Finding how an ancestor went from Europe to the US can be difficult from
afar, especially. There are printed indexes to passenger lists for
almost every US port, but not in every library by far. BUT there is no
index for the largest one of them all, New York, from 1846 to 1892 when
the Ellis Island database picks up. A huge problem for many researchers.
All that a passenger list will tell you is just that, a list of
passengers and, if one is lucky, perhaps who may have traveled with the
person, such as a spouse or children, a sibling or two, or parents.
That, and the port of embarkation, which from England was most often
Liverpool. Lists don't exist for very early times, but do for 1880s.
If the person became an American citizen (was naturalized, but not all
applied), the application information could/might supply when and where
the person entered the US -- and that could also be not by ship, but
over the border from Canada, having taken a ship to Quebec, Montreal,
etc. Prior to 1906 when naturalization became a federal process, it
could be accomplished in any "court of record" after fulfilling a
residency requirement, which changed from time to time. What is that? It
could be as small as a town's or county's civil, criminal, orphan's or
any number of special courts that kept a permanent record, in various
state courts, or the regional federal court. You have to know where the
person lived and what were the possible courts in that vicinity (even
acrosss state borders) to find (you hope) the record. Note that not all
courts required an application, and some such have not survived that did.
Hope this information helps. Sally