Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S., Arriving and Departing Passenger and Crew Lists, 1900-1959

The captain or master of each vessel was required to submit passenger lists to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) upon arrival if they had departed from a foreign port or if their last scheduled U.S. port of arrival was Honolulu. This data collection contains passenger arrival and departure lists for Honolulu, Hawaii from 1900 to 1959 including both alien and U.S. citizen arrivals. In later years passengers may have arrived by airplane rather than by ship.

In the early 1900s, with the development of the sugar cane industry, competing companies sought to attract immigrants to work as contract laborers in the islands. A wide variety of nationalities were recruited including Chinese, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Korean, Japanese, and others in smaller concentrations. Today the Japanese have become the largest ethnic population in the state and less than 1 percent of Hawaii’s population is pure-blooded Hawaiian.

Passenger list forms differed between aliens and U.S. citizens, some from the INS and others from steamship companies. Many are several pages long making it necessary to navigate forward and backward in the image viewer in order to see all of the images pertaining to a particular manifest.

INS forms used to record information about passengers and aliens:

• Form I-418, Passenger List / Crew List
• Form I-259, Notice to Deliver, Detain on Board, or Remove Alien

Typical information recorded on a passenger list includes:

• Name of passenger
• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Occupation
• Citizenship (nationality)
• Last permanent residence
• Birthplace
• Ultimate destination
• Name and address of individual intended to join
• Date of arrival
• Date and place of last arrival in the U.S.
• Physical description

Updates:
13 Jan 2022: Added 523,569 relative contact names.