Earlier this week I entered the ellisisland.org website for the purpose of examining penmanship styles from the turn of the century. After several hours of research I was able to locate the records of the arrival of my grandparents to Ellis Island. The years range from 1908 to 1913. Included were hand written ships manifests and photos of the ships. On top of that I just read a review by girlieg33k on a Noodlers ink called Ellis Island, a blue-black that captures a color of that era. Over the months since joining FPN I have gone on some interesting paths. This was a special week. Thank you to all who make this network possible.

It takes a while to get used to the "S" that looks like the modern "P".

I found several ancestors there.

We found my wife's grandfather, who came over from Sicily in 1917. He was 16 years old, a grown man, and went to Chicago. He ended up in Memphis, where he met my wife's grandmother.

Donnie

Thanks for that link. My wife found her grandmother and great grandmother - Finnish immigrants bound for Michigan's Upper Peninsula. According to the site her GGM was 5'8" with red hair and blue eyes. She must have been striking. And the ship that took them here ... it was tiny! Just looking at it made me seasick.

I also found some of the statistics amusing ... like whether or not the immigrants were anarchists.

- Yumbo

The Ellis Island site is a godsend to those of us that in the past found it difficult to get to a National Archives location to dig through rolls of microfilm. I did it once, trudging down to the corner of Houston and Varick in NYC, and spent several hours at a film reader. But it was necessary to travel, and to be there during their hours, and to be limited in time if there were others waiting to use the film reader. Now I can do some (not all) of the same research in my own home, in the middle of the night or whenever I choose. It's wonderful.

Hint to those looking for female Italian ancestors: Women in southern Italy (and I'm sure in other places) traditionally kept their maiden names after marriage. I only found my great-grandmother after much fruitless searching for Trofimena Farace when I remembered this, and searched under Bonito instead. And there she was, along with her four youngest children. I offer this just to help along anyone that's bumped up against one of the stumbling blocks I encountered.

The raw facts in the manifests can hint at quite a story: In my great-grandmother's case, she was fifty years old, widowed two years, her youngest child was eight. She was leaving a beautiful town on the Amalfi coast to come to New Haven, Connecticut, where her brother already lived. It was October-November 1916, World War I was on, Germans had sunk Italian ships, and in fact this was the last voyage the steamship Regina D'Italia would make before being taken for use by the Italian Navy. She had to leave her three oldest children behind, the son because he was old enough to fight in the war. So here was a middle-aged woman, on her own, supporting young children, leaving the warm sunny town where she grew up (and may never have travelled very far from) to get on a transatlantic steamer during wartime to come to the colder northeast US, a country where she didn't know the language. I can't imagine how difficult life must have become to cause her to make that brave decision. I wish I could go back in time to meet her. (And boy, genealogy sure can be a lot more interesting than a dusty list of begats, eh?)

More back on topic, I had posted last spring a couple of samples of some of the handwriting that can be found on the manifests in this thread.

I find it interesting how handwriting has changed so much over the last 100-150 years. And even further back.

I remember reading the "Dear Boss" letter, supposedly written by Jack the Ripper in 1888. It was perfectly legible and very neat and easy to read.

I was researching stuff for a piece I was writing up on the RMS Titanic and I found several copies of Marconi-messages sent from the ship and the other ships, involved in the rescue-effort. Try as I might, I couldn't read it. I've also looked into inscriptions I found in books, dated in the early 1910s (1911 & 1917, to be precise). And I had a fair bit of trouble reading those as well, neat as they were...(does this make any sense?)

Going through my grandmother's papers was an interesting experience (Don't worry, I had permission!). She was showing me all her old records one day when I was a child and I got to see her signature and all that...amazing how handwriting changes over the years...