I interned at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum as an archival intern last summer. First off, there is no huge book where your ancestors signed their names when they first entered the country. I guess this was in some Will Smith movie that I never saw, so people would always ask where they could find “the book.” It doesn’t exist.
Instead, American immigrants signed a ship manifest in their country of origins before they ever left their port—and Ellis Island doesn’t have a physical record of these. But if Ellis Island visitors really want to hear the immigration stories of tottering Aunt Helen or about the difficult ocean passage of long-dead Uncle Vladimir from Russia, they can listen or read an interview from their relatives as part of Ellis Island’s Oral History program.
Ellis Island was open as an immigration station from 1892 to 1954. After that, despite short stints housing other things, it was left stagnant in the New York Harbor for many years, until it became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965. Housed in many of the original immigration station buildings and with plans for expansion, the Immigration Museum opened its doors in 1990.
Over twelve million immigrants passed through the immigration station during the years it was open. Nearly eleven million of those immigrants journeyed away from New York and New Jersey to populate the rest of the country.
Today, over one-third of Americans can trace their ancestry to this single immigration station. However, as immigration patterns changed and shifted—many new immigrants wanted their children to be as “Americanized” as possible—so did their American-born children’s and grandchildren’s knowledge of their immigrant relatives’ homeland culture or immigration stories.
Ellis Island’s Oral History program started in 1973, as museum staff began to recognize that many of the earliest immigrants who passed through the iconic immigration station were dying off. The collection now exceeds 1,900 interviews, with staff members completing more and more interviews each year. Since the 1980’s, interviews have included questions about immigrants’ lives in their birth countries, ship passages to the United States, transitions to life in the States and the processing at the Immigration station.
I transcribed a number of these interviews and searched through a lot of the interview records. Many of the immigrants interviewed lived in the New York City/ New Jersey area, or in one of the cities to which the Immigration Museum staff journeyed to interview significant passengers. Most immigrants interviewed were well into their 70’s and 80’s and most of their countries of origin were Ireland, Great Britain and Germany, as well as other Western and Central European countries and Russia.
Although the names and countries of origin changed significantly, many of the themes in these interviews stayed the same. Immigrant journeys on seafaring ships were often difficult and long, the Statue of Liberty was greeted with awe, and immigrants were checked and interviewed in fear that they may be detained or deported at the Immigration Station. New York City (where many interviewees stayed) was filled with ethnic enclaves in the early 20th centuries that were often very poor and parents of the immigrants interviewed sometimes barely learned English and retained many of their homelands’ customs for the rest of their lives.
Living history collections like these about the immigrant experience and details about immigration patterns—such as ethnic enclaves that were eventually homogenized—make American history that much more real to new generations of Americans.
Sources and further reading:
http://www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/oral-history-program.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island