The Right Annie Moore

by Sheila Connolly

This week my husband and I joined our daughter at a local Trivia evening, held at a bar slash bowling alley. She plays there regularly with several other people, two of whom were also there. In age they fall midway between the rest of us. One of them is scarily knowledgeable about almost anything (good man to have on your side!). I think our daughter invited us just to make sure we acknowledge how clueless we are. (Our team came in fourth out of ten or twelve.)

The Ellis Island statue

One of the last questions of the evening was about Annie Moore, the first person to enter this country through Ellis Island when it opened on January 1st, 1892. The Trivia question was, what was her nationality?

I had never heard of Annie Moore. And she was Irish. I bow my head in shame—I had grandparents who came through Ellis Island in 1907. Of course I had to fill in this conspicuous gap in my knowledge after I came home.

For the distinction of her arrival Annie received a $10 gold coin. She was either 13, 14, or 15 on that day (the ship's manifest says she was 13 but it was apparently wrong, and her birthday was January 1st, so she would have turned 15 on the 1st). She left from Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, and spent twelve days at sea on the S.S. Nevada, as one of 148 steerage passengers, which also included two of her brothers. They arrived on December 31st but were not processed until the next day. Then she disappeared into New York, to join her parents.



Ship manifest:  Annie's entry is the
second line



That would have been the end of that little footnote in immigrant history, except for the erection of a bronze statue of Annie Moore during the renovation of the Ferry Building on Ellis Island, completed in 2008, when her story was revived.

Problem is, they got the wrong Annie Moore. And the wrong one became famous.

This little mix-up was discovered by genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who was working on a documentary on immigration and wanted to track down the descendants of Annie Moore (as she told host Renee Montagne in a 2006 NPR interview). She did a little digging and discovered that documents for the Annie of the statue showed a birth location of Illinois. All right, mistakes happen in immigration documents all the time (and now and then, people lie!). Then she found more with the Illinois reference, and wrong Annie's cover was blown.

What was the source of this mix-up? Ms. Smolenyak says that after an earlier PBS documentary about Ellis Island, that referred to the correct Annie, somebody claiming to be from her family called the makers of the documentary and said, hey, that's my great-grandmother. And theirs became the accepted story—without any documentary verification. Maybe it stuck because it was an appealing story—the wrong Annie lived a difficult life in Texas and died tragically. The right Annie lived out her life in New York and had eleven children. Half did not live to maturity, but the rest did well for themselves.

When Ms. Smolenyak called the descendants of the right Annie, most of them said, "sure, we knew that." It didn't seem to bother them that some other Annie was getting the credit.

In these days of rampant identity theft, and poaching of people's information from any number of Internet sources, it's interesting to step back to a time when your life could be measured by a handful of documents—birth, marriage, death, maybe a deed or two—and your story was passed on (and often mangled) orally by family members. And it's also interesting that the dramatic story rather than the more ordinary one captured the public imagination.

Is it any wonder that genealogy is great training for writing mysteries?

When the Ferry Is a Time Machine

Elizabeth Zelvin

I recently took a short ferry ride from the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, through New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island, a trip that cost $9.50 and traveled 100 years into my family’s past.
The gateway to America for 12 million immigrants from all over the world in search of a better life between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island has been completely restored and is now managed by the National Park Service as a monument to the melting pot that shaped American culture.

A French friend visiting from Paris suggested we go, but this was no mere museum trip or history lesson for me. Both my parents came to America through Ellis Island: my father from Ekaterinaslav in the Ukraine in 1905 at the age of six, and my mother from Papa in Hungary in 1906 at the age of four. I’ve always regretted that I never visited Ellis Island with them.
They went with a cousin shortly after the restoration in the 1980s, and both said that they remembered the Registry Room with its vaulted ceilings and high arched windows.
My mother’s most vivid memory was of her own mother, my grandmother, crying as she said goodbye to her mother, whom she knew she would never see again. My father remembered being given a banana as he waited to board the ship, and how, puzzled by this strange fruit, he bit into it skin and all.

The night before our excursion, I looked up Ellis Island on the Internet. The site www.ellisisland.com offers information about the Immigration Museum, while www.ellisisland.org allows users to search for passengers on the ships that brought the immigrants past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. At the click of a mouse, I found both my father, on the ship’s manifest of the Caronia out of Liverpool and my mother, listed as a passenger on the Deutschland, departing from Hamburg. I discovered that my Aunt Anna and my Aunt Sophie, younger than my father, were actually named Chane and Schifre. I already knew that my mother, named Judith (and called Judy her whole life, till she died at 96), got an inadvertent name change at Ellis Island, when an immigration official heard the Hungarian pronunciation Yoo-deet and wrote down “Edith”—which is how she was listed on the records I found. (Her official signature was always “Edith Judith” or “Edith J.”—though the only people who called her Edith were telemarketers.)

The cousin who visited the museum with my parents enrolled my mother’s mother, our beloved Gran, on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor outside the Great Hall, overlooking the harbor and the Lower Manhattan skyline.
When I emailed him, he reminded me that at the time, none of the cousins wanted to pay the hundred bucks to list our grandfather, who died long before we were born. Now I think I might go back to www.wallofhonor.com and do it. I was moved to find my grandmother’s name among the 700,000 remembered in this beautiful and historic spot.