Paper Trails: Tracing Migration Through Family Documentation
A Collaboration between Ancestry Classroom, Donna M. Neary, and Re-Imagining Migration
Every family has migration stories. Some are told proudly across generations. Others are whispered carefully, or left unspoken entirely. But whether celebrated or concealed, these stories of movement—of people leaving one place to seek opportunity, safety, or belonging in another—are woven into the fabric of who we are.
This collection of lessons invites students to become genealogical detectives, tracing individual migration journeys through the primary documents that families leave behind: ship manifests, census records, interrogation transcripts, naturalization papers, voter registrations, and the stories people tell about their own experiences. By following these paper trails, students discover that migration is not an exception to the American story—it is the American story, repeated across centuries and continents in countless variations.
