idea 33 · build only
RFQ checklist
What to bring to a research appointment, as a checklist.
Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation
The Family History Center asks researchers to arrive with names, approximate arrival years and ports, because the search across 100 million records needs somewhere to start.
https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/family-history-center/Research appointment
Bring these six things
0 of 6 ready
A surname, spelled the way it was written thenNot the way the family spells it now. Both if you have both.
A decade, at leastA year is better. A decade is workable.
A port, or a country of departureThis is what narrows a hundred million records.
Any document you already holdA photograph of it is enough. Bring the whole page.
Names of anyone travelling with themPeople arrived in groups and were indexed in groups.
What you have already ruled outSo nobody spends the appointment repeating it.
Ticks are saved on the device, so somebody can work through this over a week and arrive with it finished.
State persists in localStorage, which is what turns a list into a tool: people tick these off across several evenings. Every line exists because a research desk loses an appointment to it. The sixth one saves the most time.