Ellis Island

[brianac]

Ellis Island Museum to Expand, Touching on Other Eras

By DAVID W. DUNLAP (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/david_w_dunlap/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: September 24, 2008

The story of immigration (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) told at the Ellis Island museum (http://www.ellisisland.com/ellis_home.html) will be expanded to the eras before and after the period when Ellis was the portal to America, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/dirk_kempthorne/index.html?inline=nyt-per) said on Wednesday, speaking in the vaulted Registry Room of the island’s main building.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/25/nyregion/immig650.jpgChang W. Lee/The New York Times
About a dozen men and women were sworn in as citizens on Wednesday in the Registry Room of the main building at Ellis Island.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/25/nyregion/ellis650.jpgChang W. Lee/The New York Times
The Immigration Museum at the Ellis Island National Monument will be expanded to include other eras of great movement.

Mr. Kempthorne said the expansion would increase the museum’s “relevancy to the more diverse audiences who visit national parks today.”

The $20 million museum expansion, to be known as the Peopling of America Center, will extend the public space from the main building at the Ellis Island National Monument into the adjacent kitchen and laundry building. The new exhibits will follow archetypal families, past and present, through the stages of immigration: leaving, journeying, arriving, struggling and, finally, helping build the nation.

Although the new exhibition will touch on the story of illegal immigrants, it will keep its focus on citizenship, an emphasis that was underscored on Wednesday when a dozen men and women, most of them in the armed forces, were sworn in as citizens after Mr. Kempthorne’s announcement.

(They pledged, among other things, to “bear arms on behalf of the United States.”)

Specialist Franck Dorval, 36, was among them. He arrived from Haiti two years ago, he said, and worked in restaurants in New Rochelle, N.Y., before enlisting in the Army. “The best way to give the country something back is to serve the people,” Specialist Dorval said, though he allowed that education benefits were another inducement.

As to why he had applied for citizenship, he said he hoped it would open doors in the Army. “If you want a career, if you want a promotion, you need to be a U.S. citizen,” he said. An hour after saying that, he was.

Construction on the museum expansion began last week, said Stephen A. Briganti, president and chief executive of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which is overseeing the project and says it is to be finished in 2011.

Given the changing nature of immigration, it is likely that if the museum did not broaden its approach, future generations might see Ellis Island as an anachronistic institution devoted largely to European arrivals from 1892 to 1954, when the immigration station operated there.

Mr. Briganti said that illegal immigration needed to be part of the story the expanded museum would tell. “There have been undocumented people ever since immigration began to be controlled,” he said.

The exhibit will trace one family that lived in the United States illegally for a time before applying for citizenship. But none of the families traced will be in the United States illegally on a permanent basis, said Edwin Schlossberg of ESI Design, which designed the new center.

Mr. Schlossberg said that it did not make sense to place too much emphasis on the great concerns surrounding illegal immigration. “In a public environment, where people are going to spend one and a half hours, the idea of raising issues you can’t answer is irresponsible,” Mr. Schlossberg said. Instead, he said, such issues could be presented in depth on the museum’s Web site.

And a practical objection was noted by Alan M. Kraut, a professor of history at American University and the chairman of the academic committee that advised the foundation. “If a family was undocumented,” he said, “they would be a little bit reticent to have their story told.”

The National Park Service (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_park_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org) Centennial Challenge Initiative has committed $2.3 million to the new center, matched by $1.5 million from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation and $1 million from the Annenberg Foundation. All told, Mr. Briganti said, fund-raising is about 75 percent complete.

But he acknowledged how cloudy the future was, with the turmoil on Wall Street. Asked about fund-raising prospects in a recession, Mr. Briganti said: “This one has me concerned. I don’t know, to tell you the truth.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/nyregion/25ellis.html?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Merry]

Relatives Say Photos Depict Ellis Island’s First Immigrant

December 29, 2009

By SAM ROBERTS

For more than a century, she was lost to history. Three years ago, she was rediscovered. As it turned out, the first immigrant to set foot on Ellis Island (http://www.nps.gov/elis/index.htm) when it opened on Jan. 1, 1892, an Irish girl named Annie Moore (http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/annie_moore.asp), did not go west and die in Texas, as had long been believed (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/nyregion/14annie.html), but spent her days as a poor immigrant on the Lower East Side, dying in 1924.

Now, relatives have found two photographs of the woman they believe is the real Annie Moore.

“It is of Annie, probably in a photography studio with a baby girl, maybe a year old, in her lap,” said Michael Shulman, Annie’s great-nephew.

The story of Annie Moore, who set foot on Ellis Island on her 15th birthday, is memorialized in song and in bronze statues in New York Harbor and Ireland.

In 2006, Mr. Shulman joined four generations of descendants of Annie Moore Schayer to celebrate her rediscovery by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, a genealogist, who teamed up with Brian G. Andersson, the New York City commissioner of records, to figure out that Annie never left New York, as had long been believed.

“Megan called a few months ago, and we were just chatting,” Mr. Shulman recalled. “Then I mentioned it to my sister, Pat Somerstein, and we said, ‘Let’s start a real hunt for a picture.’ “She found one in a collection given to her by a cousin. The back of the picture is inscribed ‘Ma Schayer.’ The clothing and the quality of the picture indicate that it’s of the right time period.”

Schayer was Annie Moore’s married name. The photograph is of a woman with an infant (Mrs. Schayer and her husband had at least 11 children). A second photograph, believed to be of Mrs. Schayer years later, was found by Maureen Peterson, one of Mrs. Schayer’s great-granddaughters, in a scrapbook.

“Like the photo of Annie with a baby, this one also says ‘Mama Schayer’ on the back,” Ms. Smolenyak Smolenyak said. “Maureen believes that the handwriting is that of her Aunt Geri, who passed away in 2001. Geri was the so-called ‘crazy aunt’ who constantly insisted that her grandmother was ‘the Annie.’ She’s the reason why some of the current generation knew this part of their family history.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/nyregion/29annie.html



September 14, 2006

Story of the First Through Ellis Island Is Rewritten

By SAM ROBERTS

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/14/nyregion/14annie600.2.jpg
Jeanne Rynhart’s Ellis Island statue of Annie Moore, holding her hat in the harbor breeze, unveiled in 1993.

Annie Moore is memorialized by bronze statues in New York Harbor and Ireland and cited in story and song as the first of 12 million immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island. Her story, as it has been recounted for decades, is that she went west with her family to fulfill the American dream — eventually reaching Texas, where she married a descendant of the Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell and then died accidentally under the wheels of a streetcar at the age of 46.

The first part of the myth seems authentic enough.

Hustled ahead of a burly German by her two younger brothers and by an Irish longshoreman who shouted “Ladies first,” one Annie Moore from County Cork set foot on Ellis Island ahead of the other passengers from the steamship Nevada on Jan. 1, 1892, her 15th birthday. She was officially registered by the former private secretary to the secretary of the treasury and was presented with a $10 gold piece by the superintendent of immigration.

“She says she will never part with it, but will always keep it as a pleasant memento of the occasion,” The New York Times reported in describing the ceremonies inaugurating Ellis Island.

As for what happened next, though, history appears to have embraced the wrong Annie Moore.

“It’s a classic go-West-young-woman tale riddled with tragedy,” said Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, a professional genealogist. “If only it were true.”

In fact, according to Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak’s research, the Annie Moore of Ellis Island fame settled on the Lower East Side, married a bakery clerk and had 11 children. She lived a poor immigrant’s life, but her descendants multiplied and many prospered.

The story of the immigrant girl who went west, however, became so commonly accepted that even descendants of the Annie Moore who died in Texas came to believe it. Over the years, several have been invited to participate at ceremonies on Ellis Island and in Ireland.

It took some genealogical detective work to find the proper Annie. After offering a $1,000 reward on the Internet a few months ago for information about Annie Moore, Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak teamed up with New York City’s commissioner of records, Brian G. Andersson, and discovered the woman who they have concluded is, in fact, the iconic Annie Moore.

Joined by several of her descendants, they are scheduled to announce the results of their research tomorrow at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society in Manhattan.

Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak (a genealogist’s dream: she’s a Smolenyak married to a previously unrelated Smolenyak) became interested in Annie Moore four years ago while researching a documentary film on immigration.

Pursuing the paper trail, she found that the Annie who died instantly when struck by a streetcar near Fort Worth in 1923 was not an immigrant at all but was apparently born in Illinois. Moreover, she traced that Moore family to Texas as early as 1880.

“I realized it was the wrong Annie,” she recalled.

Then, what had happened to the Ellis Island Annie?

Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak made little progress for a few years, but her search was reinvigorated this year after she moved to southern New Jersey and visited a genealogical exhibition in Philadelphia featuring a 1910 photograph of the Texas Annie. (The photograph might also have been a model for Jeanne Rynhart’s two bronze sculptures, one of which is at Ellis Island.)

She posted a challenge on her blog for information about the immigrant Annie Moore. She also mentioned it to Mr. Andersson, who she knew was very interested in genealogy.

“With the power of the Internet and a handful of history geeks we cracked this baby in six weeks,” she said. “Brian found this one document, and we knew we had the right family. We had the smoking gun.”

What Mr. Andersson found was the naturalization certificate belonging to Annie’s brother Phillip, who arrived with her on the steamship. He was also listed in the 1930 census with a daughter, Anna. They found Anna in the Social Security death index. That identification led to her son, who is Annie Moore’s great-nephew.

On her first try, Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak was lucky enough to find the great-nephew listed in a directory. “As soon as I said ‘Annie Moore,’ he knew instantly — ‘That’s us,’ ” she said. “They had been overlooked, but they had sort of resigned themselves. I think they’re very happy to be found.”

Her $1,000 reward is to be split between Mr. Andersson, who is donating it, and Annie’s great-niece.

As for Edward P. Wood, a New Jersey plumbing contractor who is descended from the Texas Annie Moore and has been feted on Ellis Island, Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak said that when she told him of her findings, he said, “I’m disappointed, but I’m not heartbroken.”

The Annie Moore who arrived in steerage and inaugurated Ellis Island initially joined her parents, who had arrived several years earlier, apparently in a five-story brick tenement at 32 Monroe Street in Manhattan. (One of many problems that complicated Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak’s search, she said, is there is also a 32 Monroe Street in Brooklyn.)

Records indicate that Annie Moore later moved to, among other places, a nearby apartment on New Chambers Street — near the Newsboys’ Lodging House and the Third Avenue El on the Bowery.

The area now includes the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a public project constructed in the early 1950’s and named for the governor who grew up nearby, and the Knickerbocker Village complex of rental apartments built in the 1930’s.

“She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life,” Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak said. “She sacrificed herself for future generations.”

According to her latest research, Annie’s father was a longshoreman. She married a bakery clerk. They had at least 11 children. Five survived to adulthood and three had children of their own. She died of heart failure in 1924 at 47. Her brother Anthony, who arrived with Annie and Philip on the Nevada, died in his 20’s in the Bronx and was temporarily buried in potter’s field.

Annie lived and died within a few square blocks on the Lower East Side, where some of her descendants lived until just recently. She is buried with 6 of her 11 children (five infants and one who survived to 21) alongside the famous and forgotten in a Queens cemetery.

Her living descendants include great-grandchildren, the great-nephew and the great-niece. One of the descendants is an investment counselor and another a Ph.D.

Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak described them as “poster children” for immigrant America, with Irish, Jewish, Italian and Scandinavian surnames. “It’s an all-American family,” she said. “Annie would have been proud.”
So far, this turns out to be one of the few cases in which historical revisionism may have enhanced a legacy instead of subverting it. As one guidebook says: “Annie Moore came to America bearing little more than her dreams; she stayed to help build a country enriched by diversity.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/nyregion/14annie.html


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-smolenyak-smolenyak/photos-of-annie-moore-fir_b_406156.html

http://genealogy.about.com/b/2006/09/16/meet-the-real-ellis-island-annie.htm

[paul_houle]

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Picture of Ellis Island (http://ny-pictures.com/nyc/photo/topic/3414/Ellis_Island) thanks to 23912576@N05 (http://ny-pictures.com/nyc/photo/photographer/604320/23912576@N05) and New York Pictures (http://ny-pictures.com/nyc/photo/)