One-Step Webpages



A genealogy researcher, Stephen P. Morse, created alternate ways of accessing some of these
genealogical websites. In addition, he developed some of his own databases and programs to facilitate doing genealogical research. These are all collected together under what he has called the ‘One-Step‘ website.

Morse developed the One-Step website and it is broken down into twelve sections.

Ellis Island Search Forms and Ship Arrivals – This has passenger records of 25 million immigrants who came to this country between 1892 and 1924. This section deals with the Ellis Island database and various ways of searching for passengers in it.

Ship Pictures – A collection of pictures of the ships that brought immigrates across the oceans. There are many websites that contain such pictures, and Morse combined those into a One-Step Ship-Pictures tool.

Castle Garden and Earlier Search Forms and Ship Arrivals — Prior to Ellis Island there were other facilities in New York for processing immigrants. Starting in 1820, each ship recorded all passengers’ names. However, prior to 1855 passengers were not processed upon their arrival and simply walked off the ship. In 1855 New York State began processing the immigrants and did so at a facility in lower Manhattan known as Castle Garden.

Other Ports of Immigration – A list of some other popular ports during the peak immigration years, and the years for which the records are online: Baltimore 1820 to 1948, Boston 1820 to 1943, Galveston 1844 to 1954, Philadelphia 1800 to 1945 and San Francisco 1893 to 1953.

U. S. Census and Soundex — Morse showed how to use the Soundex is a fundamental component of search-by-name. For each of the decade censuses done since 1790, information is provided on how best to search using a name, location or street address.

Canadian and British Census — Morse covers the free Canadian and British 1881 and 1901 censuses online and also how to locate individuals in all the earlier censuses.

New York Census — In the state of New York censuses for 1905, 1915 and 1925 have proved to be the best preserved. These are of great value to genealogists because of the large influx of immigrants during those years, and because so many of those immigrants settled in New York even if only for a brief period.

Births, Deaths, and other Vital Records — For searching birth dates Morse offers several sites for finding a birth date. They include: birthdatabase.com, privateeye.com, zabasearch.com, ancestry.com, and myfamily.com. There is the Social Security Death Index database, with deceased social security recipients, that is updated monthly. The SSDI database has a high percentage of missing names from the 1950s, but very few names prior to that. The New York Naturalization Records, which is made up of various local databases. For example, there is the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York online, the Brooklyn Naturalization Records for the early years of the 20th century is available online, and the Italian Genealogical Group has done the same for much of the Greater New York area. Using Morse’s One-step naturalization tool a researcher can search all the naturalization databases at once. With the New York Incarceration Records, all the prison records can be searched for the state of New York.

Calendar, Sunrise/Sunset, and Maps — Here Morse provides the Jewish Calendar which has a conversion program. There is a sunrise and sunset program to learning when each occurred in a given location and a given date. With maps, there is a road map, contour map, or aerial photo of practically any place on Earth.

Dealing with Characters in Foreign Alphabets — To assist when viewing documents in a foreign language especially those which using different alphabets, Morse has the website provide tools to make working with these alphabets a little less painful. The specific alphabets covered are Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as all the accentuated characters in the various Latin-based alphabets.

Holocaust and Eastern Europe – This covers a series of databases having to do with the Holocaust period. Some of the underlying websites that hosts the data are in Polish or Russian, so the One-Step tools present an English front end for interacting with those websites.

With each of his linking sites Morse lists which would require a membership fee and which are free to use online.

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