This plaque in the Ellis Island museum caught my attention:
Alright ladies, let's be honest. Historically men have always divided women between saints and prostitutes. Certainly, this is the subtext of the above proscription. Well, my great-grandmother was such a woman. (No, not a prostitute). She was 15 when she arrived in 1899 and on her passenger arrival form, she said she was going to her father Paul in Lansford, Pennsylvania. And so she was.
You'll have to click to enlarge this. She's at the bottom. And of course, due to the vagaries of genealogical research, I cannot find her father's arrival for love nor money. Go figure.
Wow! By coincidence I posted some photos of a trip to Ellis Island in 1975 today. We both had the same thing on our minds.
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/05/wordless-wednesday-ellis-island-1975.html
Posted by: Heather Rojo | 05/05/2010 at 11:55 AM
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir regarding immigration searches, but have you tried the Hamburg Passenger Lists or Philadelphia Passenger Lists? My Landsford PA bound relatives came through Philadelphia more often than New York.
Posted by: Susan Popp Clark | 05/05/2010 at 03:29 PM
Great idea. If those are on ancestry.com then he isnt there. However, if there are print indexes that arent on ancestry, perhaps he is there (or Baltimore).
Martin
Posted by: Martin Hollick | 05/05/2010 at 06:54 PM