There is so much romance attached to ancestors coming through Ellis Island in steerage, that you may be surprised to know that the 1st and 2nd class passengers could skip the whole Ellis Island scene and were left off first in New York.
It may surprise you to learn that your ancestor actually didn't make just one trip, but several back and forth before having taken care of all their business in the old country, such as selling property, settling old mom - too old to immigrate - with relatives.
It may also surprise you to learn that there were other, busy ports, including Canadian ports, or that your ancestor may have taken a trip to Argentina first, checked it out, and then decided to come to the United States. Your ancestor may have also come on a ship that wasn't one of the big-line steamships. There were people coming in as crew. There were still sail ships operating coming into smaller and unofficial ports. You may have checked all the available databases out, straining through near unreadable handwriting, missing manifests, and so on; all you know is that they are suddenly on a census.
If you find their naturalization papers, you will probably learn that they declare the date they arrived and the name of the ship. For some, obtaining evidence of this voyage, if they didn't still have a ticket /paperwork still on them, was a step towards naturalization. Even if those ship manifests or passenger lists no longer exist they will name the date and ship and often place.
During the pre-aviation era, ships were the way to go. The romance of immigrants coming in by ship sort of negates what else was going on. Such as people who were traveling back and forth to Europe on business, such as spending sprees for fashionable clothing, banking and investments, and visiting relatives or taking long vacations for pleasure. People walking across borders. People who skipped Ellis and questions about disease and mental health. If an immigrant wanted to bring a sibling along who probably wouldn't pass through Ellis, say because they were "slow," they might suggest the person was a shy twelve year old rather than a budding fifteen.
What reminded me of all this was a relations question about our great-grandmother. By using oral history about the age of the first child, said to be in her mother's arms when they arrived to meet up with our great-grandfather, I had not found her on my first efforts with microfilms of ships coming into New York. I assumed New York. The assumption turned out to be right. But I calculated after finding the first child's birth date on the Social Security Death Index to another date. This time the first microfilm I rolled had them there. Previously I had found great-grandfather's immigration. Yes he was there before she was. My relations questioned the parentage of this first child. Without knowing if she was possibly born premature or late, and based on her strong resemblance to him, I had not doubt she was the child of our great-grandparents. Yet, this made me go back into the ship manifests to check out other men with the same name.
As it turned out I was able to verify that indeed great-grandfather had made two trips. On one ship manifest it says WHERE DID YOU LEAVE? Since this village was near the larger town that both referred to as having come from, well.... on the first trip it says WHERE WERE YOU BORN? In this case the man with the same name gives a different answer. He refers to a larger region that contains the village that he left, and this lead me to realize that he was probably not BORN exactly where he left. This actually has opened up the place I can look for records of his birth and possibly their marriage.
In any case, though two trips makes sense, I won't consider this proofed until I can prove that two men of the same age, name, and region, did not exist at the same time.
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