this gave me a belly laugh for awhile. I found it on another list. no
problem with copywrites.
.I have searched
Ancestry.com,Family Search,various Ships Lists,& Castle
Garden and cannot find emigration.Naturalization papers
indicate he came over in 1873. "They must have swum".
There were tens of thousands of German immigrants who swam over. The sea must have been so think with them that one could walk on their backs from the UK to NY. 
I have 4 swimmers in my family. Even knowing the day, month, year, and ship, they are still not in the ship lists. In one case, I have a document they signed while they were here visiting.
Michael:
I loved this ... I always thought it was 'immaculate conception' but yours
probably is more reasonable. Maybe their inherited the 'parting of the
waters' ability from their ancestors :o)
To a more serious nature, I had the same problem. I looked at all the
microfilms for passenger lists for every ship from Germany -- nothing!!
Then I contacted Hamburg to see if they have their embarkation records ..
they did .. I checked the ship and rather than arriving from Germany, it had
arrived from La Havre, France !! I then discovered that many ships stopped
at several ports before arriving in America ...
I also found that sometimes the ship docked on one day and they did not
allow people to come off until the next day, so the dates were actually
different from the naturalization versus the arrival dates.
Hope this helps you find your 'swimmers' or 'walkers' :o)
Bonita
Bonita,
What in Hamburg, Regina and her crew at hist.de, or archives?
- Michael
Oh, the Emgration Archives. I knew the year -- they looked up and found
them -- which included the last village of residence -- which put a hole in
the 'brick wall' and really helped. They sent me a nice frameable copy of
the passenger list. It was US$60 in the mid-1990s .. no telling what it will
cost now. They do have a website .. just Google for Hamburg and Immigration
or Emigration.
Bonita
Many Germans also came to the USA from the British ports, like Liverpool and Manchester, as well as French ports like Marseilles and LeHavre. Wherever they could get to that had ocean-going vessels!
The Germans were late getting into the business of trans-Atlantic passenger crossings and didn't have passenger ships that could make it across the ocean until long after the Dutch and the English were firmly established. So, many of the Germans sailed up the Rhine to Dutch ports .. or up the Rhine to places where it was easy to cross Belgium to Antwerp ... or took schooners and other smaller vessels from places like Bremen and Hamburg to Liverpool or Manchester in England.
When the Germans did finally open their trans-Atlantic passenger service and build the new port of Bremerhaven, etc., the English and Dutch quickly spread out to deny them landing space in New York City. So the German passenger lines went to the New Jersey side of the Hudson River and, although it was still called "the Port of New York," the passengers on the German lines debarked in cities like Hoboken and Jersey City and Bayonne, New Jersey.
Many Germans who settled on the east coast also came in through Baltimore, so you must keep looking at those passenger lists.