Saturday Mike went to play golf up at Saint Andrews (he works a ridiculous number of hours - believe me, he needs this), and Shauna and I went to Ellis Island. After visiting Ground Zero, Ellis Island seemed to be - felt like - a proper and appropriate place to go, as a spiritual refresher and a reminder of reasons why this country is what it is.
The
ferry boats run out of Battery Park. Within the park stands this scupture
entitled "The Sphere". It was formerly located in the plaza of the
World Trade Center. It was recovered from the wreckage and relocated, in its
damaged state, as a memorial to 9/11.
Shauna
and I boarded the ferry at Battery Park. The first stop is the Statue of Liberty.
You can disembark there, but the interior of the statue itself is still closed
due to 9/11. (Personally, I think we should re-open it, then air-drop millions
of miniature statues all over the Middle East, slightly modified to extend
the middle finger of the upraised hand). Since it was already into the afternoon,
Shauna and I chose to satisfy ourselves with the view from the boat, and continue
on to Ellis Island.
The facility at Ellis Island opened to process immigrants coming to the US in 1892, taking the burden off the Barge Office in Battery Park. The original wooden structure burned down in 1897, but by 1900, the current French Reniassance style structure was opened for business. Architecturally, it is easy on the eyes. Whether by accident or design, this probably had somewhat of a comforting effect on the people coming through. The average time to accept, process and release a person coming through was an amazingly short 5 hours. If they had had computers, it probably would have taken days.
The
historical displays within the building are very well done. They are quite
uncluttered - some might consider them almost sparse. However, this uncluttered
nature made it very easy to absorb what is presented, instead of being assaulted
with so many artifacts and so much information you can't make sense of it.
In one room, there are computer kiosks with which you can enter a name. The computer searches the archives, and if a match (or matches, for common names) is found, it returns the year that person came through. I entered these two names:
Marija Husic
Ivan Grabrijan
They were my grandmother and grandfather on my father's side (my mother's ancestors came before Ellis Island was built, and came through Baltimore). My grandmother came in 1905, my grandfather in 1907. They did not know each other at the time, and would not meet for many years, after my grandmother was many times a mother and already a widow.
Ellis
Island closed in 1954 and remained idle and abandoned for almost 30 years.
In the 80's, restoration work was started, funded to a large degree by private
funds, and the site was opened to the public in 1990. The result is a monument
to the heritage of many of us, and to our ancestors who dared to leave all
they knew behind - many fleeing political repression, poverty, war and pogroms
- and venture forth to find a new life.
While
the bulk of them came from Europe and Russia, they also came from the Middle
East, the Central and East Asia, Africa, the Carribean, South and Central
America - essentially everywhere. Very few, less than 2%, were refused admittance
(usually due to infectious or mental illness).
In the 62 years that the facility operated as an immigration station, over twelve million people came through its doors, offloaded from ships in New York Harbor. Most of those were the poor "steerage" class passengers. Those who could afford first and second class passage were usually processed quickly on the ships they came in on.
So - if you can find the name of an ancestor in the Ellis Island records (this can also be done on the Ellis Island website) you can probably assume that he or she was very, very poor at the time. Think about where you are now, then think about where you might be if your ancestor had not come here.