The Ships

Shortly after Ellis Island was opened as an immigration museum, I had the opportunity to visit it with family. Approaching the island by ferry, we could imagine what it might have been like for immigrants to get their first glimpse of the new world, although I was quite conscious that we were experiencing a very brief, comfortable ferry ride. I didn't even want to imagine the hardship of the overseas voyage in steerage conditions.

Entering the main building I could feel the presence of the millions of people who filed through before, like dim echoes or a faint lingering scent. Fanciful, I know, but such was the atmosphere. After seeing the exhibits, we wandering around the wall of names, looking for possible ancestors there, but finding none. The majority of immigrants between 1892-1924 entered the U.S. through that port, so those of us from New York tend to assume our ancestors came through Ellis Island. So far, I can't find evidence that anyone in the family entered through that port. Quite the contrary. It's likely at least one of the great-great grandparents for whom I haven't found immigration documentation came in that way, but all the ones I can find are in passenger lists of ships that sailed from Liverpool to Boston or Philadelphia (and maybe Canada, but that's another story).

It has been great fun to find ancestors in incoming passenger lists because of the information these documents contain. At first I didn't notice that the record for each individual spanned two pages in the early 1900's Boston passenger lists. The first page contains all the mundane information you'd expect, including information useful for genealogical purposes. Among the data fields on the second page are:

By whom was passage paid?

Whether in possession of $50.00, and if less, how much?

Ever in prison or almshouse or institution for care and treatment of the insane, or supported by charity? If so, which?

Condition of health, mental and physical?

Height, complexion, color of hair and eyes

Marks of identification

And my personal favorites: Whether a polygamist? and Whether an anarchist?

Perhaps those last two were a very early form of IQ test. Seriously, do you think anyone would be stupid enough to answer in the affirmative? Can't say I saw any "yes" answers in those columns. But all the other little details on those two pages add up to skeletal stories just waiting to be fleshed out. A young mother traveling with an infant to join her husband in a foreign land, carrying 75 cents in cash. An illiterate 59-year-old 5'8" tall, sallow-complected, brown-eyed, gray-haired Jewish Russian tailor, immigrating with two of his daughters after 11 years in England, "senility" noted above the word "good" in the health column, tickets paid for by a step-son, to be joined later by his wife and youngest child. Where did these people end up, and how and why did they get there?

Immigration

I'm finally putting significant time and effort into tracing my genealogy, which is something I've always wanted to do. Not necessarily the significant time and effort part, but the learning about the ancestry part. About three weeks ago, still unemployed, still in a rented house without most of our worldly belongings, and somewhat at loose ends, I decided I might as well take advantage of all this free time to buckle down and start some serious genealogical research. So I bit the proverbial bullet and shelled out the $29.95 for a one-month world membership to ancestry.com, where I had already begun a paltry family tree with the little information previously gathered from family members and from free online searches.

The process had been fascinating, surprising, informative, tedious, and strangely addictive. It has given me glimpses into bits and pieces of an entirely different world, to cultures and culture clash, and to the nightmares of pre-computer age record keeping. I often dream about it at night, my mind processing the overwhelming amount of data, the clues, the false leads, the electronic databases, the partial stories about family members I can construct from pieced-together minutiae. Labor intensive as it has been, the research that has taken me three weeks so far would doubtless have taken literally months, at least, not long ago, not to mention quite a bit of travel and expense. I wish I had started recording the process and my thoughts about it from the start. Now that it's finally occurred to me that I should do so, I'll try capture both where I've been and where I'm going.

At the moment, I'm working primarily on locating immigration documents, and the irony of it finally hit me. Like all Americans (yes, even the "native" Americans), my ancestors were immigrants. Perpetual immigrants, in a sense, since they were all Jewish, and apparently moved, or were moved, from one country to another over the generations. No matter where they lived they spoke Yiddish, moved into Jewish communities, and married other Jews from the same country or shtetl or street. Luckily for themselves and their descendants, they managed to escape pogroms, survive extreme anti-semitism and poverty, and get to the U.S. before World War II. And here I am, an immigrant back to the Old World, after all they went through. But it is a different world, after all.