The people who landed in Cuba or sailed from it, named as Havana's newspapers printed them, almost all between 1847 and 1882.
From the 1840s on, Havana's papers listed the passengers of every ship that came in or went out. Volunteers at CubaGenWeb, the oldest Cuban genealogy site still running, indexed the lists; the index is published here again after it went offline there.
What these lists are
When a ship reached Havana, or left it, the port's papers printed its name, its type and flag, the port it came from or was bound for, and the passengers aboard. The Diario de la Marina did this for decades, and 98 in every 100 names here come from its pages. The rest come from the Gaceta de la Habana and three other newspapers, from Spain's state archives, from a municipal archive in Gijón and from the Catálogo de Pasajeros a Indias, which reaches back to 1514.
A record here is one name on one printed list. It is not a full manifest, because the papers usually printed the head of a family and only counted the rest. Nor is it every crossing: not every ship's list was indexed, and the index has very little after 1882.
Before you search
- Start with one surname. Most lists print only the first surname. Leave the second surname box empty unless you know the paper printed it: "Juan Valdivia" finds what "Juan Valdivia Fernández" would miss.
- Choose Exact or Include similar. Exact finds the spelling you typed. Include similar also finds names that begin with it and spellings a letter or two apart, so Vázquez finds Vásquez. The papers often misspelled names; accents and capitals never matter.
- Look for the head of the family. A wife, a child or a servant is usually not a name of their own but a note beside someone else's, such as "& Sra." or "& 2 hijos". Search for the husband or the father.
- Narrow by ship, port or year. Under More filters, type a ship's name, a port in Place (it checks both where the ship came from and where it was going), or a range of years. A name box can be left empty to list everyone on a ship or in a year.
- Open the whole list. Each record shows everyone else printed on the same arrival or departure, under its voyage code (such as M0263). Relatives often travelled together. The code was given by the index's compilers; no ship ever carried it.
- The date is the newspaper's. It is the day the list was printed. The ship had usually come in a few days before.
Reading a record
Names, ships and ports are given as the newspaper printed them, misspellings included. A ship can appear under two spellings, and one ship name can belong to two different vessels, so check the vessel type and the dates before joining records together. A remark in brackets, such as "(ilegible)" or "(duplicado?)", was added by the volunteer who read the page.
For every port the index uses, see the lists of ports of departure and ports of arrival.
Ports with older names
- Cuba
- Santiago de Cuba
- Puerto Rico
- San Juan
- Cayo Hueso
- Key West
- Mobila
- Mobile, Alabama
- Aspinwall
- Colón, Panama
Abbreviations in the lists
Titles and forms of address:
- Sr.
- Señor
- Sra.
- Señora
- Srta.
- Señorita
- Da.
- Doña
- Dr.
- Doctor
- Lcdo.
- Licenciado
- Pbro.
- Presbítero, a priest
- Sor
- A nun
- Excmo.
- Excelentísimo
- Illmo.
- Ilustrísimo
- Mr., Mrs.
- Mister, Mistress
- Miss
- Señorita
- Mme., Mad.
- Madame
Given names:
- Ma.
- María
- F. de P.
- Francisco de Paula
- de D.
- de Dios
- de J.
- de Jesús
- de la C.
- de la Cruz; for a woman, also de la Caridad or de la Concepción
- Ch.
- Charles
- Geo.
- George
- Ed.
- Eduardo or Edward
CubaGenWeb's volunteers could not resolve "de la M.", "de la P." and "de la R.", which appear on men's names.
Sources
Every record names the source it was read from.
- Diario de la MarinaHavana's daily. Its arrivals and departures columns, 1844 to 1899.332,270
- Gaceta de la HabanaThe official gazette, Havana, 1848 to 1872.2,336
- Jorge PiñónTranscribed from the municipal archive of Gijón, 1854 to 1860. Unpublished.1,197
- PARESSpain's online state archives, Portal de Archivos Españoles.1,129
- Catálogo de Pasajeros a IndiasLicences to sail to the Americas, 1514 to 1599. Published in Seville and Madrid.489
- La Voz de CubaHavana newspaper, 1876 to 1885.343
- La Unión ConstitucionalHavana newspaper, 1891.50
- El Bien PúblicoSantiago de Cuba newspaper, 1885.41
- Miriam Rivera and David ChudleighA single list from 1686. Unpublished.36
- Ship manifestsManifests filed at the port of arrival, 1866, from Ancestry.com.9
A further 2,038 records cite no source, or cite an abbreviation (DH, LC, MF) that the original index never explained. They are kept as they were received.
CubaGenWeb's own pages discuss the sources at greater length: the ships index and the passenger lists.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Ed Elizondo, administrator of CubaGenWeb, who gave the database to Cuba Research Project so it could be public again. The records were compiled by Jorge Piñón, Ingrid Palica, Mariela Fernández, Lourdes del Pino, Conchita Gutiérrez, Juan Tamayo and Lydia Reyes. Aileen Vega, host of the Cuban Family Roots Podcast, helped bring it back.
The picture at the top of this page is James Bard's 1853 painting of the Black Warrior, a mail steamer that carried passengers between Havana and New York, Mobile and New Orleans, and appears in these lists from 1852 to 1859. In 1854 the Spanish authorities seized her in Havana harbour, the "Black Warrior affair". No photograph of any ship in these lists is known to be in the public domain. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)