use for immigration searches including some lesser known ones. Joel is an emeritus Professor at California State University Fullerton, and was a volunteer for nine years at the National Archives, then in Laguna Niguel, CA. For close to two decades, Joel has created search tools for the U.S. and New York City censuses that are freely available on the Steve Morse "One-Step" website. He has given presentations on census (both federal and NYC), immigration and naturalization, biographical and Jewish genealogy topics and has published articles on many of those topics.