COLORIZED FILM OF NEW YORK IN 1911 - Love it!

 

Certainly helps one imagine what it might be for immigrants who were coming off those steamships into America for the first time, though they usually got on a train ASAP to get to their final destination.

WERE THEY AS POOR AS YOU THINK? #10

I love the genealogy series Finding Your Roots. I recently binge watched it. But while it's just stating facts when someone, even Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says it, I tend to question how poor someone was when I hear that a laborer came over with only $6. because that's what's recorded on a ship manifest/ passenger list. We start to think $6 will buy us a burger and fries instead of the value back in the day.

That's the amount declared. Noone was going through his socks or shoes or money belt or that secret compartment in his one suitcase. Or in her undies or babies' diaper. I'm sure lots of things were kept safe by being sewn in to clothing.

I know how we think of steerage passengers. Early films and photos don't tend to depict thin gentleman in suits strolling along with their luggage being transported by a worker. They show fat women with scarved heads, their worldly possessions all bundled up in sheets. The motion of the film suggests they move awkwardly (you would too carrying a heirloom carpet on your back) and as quickly as possible (Gotta get that train to Pittsburgh.) It doesn't help that the words on the Statue of Liberty suggest she's a beacon for the bedraggled. But am I to believe the ignorant were stupid? How it is then that so many of the descendants of these passengers have made their way through college, into professions, and some have earned PhDs? Three or more generations in America makes a difference but so does inherited genius.

No doubt third class tickets/ steerage and poverty tended to go hand in hand. But sometimes it's just that a person was cheap or wanted to spend less on a ticket and have more in the pocket.

It's also true that the tickets were often purchased by family already in America and striding those fabled streets of gold while breaking their backs in mines and factories. Men first, wives later.

There is only one thing to do in order to better wrap your mind around just how much money a person brought with them on the ship that they declared. Use an online inflation calculator that turns that $6 in 1901 into 2021 U.S. Dollars. (The U.S. Department of Labor has one.)

Ok, it's not perfect in predicting value because prices fluctuate but it's the best.

Ever wonder who figured out what the dollar value was when the immigrant had left with Italian, German, or Austrian money? When and where would he convert that into American dollars? 

According to one such online calculator $6 in 1901 is about $184 dollars today.

Let's do another example. $25 in 1914 is $650 today.

Another. $65 in 1921. $945 today.

You get the idea. 

The inflation calculator is so useful.

Using census information you can calculate rent, mortgage, home value, and get a better idea about your ancestors money. If your Ellis Island ancestor goes to a house that he owns or pays a high rent on, what does that tell you?

I'm going to go on a little about the cost of tickets here too.

You may want to look over a short paper online that was presented in 2012 at a gathering of the Economic History Association in Vancouver by Brandon DuPont, Drew Keeling, and Thomas Weiss. Its called Passenger Fairs For Overseas Travel In The 19th and 20th Centuries.

The report mentions that advertisements for fares didn't give particulars - the company might actually quote higher or lower. Fares varied by direction - West higher, luxury of design and location of cabin space (ocean view or inside with none) speed of the ship, and other factors. Some ships converted cabins into third class to profit by quantity. A head tax on incoming passengers generally made west travel on the Atlantic a bit more expensive than east. (Where are the outgoing passenger lists for New York?)

There were four major carriers, CUNARD line generally most expensive. Cunard's star attractions and most expensive travel being the three sister ships - the Lusitania (which got torpedoed and sunk), Mauritania (called The Grand Old Lady), and the Aquitania. 

Holland-America, and North German Lloyd line were two others in The Big Four.

I learned about another line I hadn't known about called Anchor. It was the least expensive. You might think of it as a steamship equivalent of Jet Blue. 

The authors of this paper do a lot of statistics but overall they play with the discrepancy between advertised prices and profits. 

So let's use that inflation calculator on some suggested fares from that report and see just how expensive ocean travel was in 1908.

$151 on The Grand Old Lady going east is $4275. Highest fare. (We can assume people of wealth paid that ticket price.)

Cheapest first class on that ship was $121. $3425 today.

Cheapest ticket on that ship was $54. Now $1528. (I assume steerage.)

Holland America average fare using all ticket classes $141. $3992.

Holland America cheapest ticket west was $41. $1160. 

North German Lloyd cheapest ticket was $70 west. $1981. (If your ancestors left a German port there's a good chance they took this line.)

Anchor cheapest ticket was $62 west. $1755.

I think it's fair to say that a typical Passenger in steerage,  scarf, carpet, and all began their trip to America with a personal net worth of more than many an American today who gets government EBT / Food assistance. They were better off than our homeless.

(I look forward to learning if the companies charged less for children and babies.)

C 2021 

This post is part of a series that focuses on Ellis Island immigrants.

TOP SURNAMES in the UNITED STATES BY STATE! LOPEZ and JENSEN ! WHOLE STATES and a whole lot of MEYERS in MISSISSIPPI!

DAILY MAIL - TOP SURNAMES FOR EACH STATE OF THE UNITED STATES


Click on this link and get to the map to see if YOUR SURNAME is the most popular in ANY STATE!    It's no wonder pretzels made in Pennsylvania are made by SNYDERS... and New York State has an outsized population of COHENS!

THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS : STEPHEN NISSENBAUM : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS by STEPHEN NISSENBAUM 

Stephen Nissenbaum takes wassailing, an English custom, to the early American colonies where Christmas was a day for reversing roles, and the gift giving was more like a Halloween trick or treat. Perhaps the idea was to let off resentment?

Christmas as we know it to be was invented by New Yorkers who leaned on a myth that the holiday was from the Dutch heritage of early residents of Dutch New York. In early new England the day was not celebrated because the festivities were not considered to be Christian behavior.

Perhaps no better a day of the year existed for slaves. A good portion of this book by Stephen Nissenbaum, a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, is devoted to the relations between slaves and their masters.

Genealogists will learn more about the Freedman Bureau too!

Maybe you'll want to read this one after the holidays?

Book is C 1996 by the author Stephen Nissenbaum and published by Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf.

C 2011-2025  Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

STATUE OF LIBERTY

Many of our ancestors came through ELLIS ISLAND or the Port of New York, though there were several other important seaports that immigrants sailed into. Today on the anniversary of the 9/11 Terrorist Attack, I think of this great symbol of the United States of America, a statue made in France and gifted to us by the French.

CASTLE GARDEN Searchable Database has ended... BUT OTHER DATABASES HAVE THE INFORMATION NEEDED

Before there was Ellis Island there was CASTLE GARDEN and while there was Ellis there was Castle Garden too. Ellis Island was the checking point for steerage only passengers. A better ticket? Castle Garden, the first stop a ship made to let off passengers. Now, a searchable database!

***

Just a note Nov 2022.  My understanding is that this web site has ended but the passenger lists are searchable now via FamilySearch and Ancestry TM genealogy databases.

February 2023 ....  Yes,  the site is no longer.

Just a note to remember that there were other ports in operation.

MAJOR ERROR on ANCESTRY GENEALOGY DATBASES BEGS CORRECTION

I recently looked at 44 ship manifests which came up when I used a certain surname in the ANCESTRY genealogy database. I was watching to see if there was any pattern I could follow to put relatives together from the old country to the new.

I believe you must read the manifest yourself and not take the text version for granted because there have been all sorts of transcribing errors.I REALIZED THAT THIS DATBASE has A MISLEADING ERROR BUILT IN on the FORM used for the TEXT VERSION of the New York ship manifests! When you read the text version you see the word BIRTH as if the immigrant was being asked in New York " Where Were you Born?" when the actual question asked on the manifests is not "Where were you born" but where was your last permanent address?

I wonder how many family historians have been mislead and repeated this error, or even gone on a useless quest because they assumed that the Ancestry database was right in reporting a location as a BIRTH location?

Simply, many immigrants did not leave HOME! Some did, and usually you will see that they are saying they left a parent or a husband or wife.

But sometimes they simply went to stay with a relative - a sibling or aunt or uncle - in another location. They gave up their own address (as we would do if say an apartment lease was up before we were ready to move to another city). There they stayed until maybe a baby was born or money promised from America came in and until it was time to get to the rail station and then the ship port. Some did not go directly onto a ship but stayed somewhere else, such as near the very port they planned to leave, for a time to earn money, or got off the ship in South Hampton and tried England for a while!

Please be very careful with this one! As you know the words "Permanent Address" are also not always taken seriously.

Q: What's a permanent address today?
A: Anywhere you stay when you are not traveling!

FORGOTTEN ELLIS ISLAND HOSPITAL

Just watched the PBS video "Forgotten Ellis Island" about the immigrants who were kept at the hospital before being deported back to their home countries or released as well into their new country. It's a terrific video so I recommend you get a copy to watch! You'll see the decay of the buildings themselves...

The link above goes to a web site for the hospital....

It's being refurbished!