The Ellis Island Experience

By Barry Nove

The Ellis Island Experience offers insights and tips on the immigrant experience and shares how to document your ancestors' own story at Ellis Island - often without the need to leave the comforts of home.

From passenger manifests and naturalization files, to available onlne resources, author and family history researcher, Barry Nove, also offers several tales he has based on what he has documented as examples of what arriving at Ellis Island was like in the early 20th Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Nove
• Release date: Jan 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497724433

Barry Nove

Barry Nove has delved into his family history and their immigrant experience to the United States for over twenty years. He has published a number of short stories in anthologies, focusing on the Ellis Island Experience, two of which also appear in his non-fiction/history fiction work, The Ellis Island Experience: A Sampling of Stories and How You Can Research Your Own (published in 2014). He has presented on genealogy topics across the United States, focusing on the Ellis Island Experience and Jewish genealogy. He currently resides in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Find the author on twitter at @Jewishgenealogy.

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Dedication

To my grandparents,

who either passed through Ellis Island

or whose parents did.

––––––––

Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge copyeditor, Karen MacLeod, and Pauline Pivowar for their assistance in offering editorial advice on this book. As ever, I also wish to thank my family and Sarah for all their support of this project.

Introduction

When I was a teenager, Alex Haley’s Roots was on television. Watching that mini-series got a generation wondering about their roots and started a wave a genealogical research. Also at that time I got the being Jewish bug. I wanted to know more about my Jewish identity and everything Jewish. That was the flipside to wondering about my roots. I went from being in public school to a Jewish high school, later Yeshiva University in New York, and spent my junior year and delayed my senior year of college for one year to go to school in Jerusalem. When I completed college, I not only had a Bachelors Degree, but an Associate of Arts Degree in Judaic Studies.

I went on to complete a Masters in Social Work in community organization, specializing in communal service. It’s funny how professional life and interests align sometimes. I was working for UJA-Federation of New York in Westchester County in the early to mid-1990s, when I participated in an educational outreach program on Jewish Genealogy offered by Westchester Young Leadership, a group I had been organizer for during my first two years with UJA-Federation. The program featured Rafael Rafi Guber, then Executive Director of Westchester Jewish Day School, who gave a wonderful Introduction to Jewish Genealogy. He brought several books published by Avotaynu Press, including Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the Holocaust and Alexander Beider’s Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire. Rafi’s program was eye-opening. Shortly thereafter, he approached Young Leadership about doing a program at Ellis Island, working with his contacts at the museum.

The leadership loved the idea and based on my interest, I was asked to do the necessary research, coordinate, and plan the event, which Rafi mentored and tour guided with the help of the Ellis Island Museum’s staff.

In preparing for the program, I had the opportunity to take the Coast Guard cutter that brought the museum’s staff to work, before the ferry began its morning run, and met with the archivists in order to plan the re-enactment tour, the first for families they had ever attempted.

This special tour of the Ellis Island Museum was held in the summer of 1994. The Young Leaders in the group brought their children and invited their parents to participate, making this a multi-generational experience like that of many of the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. One of the outcomes of planning the re-enactment tour was the sudden interest of PBS, which tagged along, filming the program, and featured an interview with Rafi Guber, as part of PBS’s 10-part series Ancestors, which aired in 1997.

As I learned more about the Ellis Island immigrant experience, I asked family members whether we had old naturalization papers, or other records, including photos and letters, and began gathering my collection of possible links to Ellis Island. What I found and what I then began documenting has inspired this book, which includes the stories of the immigrant experience of those who came to America and passed with trepidation through what is now the Ellis Island Museum.

Among my most amazing finds was a note my father found left by my grandmother, Rose, which had been in the envelope with her naturalization papers. The note was but one page. It states that she arrived at Ellis Island on the S.S. New Amsterdam on August 5, 1907. Being given that note about a month before the re-enactment tour made my experience walking through the museum in period garb really feel like I was following the path my grandmother walked as a girl even more poignant.

Genealogical research has come a long way since Alex Haley did his research, which was prior to the advent of the Internet. But in others it has not. For those seeking information on their ancestors’ Ellis Island immigrant experience, there is not only a wealth of details available, but access has never been easier. Yet it can still be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The Ellis Island Experience offers you the reader insight into finding not only your family member or members on passenger manifests, but how you may put the puzzle of your ancestors’ story together. So that you one day can offer your family, your children, and grandchildren insight into a pivotal time in your own family’s history through the lens of documents, historic facts about the process of traveling to America, and details like how many people were traveling in Steerage (Third Class) with your immigrant family members.

This book is intended as a means of personalizing the Ellis Island experience, which in many ways was played out at the many other ports of entry our immigrant family members traveled to, ranging from cities like Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland; and Savannah, Georgia on the East Coast, to Galveston, Texas, and on the West Coast to major cities like San Francisco, California.

These stories are fictionalized, based