Owing to the total destruction of the original Bremen passenger lists, the fourth volume of German Immigrants, like the others in the series, is the only practical means of discovering information on 32,000 individuals who departed from Bremen for the port of New York, for whom immigrant origin data was thought to be irretrievably lost. In effect, it is a partial reconstruction of the Bremen records, based on official passenger lists and manifests in the custody of the National Archives. It is, therefore, a record of arrivals rather than departures, and is the closest we are ever likely to come to duplicating information in the lost Bremen records.