Hamburg - It was called the Embarkation City, and it certainly lived up to its reputation.

Between 1850 and 1939, some 5.2 million European emigrants left their homelands via Hamburg in search of a better life across the Atlantic.

Today, the northern German port's achievement in becoming a Gateway to the New World is remembered by a museum called "BallinStadt - Emigrant World Hamburg."

Every month, hundreds of visitors from around the world descend on the museum, eager to trace the roots of their ancestors. Hamburg has the world's most extensive emigration records.

There are 550 ship's manifests, preciously stored in a Hamburg City Hall cellar, which contain the names of 5 million passengers who departed for the US, Canada and Latin America in the early 1900s.

At the museum's research centre it is not only possible to search the old passenger lists but also to access the world's largest genealogical database.

Nina Siepmann, a historian working at the BallinStadt museum, says there are parallels between present-day migration and that from Germany in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

"As was the case back then, people who move to other countries today still harbour the same dreams, hopes and aspirations of earlier emigrants. They're eager to start new lives, find jobs, lead a life of dignity and respect with their families in other countries," she says.

In 1907, some 190,000 people from Germany and Central and Eastern European countries emigrated to the New World from Hamburg. In 2005, it was 150,000 - people emigrating "mainly for economic reasons."

The difference between then and now, Siepmann says, is that in the early part of the 20th century it was less difficult for people to gain entry to the US, Canada and Australia.

"The result is an increasing number of people nowadays head to other European countries or to Scandinavia," she says.

Berlin-based Serb writer-translator Nikola Zivkovic, 57, used the museum's "family research centre" to uncover precise details of his grandfather Ilija Zivkovic, and aunt Marta Bracika's, emigration to the US in 1912 and 1927 respectively.

"I was hazy about the dates of their emigration but that proved no problem for museum director, Rainer Diessner, who traced their personal hand-written emigration documents within minutes during a computer search," he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa. of his delight at tracing atsaid an excited Zivkovic.

"My grandfather was a Serb, born in Dragosevci, a village then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today located in Croatia near the Slovenian border. After a week spent at the Hamburg emigration centre in March 1912 he left Rotterdam aboard a Halifax, Nova Scotia-bound ship.

"From there he moved to Vancouver where another of my relatives was living. My aunt, who was born in 1904 and who was also from Dragosevci, left by the same route in 
1927, also after a brief stay in Hamburg.

"She would marry and remain in Vancouver all her life, but my grandfather would ultimately return to Dragosevci," explained Zivkovic, who has numerous relatives in Canada and the US.

Siepmann confirms that of the millions of people who emigrated, about a third would ultimately return to Europe.

The BallinStadt Museum is named after Albert Ballin, a 19th century director of the HAPAG shipping company.

Shocked at conditions for the swelling number of people arriving in Hamburg in the hope of emigrating to the US and Canada, Ballin had a departure "city" constructed.

Thirty redbrick barracks were built to house up to 5,000 people, along with a church, synagogue, dispensary and small pavilion for concerts on the island of Veddel, on the southern edge of the port.

So impressive was the facility that it was awarded a prize at the World Exhibition in Paris, and when it opened in December 1901 it also won international recognition for Hapag.

In 1906 close to 102,000 emigrants from Germany, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Tsarist empires were accommodated there cheaply until their ocean liners departed.

The outbreak of World War 1 interrupted the flow of emigration. The number of in-transit passengers also declined from an impressive 170,000 in 1913 to a mere 20,000 by 
1924.

The shipping line scaled down the facility. By the time of the great depression in the late 1920s and early 30s, a town for accommodating passengers in transit was no longer needed and the site was returned to the Hamburg authorities in 1934.

The emigrant town houses were later demolished. But now four of the 30 barracks from the 1900s have been accurately rebuilt to house "the BallinStadt Museum." Suitcases in which emigrants kept their life's possessions are among the 360 exhibits put together for the exhibition.

On old-style telephones you can hear the voices of emigrants reporting back to their homeland, while puppets representing various countries relate stories from the New World. (dpa)