Hello to all! I've got a real corker of a problem in front of me -- sorry this is so long. Also sorry it's so frustrated sounding.
I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on how to chase down images of a passenger manifest that has been so badly indexed that even EllisIsland.org doesn't show the right image, and the NARA Italians to America database search page is no help.
I believe I MAY have found a (badly misspelled) name that belongs to an ancestor of mine. There is a good chance that the name "Nicola Pastetto" at EllisIsland.org is actually Nicola Pistilli, for whom I have been searching for some time. He is shown as having left on the Trojan Prince on 4/14/1902. (I'm VERY confident that this name is wrong since a search at gens.info for that surname in modern Italy returns no results as spelled. Other names on this supposed manifest have also been horribly mangled as well, so someone really blew it indexing this thing. I mean, "Panasoti Costaki?" "Guiseppe Ascolye?" Really?)
However, the manifest image that the Ellis website shows is one for the Saxonia which left Queensland 4/4/1902. Clicking back and forth on "previous" and "next" returns NO images of a manifest for the Trojan Prince having left Naples on 4/14.
A search at
the NARA website shows that there is one manifest for the Trojan Prince which left Genoa on 4/14, but none from Naples on that date. The closest Naples departure for that ship was on 2/16/1902.
To make matters worse, one NARA search form gives me a manifest identification number for the 2/16 Naples departure that the other search form doesn't recognize!
Does anyone have any guidelines for how to untangle this and get hold of a manifest image for something that has apparently been so badly indexed that even Ellis Island and the National Archives can't seem to keep it straight? I've been having a terrible time finding this one ancestor, and I'd dearly love to actually lay eyes on a scan of this actual manifest if it exists. Given that neither site can seem to reconcile where it left from and when, I can't even begin to figure out what some anonymous indexer was even looking at while indexing, but this record belongs to
somebody.
Again, sorry this is so long and that I sound so frustrated. Thanks so much for any advice anyone can give me.
tl;dr -- Trying to find scanned image of horribly badly misindexed passenger manifest that neither EllisIsland.org nor NARA website can manage. Help?
UPDATE: I should also specify that I've search in every conceivable way for a Nicola Pistilli. Ellis, Stephen Morse's search at JewishGen, the NARA databases, FamilySearch. Every possible wildcard you can imagine with no positive results. I have managed to find his brothers, whose names were also mangled almost beyond recognition, so I'm confident that if he were among the low-hanging fruit, I'd have found him. This is part of why this record intrigues me so much. I've already aimed for ALL of the low-hanging fruit, and some which required stepladder, and come up empty. At this point, he's probably embedded in a manifest someplace that is precisely as mixed-up as this one appears to be.