Card manifest

Officials found it impractical to keep ship-style lists at Mexican border crossings, so each arrival got a card with much the same questions: name, age, sex, marital status, occupation, last residence, destination and the friend or relative being joined. The most common was Form 548, later I-448, and some cards carry a photograph on the back. On the Canadian border, where U.S. records begin in 1895, arrivals were mostly entered on lists, and the cards searched there today are a Soundex index made from those lists in the 1930s.

Many card series are filed alphabetically by surname under special rules, so similar names may be mixed together. Some ports also used separate statistical and nonstatistical cards, and the back of a card can note later crossings.