Ellis Island and the Immigrant Experience

10,000 immigrants a a day could pass through Ellis Island

Ellis Island is a powerful symbol of the American immigrant experience, and by extension, the American dream. We all know the stories. Every immigrant arriving to America was screened there. Or that agents on the island routinely changed the names of eastern European immigrants whose strange-sounding names they couldn't pronounce or spell. The stories have been passed down in families for generations.

There is only one problem, a panel of experts said tonight at a program on Ellis Island and the Immigration Experience at the National Archives - many of the stories are more myth than truth.

"Ellis Island is a powerful symbol and we often get that confused with fact," says Marian Smith, chief historian for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. "When you get an image fixed in your mind, it can stop you from considering other possibilities."

Smith moderated the 3-member panel which consisted of:

• John Colletta, a veteran researcher and conductor of the Smithsonian's Resident Associate Program
• Megan Smolenyak, who describes herself as a genealogical adventurer and
• Joel Wurl, a senior Program Officer of the Division of Preservation and Access for the National Endowment for the Humanities

The program, which was presented in partnership with the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, served as a kickoff for the Archives newest exhibition Attachments: Faces and Stories from America's Gates.

Colletta addressed the claim that immigrants were renamed, an idea chiseled into the American psyche through the movie The Godfather, where Vito Corleone received the last name of his village. The correct names of all passengers were on the ship's manifests and therefore there was no need for name changes. Colletta maintained..

The idea that all immigrants passed through Ellis Island is also a myth, he said. For example,1st and 2nd class passengers arriving to America were screened in their staterooms and then allowed to proceed directly to New York City.  In addition, there were more than 100 ports of entry into the United Sates beside Ellis Island. Also, Ellis Island was periodically closed, meaning that several hundred thousand immigrants over the years arriving in New York didn't get processed there.

Smolenyak said even key figures in the Ellis Island experience are subjects to distortions. Annie Moore, an Irish teenager, was heralded as the 1st immigrant processed when Ellis Island opened in 
1892. Statues of Moore appear at both Ellis Island and the Irish port city of Cobh. But many facts once reported about her later life were proven to be wrong, Smolenyak said..

Wurl focused his remarks on the people who were sent away from the United States with their port of departure being Ellis Island.

"The American gate has always swung in both directions," Wurl said, nothing that many were deported during the anarchist Socialist/Communist scares of the early 20th Century. "The story of America is who left as well as who stayed."

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
If you are interested in the story of immigration and the immigrant experience, you have plenty of time to see the Attachments exhibition at the Archives. It runs until Sept. 4.