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Between 1871 and 1910 more than 2.3 million Russian immigrants arrived in the United States, some 600,000 between 1871 and 1898 and 1.7 million between 1899 and 1910. Of the 1.7 million Russian emigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1899 and 1910, 43 percent were Jews, 27 percent Poles, 9 percent Lithuanians, 8 percent Finns, 5 percent Germans, and 4 percent indigenous Russians.

The first six volumes of Migration from the Russian Empire (see also Items 6602, 6603, 6604, 6605, and 6606) cover the period from January 1875 through June 1891 (the work will eventually comprise numerous volumes and extend to the year 1910).

Volumes One through Six contain data on hundreds of thousands of persons of Russian nationality who emigrated to the United States from Russian territories. The information was extracted from the original ships' passenger lists held by the Temple-Balch Center for Immigration Research. These passenger lists--customs passenger lists and immigration passenger lists, as they are known--are the only records that furnish proof of the arrival in the United States of all 2.3 million immigrants from the Russian Empire.

Information in the first volume corresponds to the information given in the passenger lists--name of passenger, his age, sex, occupation, country of origin, place of residence, and destination; additionally, each passenger list is headed by the name of the ship, the port of embarkation, the port of arrival, and the date of arrival. By the 1890s, information furnished by the passengers would include their last place of residence in Europe and their precise destination in the U.S.

For researchers investigating their Russian family origins, this type of information is the very bedrock on which all American family history is built.