hey hey, got a finicky research question that I'm hoping you might be able to help with, since you were looking at marine lists trying to figure out if the mysterious Josie was a passenger on the Asia. I'm trying to track down the transatlantic movements of a few specific people in the 1860s, but these folks would all have been traveling for business purposes rather than immigration. all the New York passenger lists I've been perusing so far seem to be wall-to-wall immigration info. are records of non-immigrant travelers in a different type of record, or called a different thing, do you have any idea?
It varies quite a bit depending on what ports are involved, but in the 1850s/60s all passengers should appear on the same list - however in my personal experience the Port of New York in particular is sometimes missing non-steerage passengers.
If you're not getting any hits in passenger records, arrival lists in newspapers are always a good alternative for non-immigrant travel. I usually just search for the passenger name in quotes + arrivals.
Keep in mind that passenger lists in the 1860s often only included last names, so you may have more luck searching for "Mr. Doe" rather than "John Doe" - which can suck if you're dealing with a very common last name.
This goes for searching passenger manifests as well. I am a firm advocate of including as little info as the search engine will allow when searching through records. If you search for "John Doe" and your target is listed as "J. T. Doe" or just "Mr. Doe" you may not get a match depending on your search settings.
Transcription errors also abound with any handwritten documents - which nearly all manifest are - so be sure to try some alternate spellings or experiment with some asterisks (if whatever site you're using allows) if you're not getting any matches. And*s*n will return Anderson, Andersen, Andreessen, etc.
For inbound New York passengers my go-to newspaper for arrival lists is the New-York Tribune, which is searchable for free through the Library of Congress (Chronicling America) collection.
Though it often depends on how large a city the person you are researching was from, it's always worth checking local papers to see if they mention their travel plans. It's not uncommon for small town personal sections to include comings and goings of more prominent citizens. Businessmen in particular, depending on the industry, would occasionally place notices in the paper letting their customers know they would be abroad and for how long - which can at least give you a time range to work with.
If you're looking at images of the actual passenger list, non-immigrant travelers are most often listed at the very beginning or very end of the manifest - so if you know what ship they were supposed to be on try checking the first and last pages.
Most standard manifest forms used the last column to specify where on the ship the passengers traveled. Business travelers were most-likely "cabin" passengers (1st/2nd class)...
as opposed to steerage passengers, who were usually immigrants...
Sometimes the images on research sites zoom in on the name automatically and you can't see the last column, so that info can be easy to miss.
Hope some of this was helpful! Feel free to message me if you have any more specific questions or still aren't finding anything useful.
