Hello my genealogical friends and welcome back to another blog post! I hope that your research has been going well and your trees are ever expanding! Today I hope to help you grow those trees more by unraveling the mystery behind the definitions of immigration and emigration and how they may play a role in individual ancestor’s stories that have led your family to where you live today. It is important to understand these words unique definitions as they help you correctly determine your ancestors’ relationships with different countries and further more how you are connected to those countries.
Let’s begin by breaking down what the term emigration means. This term is not talked about nearly as much as its sister term immigration; however, it plays an equally important role in understanding your ancestor’s relationship with specific countries. Emigration describes the actual act of the relocation a person who once lived in elsewhere (another country) and now lives in a different country. For example, if a Canadian decided to move to the U.S. she would be considered an emigrant by herself and others from Canada. However, to those from the U.S. and the U.S. itself she would be considered an immigrant. We will get more into how these differ when I explain what the term immigration means.
So, what does immigration mean? Perhaps before I explained what emigration meant you simply assumed that was immigrations definition. Well like I stated earlier the immigration and emigration are sister terms and thus are very similar and easy to get confused. Immigration, however, is the term used to refer to a third person not from the same country you are from. For example, you would call or consider the Canadian that decided to move to the U.S. an immigrant. The only difference between using the term immigration or emigration truly depends upon which perspective you are coming from. If you are also from the same country a person has come from, they are an emigrant. If you are from the same country a person has emigrated to, they are an immigrant.
Understanding that people from different perspectives may use different terminology in reference to your ancestor and their movements can help you untangle where your ancestor came from and where they settled. This might further your own understanding of how you ended up living in the area you are now living. Most importantly it might help you trace your family roots back farther by allowing you to look maybe across the pond for records of your family’s further past. As your taking a look at immigration and emigration records it might help you to have some context about important migration periods in history. Some I would suggest are Pennsylvania and Germantown, The Great Potato Famine, Ellis Island opening, and the Emergency Quota Act.
I hope that this post has cleared up the meaning of emigration and immigration for you. I know that given how similar these terms are it might take you awhile to understand the differences between them. Feel free to re-read this post as many times as you may need or consult Google on the definitions time and time again as you go about your genealogical research if you’re unsure of which sort of documentation you should be searching for. As always, I encourage you to take a look at my Webinars if you have further questions I didn’t answer here and if your questions are still not answered after consulting them, please feel free to reach out via the above contact info. Happy researching!
Winona Laird
The Genealogy Granny
