It's so easy now to print out ship manifests that are not so easy to read. It helps to enlarge the manifest on the computer screen and print close up images. All the information can be important. A family group may be clear to you, but it's also possible some of those people on the same manifest not identified as a husband, wife, and children, or a mother and children, are also related to the ancestor you're focused on.
Something I like to do is search by where they left - the village. And look for common surnames.
What you want to do next, after finding an ancestor on a ship manifest, is see where they go. If they're heading to the same town, that might be the reason to note the larger group.
ELLIS ISLAND immigrants were steerage immigrants - on the cheapest tickets. Their motivation in coming to America was to earn money. They're generally poor rather than cheap. With that six hard earned dollars they've got in their pocket they have to get to their destination and a place to stay. Cabs, train tickets, a night in New York, a meal...
Though information about employers looking to hire immigrants was important to them and was exchanged in letters and on the voyage, so was information on where to stay.
Boarding houses were not all big houses with nicely furnished rooms rented to individuals. A room could be rented to an entire family. A number of men could be sleeping on a floor. Sometimes immigrants stayed in churches until they found work. They could begin to network at Church or go to a local club meant to support people of their ethnicity - other Irish, Polish, Italian...
There were also big manufacturers, employers, who went to Europe looking for employees - usually those considered skilled.
There were also incentives such as earning land; if a little town needed immigrants to populate or settle it, usually through farming or homesteading, they might have been invited to settle there. (That's less applicable to immigrants coming into New York Harbor/ Ellis who came to settle on the east coast and more about certain areas of the mid-West and Texas.)
Did many people from the same place go to the same place? Did your ancestor live in a company town? A company row house? They may have gotten the job while still in Europe and the offer might have included housing. But a person willing to take any work at all, listed as a laborer, and not traveling with a wife or children, is probably heading to a boarding house or hotel.
Boarding houses were sometimes owned as businesses. If a woman with children was widowed, and she had a house, taking in boarders was a practical way to become self supporting. These women worked from morning till night. They had to provide meals, and do the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and importantly, all the filthy workman's laundry.
So. Let's take a look at the address the immigrant gave about the place they are going and who's there. If there is an address on the ship manifest you must go to it on the map and on the census. If a person and place are listed such as "brother in law John Richards, Camden, search for John on census.
If they came in 1906, who is there in 1900? 1910? If there's a state census look there too.
You can get to the right page for the address given on a ship manifest when the person named did not come up on census in a database. For every census, and you have to do so by census year, there is a district description/ map which will give county, city, and then ED, which means Enumeration District. That's the area a census taker was assigned to. Go to the ED without going page by page.
However, if it's a small town, it may not be too much time to read each page till you come to that address.
Remember this is the first place an immigrant went. It could be a family home, a boarding house, a hotel, a church. It could even be a house a relative owned.
I always run addresses given on ship and census through present day real estate sites and Google Earth. This is how I found out a relative who had a humble occupation bought a house with money he brought from Europe that's now on a historical tour and that another house, though more than a hundred years old, was up for sale a couple years ago. I got to see a townhouse in a bad part of town on Google Earth that was once new and when it was a good part. My ancestors lived on that street, went through that door. There were only two bedrooms for six children but so it was for their neighbors. Using maps and historical society information I learned they could walk to church and were near a vibrant shopping district, that streetcars ran nearby, and that they were the first generation to give up on an agricultural way of life for what was an ethnic ghetto but one from which sprang good citizens who stuck together during the Great Depression.
Such details certainly will enrich the family story I write.
C 2021
This post is part of a series of posts focused on Ellis Island, New York Harbor, and Industrial Age immigrants.
