The main sources that have been used to obtain the figures before 1899 are the reports of three Jewish societies which were concerned with the care of the Jewish immigrants arriving at the principal ports of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. These were the United Hebrew Charities, of New York; the Association for the Protection of Jewish Immigrants, of Philadelphia; and the Hebrew Benevolent Society, of Baltimore. Each of these maintained an agent who, besides his other duties, collected statistical information concerning the sex, age, country of nativity, occupation, destination, etc., of the Jewish immigrants, partly from the ships' manifests and partly through personal inquiry. The statistical information thus obtained was regularly included in the annual reports of these societies. These records were begun by the New York and Philadelphia societies, in 1884, and by the Baltimore society, in 1891. As the yearly statistical tables of these reports were made to correspond with the annual meeting of these societies,[48] it was found advisable to rearrange them from July to June, in order to have them correspond with the fiscal year, and thus allow for a proper comparison with the official data furnished by the immigration authorities. As rearranged, the tables presented the number of Jewish immigrants entering the ports of New York and Philadelphia from July 1, 1886, to June 30, 1898, and the number of Jewish immigrants entering the port of Baltimore from July 1, 1891, to June 30, 1898.[49] As these three ports were, up to recent years, the places of entry of all but a very small number of Jewish immigrants, the figures thus obtained represent practically the total Jewish immigration to the United States from 1886 to 1898. To ascertain the nationality or country of nativity of the Jewish immigrants from 1886 to 1898, it was necessary to redistribute in accordance with the fiscal year the monthly arrivals found in the tables of the United Hebrew Charities, which contain the figures for each nationality.[50] As the reports of the Philadelphia society gave only the totals of arrivals of each nationality for each year but not distributed by months, the following method was employed. The percentage the immigration of each nativity constituted of the total immigration from November to October (the society's year) was used as the basis for calculating the annual immigration of each nativity from July to June.[51] There being no essential difference between Baltimore and Philadelphia, so far as Jewish immigrants of each nationality are concerned, the same percentages were used as for Philadelphia.[52]