I hadn’t thought much about researching the Italian side of my family. I knew the facts: my grandfather, Lou Ventura, came to America as a teenager with his parents and siblings and lived in New York City for the rest of his life.

His was the easiest of my four grandparents’ families to find in the census, right where they should have been. My other family lines had name changes, missing years, countries and hometowns I could never pronounce and that didn’t seem to remain the same over the course of any two decades. They had elusive documents I could never find, immigration dates and spouse that always seemed to be in flux.

The Venturas? Relatively speaking, they were white bread. But I wanted my family history piled high on a croissant, a scone, even a bagel.

Then I found Lou’s naturalization record, which included his birth date, when and where he and his first wife were married, his hometown, an old photo, and his signature, which I recognized from birthday cards he’d sent when I was a kid. And the kicker: an address. I plugged it into Google and found a current photo of the house where my mother was born, a place even she wasn’t aware of.

New York, New York. It’s a wonderful town.

There are benefits to having family that spent time in a large city like New York. You can easily learn more about a city like New York via history books (try to find something written about the town I live in now — it’s all of 1,000 people, as large as it’s ever been). And you’re always just an e-mail, message board, or phone call away from someone else who is researching the same ethnic group in the same community.

And then there are the records. That apartment I found on Google? The city of New York took a picture of it back in 1939 for tax purposes and again in the 1980s; truth be told, the city took a photo of every residence in the city limits. You can order the photos online from the municipal archives. I did. Now I have a clearer image of both history and present day.

My family got to New York City in the 1920s. More than 300 years earlier (in 1609 to be exact), Henry Hudson sailed from New York Harbor up the river that now bears his name. In the 400 years since, people from across the globe have come, gone, stayed, returned, and settled in.

So for this issue of Ancestry Magazine, we tossed the history books aside, going straight to the throngs of immigrants — and four ethnic groups specifically — who flooded New York’s ports and scattered through the town and to points elsewhere. We got the scoop on immigrants life in New York courtesy of the experts and coupled their views with a handful of tips to help you discover what’s waiting when you research your own family’s history in the town so nice, so big, they had to name it twice.

Ethnic Group: German

• • Total number who immigrated to America: 5 million (19th century)

• • Percentage of population in America today claiming German heritage: 17 percent

• • Waves of immigration: The majority of German immigrants started coming in the mid-1840s, with the largest year of immigration occurring in

  • 1854; another wave started in the early 1880s. German immigration decreased after 1890.

Read more    

Ethnic Group: Irish

• • Total number who immigrated to America: 4.8 million

• • Percentage of population in America today claiming Irish heritage: 12.1 percent

• • Waves of immigration: Various, plus a steady stream of immigrants throughout America’s history. Biggest wave was between 1847 and 1855 — during the potato famine. Additional waves in the 1700s, 1870s, and 1890s.

Read more

Ethnic Group: Eastern European Jews

• • Total number who immigrated to America: 2 million (1890-1950)

• • Percentage of population in America today claiming Jewish heritage: 2 percent

• • Waves of immigration: The largest wave of Jewish immigrants came between 1890 and 1915. A second wave of immigration occurred right after the First World War.

Read more

Ethnic Group: Italian

• • Total number who immigrated to America: more than 4 million

• • Percentage of population in America today claiming Italian heritage: 5.6 percent

• • Waves of immigration: 1880 through 1920s

Read more 

Return to New York 400th Anniversary page