Uncovering the Stories of Immigrant Ancestors

The January issue of Internet Genealogy is now available. If you are unfamiliar with this magazine, it is a practical, how-to magazine that focuses on websites that are useful for genealogists. It is published by the same group that publishes Family Chronicle Magazine.

On page 22 of this new issue is an article I wrote called “Uncovering the Stories of Our Immigrant Ancestors.” I thought I would share some tips and resources from my article. I start out by explaining that in order to uncover your immigrant ancestors' stories, you have to first know that basic facts. Begin by finding those bare-bone documents that will provide you with the outline of their lives. For immigrant ancestors, this means parish records for their early life in Europe (or wherever they came from), immigration records that show their ocean voyage, and then records such as church, vital, and census that provide dates and places for the remainder of their lives in the US.

I don’t want to spend too much time on that aspect of research. Instead, I want to move on to the next step – on resources that can help you take your ancestors’ stories from a listing of facts to an actual story. The key is to fit them into their environment. Here are some suggestions that I included in my article:

1) Get oriented by reading a general history of the time and place your ancestors lived.

2) Next, learn about the social history of their time and place – what life was like for the “common” people. One book I like for Europeans in the 1800s is Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789-1913, edited by David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli.

3) Become familiar with what the immigration experience was like. One suggestion here is: Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life by Roger Daniels. A great website is by Harvard University: Aspiration, Acculturation, and Impact: Immigration to the United States, 1790-1930.

4) Narrow your search to local histories (this isn’t in my article, but it’s a good idea anyway!). Many towns and parishes kept their own histories. Contact a local historical or genealogical society – or the town or church itself. I’ll post more about this later.

5) Read firsthand accounts written by others. This gives you that personal insight into experiences your ancestors might have shared with others who kept written accounts. Pay attention to sources in social histories or look for sources covering specific events that your ancestors were part of.

For more suggestions on books that might help you, visit my website. Choose the “Ancestors in Specific Locations” from the bar on the left hand side. Each of these sections has a subsection with books and websites that cover sources relevant to that place. Sources in the Mecklenburg section, for example, will be useful to anyone with German roots, not just Mecklenburg roots.

To see more of what is available in the January issue of Internet Genealogy, visit their website here.

Also, some of you might be interested to know that Internet Genealogy currently have an “appeal for submissions.” To quote from the magazine, “We are in the early stages of planning a new book, a follow-up to our successful Brickwall Solutions series. Tentatively titled Internet Brickwall Solutions, we want to hear how you overcame your brickwalls using the World Wide Web! Please e-mail your submissions (Word document or RTF file) to brickwalls@internet-genealogy.com. Please limit your submission to no more than 500 words, and include images (200 dpi or higher) as a separate email jpeg attachment, with caption details.

So, here’s a chance to have your story in print!

Your Family's Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island

This week we had some people over for dinner. During the course of our discussion, I asked one of them about the origins of his surname. (What can I say? I’m a genealogist – I’m always fascinated by where people’s names come from.) He told me that it had been spelled differently in Sweden, but then his family immigrated and they changed it at Ellis Island.

If you are a genealogist, you are cringing now. I know you are. I had to concentrate to not actually cringe when he said it.

If you’re not a genealogist, then maybe you don’t know why we are all cringing. Maybe you even have a similar story for your name.

Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you then: Your family’s name was not changed at Ellis Island. And neither was this person’s name. This may be the number two myth in genealogy (next only to the “I’m-descended-from-royalty/Indian-princess/Charlemagne/noble-who-fell-in-love-with-a-peasant-girl-and-stowed-away-on-a-ship-to-America-in-order-to-escape-the-Prussian-military-myth”).

First, many of the people who say this didn’t even have family that came through Ellis Island. Ellis Island didn’t open until 1892. Immigrants who came to New York prior to this probably came to Castle Garden which served as the port of arrival from 1855 until 1890.

Second, there was not a conspiracy by the officials at Ellis Island to change as many names as possible and make it difficult for their future descendents to ever trace their heritage.

Have many family names changed in spelling from their “original” spelling in Europe? Absolutely. But it wasn’t because of a massive change at Ellis Island. So why have these spellings changed then?

Well, there are several things to keep in mind. First, often there never was a “correct” way to spell the name in the first place – even in Europe. Our ancestors spelled phonetically – based on how things were pronounced, how they sounded. They were not overly concerned with what exact letters were included. You will often find names spelled multiple ways within one record. Also our ancestors, and even record keepers, were often only semi-literate. They had bigger things to worry about in life besides “i before e, except after c.”

The other piece of this is that things got more complicated when our ancestors came to the US and another language was involved. These foreign names were unfamiliar to US record keepers. The recorder heard the name – as it was spoken in its original language – and recorded it as he heard it in English.

Yes, sometimes names were written “incorrectly” (which is actually impossible since if there isn’t a “correct” way to write a name, then there can’t really be an “incorrect” way either) at Ellis Island. But, this is usually just another warping of a name that had been – and would be – warped into many forms. Just because an official wrote a name a certain way in the passenger arrival records, did not mean our ancestor was forced to spell his or her name that way forever afterward.

In fact, names usually continued to warp and change after Ellis Island. If you collect a stack of records throughout an immigrant ancestor’s life, you will most likely see the name morphing over time – not a sudden break at Ellis Island (or Castle Garden). Some of ancestors made conscious choices to change their name’s spelling in order to make it sound more “American.” Sometimes, it just gradually drifted to a more “American” spelling. Then of course, some people’s names shifted drastically into a name that appears to be completely unrelated to the name they had before. Sometimes there are reasons for this that we can figure out when we understand naming patterns. Other times, there appears to be absolutely no logic behind the change at all.

Those ancestors are the most fun of all, right?

For more information on name changes, you can read my article about it here from Everton’s Genealogical Helper. Or, if you have a special interest in patronymics, read my introductory article from Ancestry Magazine here.

Letters to Me: Castle Garden and the Wii

Like probably all of you, I get a variety of letters every day. I get letters in my e-mail inbox, letters in mailbox, and occasionally, hand-delivered letters. Today, I wanted to respond to two of them here. I’ve chosen two that I think represent the dichotomy of my life!

The first came to my e-mail last week:

Hi Leslie;

I saw your presentation at the GGG (German Genealogy Group) last week. You had a slide of an arrival record from Castle Garden in New York. I was wondering were you found these records since I thought they were all burned in a fire at Ellis Island.

Thanks

PS I enjoyed your book.

Here’s my response:
Castle Garden records are not burned, but are alive and well. In fact, at that same German Genealogy Group meeting, I ate dinner with a group of people beforehand – one of whom had worked with the actual original Castle Garden arrival lists.

Castle Garden was the New York receiving station prior to Ellis Island. It functioned from 1855 until 1890. Ellis Island opened in 1892. Castle Garden has a really interesting history. You can about it here in an article I wrote a couple of years ago for History Channel Magazine. Castle Garden was the most important arrival port of its time. During some periods, nearly 80% of US arrivals came through Castle Garden.

As for records: You can access 11 million Castle Garden arrivals for free at http://www.castlegarden.org/. This website covers the years 1820-1892, so it includes records of New York arrivals during times when Castle Garden was not the receiving port. Keep in mind though that the website does not have all the records for this period. It also links to transcribed entries, not original records. If you have an Ancestry subscription, or at least access to one, you can access all the New York arrivals here. These are linked to images of the actual lists.

If you have been to visit Ellis Island, you have seen Castle Garden – but probably didn’t even know it. It is the building where you buy your tickets! I find this a little sad, but the Battery Conservancy is working to restore it, so maybe it will get more recognition in the future.

Now, for the second letter…This was a hand-delivered letter from my eight-year-old son. They had an assignment in school to write a persuasive letter. (Let me preface it by saying that we have a family rule that my children can only play wii on Fridays and Saturdays – except in special circumstances such as school holidays or when children are home sick and playing wii would directly contribute to preserving everyone’s sanity.):

Dear Mom,

I love wii so please let me play wii on weekdays. I will do all my homework including spelling. I will only play for twenty minutes. A lot of my friends do. I will play outside first for an hour. A lot of my friends do. I will read for a long time. I should be able to play wii on weekdays.

Love,
Taylor

Do you like how he included the fact that “a lot of his friends do” two different times?

My response: No.

It is pretty cute though, isn’t it? The truth is – he doesn’t have time to play wii on weekdays. With homework, piano practice, and then whatever of the many extracurricular activities one or the other of them is in, we don’t exactly sit around the house looking for something to do.

Here's a photo of Taylor so you can have the entire persuasive effect!

Tonight, I fly to Baltimore. It's going to be an exciting weekend!

How Immigrants Paid for their Ship Voyages

We made it back from Philadelphia last night. I did four batches of laundry today. How is it that we were only gone three days and I still had four batches of laundry?

I enjoyed my visit to the American Swedish Historical Museum. I had great intentions to take a picture, but for various reasons, it didn't happen.

At my lectures, I have noticed themes in the questions people ask. There is one question in particular that I get asked about two-thirds of the time when I give my “book lecture.” Yesterday, I just focused on my Swedish “journey taker” or immigrant, Karsti Nilsdotter Karsti left Sweden alone at age seventeen to come to America. At some point during my story of her immigration, someone in the audience usually raises their hand and asks some version of this question, “How did Karsti pay to come to the US?” or, more generally, “How did our ancestors pay for the ship voyage to America?”

I thought I would answer that question here. First, keep in mind that while we often think of the “tired” the “poor” and the “huddled masses” (from Emma Lazarus’s famous poem) coming to the US, the poorest of the poor, generally, did not come. They couldn’t afford it. In the 1700s, some of the poorest, particularly from the German states, came through the redemption system, where they basically sold themselves into servitude. This had long since come to an end by the mid to late 1800s, when my “journey takers” made their voyage across the ocean. For many immigrants, crossing the ocean was a huge effort that sometimes took years of planning and saving. Sometimes immigrants sold all they had to pay for the voyage, essentially arriving in the US with next to nothing. (The Irish were a special case, as during the potato famine of the 1840s, they really were the “huddled masses” arriving in the US in desperate conditions. Often, landlords paid to send these immigrants to North America- basically, just to get rid of them. You can read more about it here.)

Karsti came after joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS Church. The LDS Church had a program that helped its members to make the trip to “Zion,” or what would become the state of Utah. This program was known as the Perpetual Emigration Fund (or PEF). Converts could borrow money from the Church. Careful records were kept, and these members were expected to pay the money back in full. The money they put back into the system was then used to bring other members over. You can read more about it here.

Of course, immigrants outside the LDS Church received financial aid to make the trip. Some received aid from other religious or benevolent society groups. Others received aid from family or friends.

Karsti did not receive aid from the PEF. Records indicate that she paid for the trip independently. I have a theory on how she was able to do this. By the time Karsti immigrated, she had lost both of her parents. Her father had passed away a couple of years earlier when Karsti was 14. Karsti probably received a portion of his inheritance when her father died. I assume she used this to fund her journey to Utah.

On an unrelated note, my computer crashed while we were in Philadelphia. It has been on its death bed for a while (although it is only two years old), so I had been careful to keep back-ups. In fact, just a couple of weeks earlier, I had invested in an external hard drive. I am currently typing on my husband’s old computer while I decide what to do. A computer crash is always a pain, but I am very glad I had recent back-ups, or it would have been a lot worse. If you don’t have your files backed up (in more than one place), do it tonight!