My grandgrandparents (Aranovich, Guerberoff) lived in Izmail,Besarabia, today Ukraine, in 1905 they came to Argentina by ship from Hamburg to Buenos Aires in the Cap Arcona, from Hamburg Sud company
I d like to know how they travelled from Besarabia to Hamburg by that time. By ship by the Danube River, or they went to Odessa and then by ship from the Mediterranean Sea, or perhaps by any means in land crossing.
Are possible routes or records to search?

Ricardo: Besarabia being in the Russian empire, the first problem they probably had was to leave it. If they had a passport, that would be easy, but it was difficult and expensive to get a passport. People usually passed the border to Austria-Hungary by night, maybe bribing the guards, often with the help of some "migration agent".   Once in Austria-Hungary (in their case that would be the provinces of Bucovina or Galicia), the train to Vienna and then to Leipzig (where there was a "registration station"), then Berlin (where there were sanitary controls) and finally Hamburg.

Ricardo : I’m not sure there were any passenger ships along the Danube in 1905. Taking a ship from Odessa to Hamburg and then another one to Argentina seems unlikely.  But : they can very well have traveled somehow from Izmail to Odessa, or to Iasi or to an even closer place like Galatz (Gali). In 1905 there was already a railway line  from those places, northbound. I could imagine they traveled for say 12 hours to Kamenetz-Podolsk and from there, by cart again, to Brody, in Galicia.  My own grandparents came from Kamenetz to Argentina in 1889.   Jorge Sexer

Ricardo,  that is very good question, and many people asked it before.

There were many ways to get to Humburg,  and two of them you mentioned in your message were valid means of transportation in these years.
Also they could go by train.  The city in Romania Galats was connected with other European countries, and Ismail is not that far from Galats, only 60 miles.

The other way possible is thru Kishinev, although it is longer way to Kishinev,  but Kishinev was connected to European countries via Yassy.

I would think that the ship option from Ismail to some of European countries on Danube is more likely.
I never find any records of these travels,  only in people's stories I saw that some went to Odessa, etc.

All the best,
Yefim

Thanks for your reply, I'm thinking that by that time (1905) emigration might have been organized, probably by the JCA or Baron Hirsch, as thousands of families came from Besarabia to Argentina. So travel routes to get to Hamburg might have been well prepared. Perhaps there are old archives with that information, plans, etc.
Ship or train.
Another way is to ask people living in Izmail if there was ship traffic by the Danube and since when

Ricardo Rubinstein