Holland America Line Offers Up Digitized Passenger Lists From 1900 Onward

As one feature of Holland America Line’s 150^th anniversary celebration, travelers the world over can now get a personal look at the cruise line’s role in immigration stories for thousands of families. Beginning in 2018, CBG | Center for Family History teamed up with Rotterdam City Archives to start digitizing Holland America Line’s passenger lists. These lists are now available on the Rotterdam City Archives website, where anyone can search for a family member who traveled or emigrated with Holland America Line between 1900 and 1969.

This three-year project was completed with the help of volunteers from the Dutch crowdsourcing platform Many Hands. Volunteers scanned approximately 150,000 passenger logs and documents and entered them into the database.

The oldest preserved list in the database dates to May 3, 1900, with the last passenger recorded in the database dating to December 29, 1969. The database reveals some intriguing  information, including children being born onboard and even a dog that travelled all by itself. Another notable passenger was a stowaway – on June 30, 1917, the Nieuw Amsterdam departed Rotterdam with one extra passenger. During the voyage, the crew found passenger Pieter Kuit did not pay for his trip. The passenger list was subsequently marked “A stowaway was on board”.

There are also some famous passengers found on the passenger lists, including Albert Einstein. He sailed between Rotterdam and New York on the S.S. Rotterdam on March 23, 1921. Nor was it Professor Einstein’s only voyage – his name appears on the passenger lists several times over the years.

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