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The passenger records found in this scarce volume were transcribed from State Department copies of passenger lists submitted by foreign ships' captains upon arrival at American ports between 1821 and 1823. From that standpoint, the book is a sequel to a similar work published by the U.S. State Department and covering passenger records from October 1819 to September 1820. (The original transcripts for the period September 1820 to September 1821 are no longer extant and have never been published.)

Most of the immigrants found here embarked from the British Isles; however, researchers will find more than 100 cities or countries listed as places of origin at the front of the book. Similarly, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans were the principal ports of arrival, but nearly 40 ports of entry accommodated the newcomers as a whole. The records themselves are arranged by calendar quarter and thereunder by port and vessel. Each passenger is identified by name, age, sex, occupation, country to which he/she belongs, and country of intended habitation. In all, genealogists will discover some 18,000 early 19th-century immigrants named here, each of whom and whose ship is readily found in the indexes at the back of the book.