I’ve just got to know that it’s now possible to access online, free of charge, the historical archive of Ellis Island, a very small island located at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor which was from January 1892 until November 1954 the main entry facility for immigrants entering the United States. By registering to the website (I haven’t tried yet) it seems possible to get even more than a simple name for every single immigrant (a photo or a portrait would be too nice) and have a look at some old photos of the ships used to reach the States at that time.

When I was in New York and I was on a boat heading to the famous Statue of Liberty, I remember I saw from the distance this small island. My first impression was that it had to be a sort of old jail. Then I read about its history and I realised I hadn’t gone too far from guessing and that there is something more interesting under the covers, a story of immigration and a connection with the much-praised American dream. Unfortunately I could go there for a visit but, since then, I started asking myself if it would have been possible to recover some useful information about those immigrants, especially about Italians. Almost every Italian has at least one relative in the States, but most of us don’t know anything about, so why not to try to reconstruct the facts?

And finally this website. I’m almost sure I’ve managed to find one or maybe more relatives after just few searches. I need now to talk to someone in my family who could remember some of the names I obtained as a result (in my case it’s all around 1900..). Have a try using your surname, you’ll probably get surprised too.. One thing you can soon notice is the high level of illiteracy at that time, several names (especially locations) result recorded in many different ways, probably following the variety of dialects still spoken as main language by the poor part of the Italian population.

Along with Mike I was discussing how tough would be to develop a family tree (or even a kind of social network of the past.. are we too ambitious?) only using the inconsistent data stored in the archive. It’s an interesting topic, we think.. IT professionals usually like watching the world through the eyes of a computer..

[ Photo: Wikipedia ]