Michael VanDerAa - Using Passenger Lists

***Update: I discovered shortly after posting this that some of the information listed below is incorrect. I wrote a new post here that updates and corrects what I've found.***

After writing my post last week about my great-great-grandfather - John Michael VanDerAa - my grandmother emailed me and let me know that I had the wrong picture - that the man in the picture was actually Michael VanDerAa - John's father (and my 3rd great-grandfather). She also told me what she knew about Michael VanDerAa - so I decided to find out more about him.

My grandmother said that she knew that he came over from Holland with his family and that he had five sons, one of which was her grandfather, John. I decided to search for an immigration record for Michael VanDerAa. Ancestry.com has an extensive list of passenger arrival records and that's where I began. Unfortunately the last name of VanDerAa is often misspelled and also mistranslated and I did not have any luck finding Michael VanDerAa. So - I went back to look at some census records to narrow down the time frame when I could assume he may have arrived. I also wanted to see if he had any family members living near him in any of the records - then I could search on their names also (especially since my grandmother seemed sure that he came over here with his family).

Very quickly I found Michael VanDerAa in both the 1870 and 1880 census, living with his wife Johanna and his children. And living nearby were two other men with the VanDerAa last name, born around the same time - Jacob VanDerAa and Garrett VanDerAa. This gave me a time frame (before 1870) and two other names to search with. So I returned to the passenger lists and searched again. This time I found them! During the indexing process - their name had been read as Vanderau.



Michael VanDerAa arrived in New York on May 3, 1856 on a ship called the Fairfield. The ship came from LeHavre, France. At first I only saw that he was traveling with his siblings - Jacob, Garrett, Wilhelm and Johanna. This was the support I needed to assure me that I had found the correct person. I knew that the census records from 1870 and 1880 were him by the location and names of his wife and children. The fact that Jacob and Garret lived next door to him assured me that they were most likely family - and their ages told me that they were probably his siblings.

But - as I looked closer at the full page of the passenger list - I saw something I missed the first time. Just above Michael and his siblings (with just one passenger listed in between them) was Leinhard and Johanna VanDerAa. Judging by their ages (54) - I had found Michael's parents. This was very exciting because my family did not know the names of the VanDerAa family before Michael (at least not that my grandmother had told me!) So - now we know that they were Leinhard and Johanna - and according to the passenger list - they were born in approximately 1802 in Holland.

One additional piece of research I did was to search for information about the ship they arrived on. In doing so I found an article in the New York Times from May 5, 1856 (two days after they arrived) that described the arrival of their ship and also their journey. The below article is a bit difficult to read, but it says that they left France on March 20, 1856 and while traveling there were 3 births and 4 deaths aboard the ship - and they experienced some difficult seas.


Fascinating to find out what their journey was like coming here to the United States more than 150 years ago. And now I have the names of my 4th great-grandparents that came from Holland. Looks like I need to learn about doing research in the Netherlands!