Mel Brooks Says Uncle

When Mel Brooks was presented with an Ellis Island Family Heritage Award last week, a video clip was played to commemorate his father's arrival in America.

It was a moving tribute, with old family photos shown while "That's Entertainment" played.

One problem.

"That photo was not of my father," Brooks said after taking the stage. "That was my great-uncle." He went on to say that while his uncle was a good-looking man who "wore a nice hat," as seen in the snapshot, his father, Max Kaminsky, was better looking. [Link]

Well, He Did Write the History of the World

The 2008 Ellis Island Family Heritage Awards will be handed out tomorrow morning. Once again, I've been passed over. Apparently you have to have accomplished something worthwhile in your life to even be considered.

The 2008 Ellis Island Family Heritage Awards Honorees:

LITERATURE
Mary Higgins Clark — The Bronx-born bestselling suspense writer has sold over 85 million books in the U.S. alone and credits her Irish heritage for her storytelling talent. Mrs. Higgins Clark’s newest novel is “Where Are You Now?”. Her father came from Ireland in 1906.


BUSINESS
The Forbes Family — “Forbes,” the oldest of the nation’s major business magazines, was founded in 1917 by Scottish immigrant B.C. Forbes, who first arrived in America in 1904. B.C.’s descendants continue to manage Forbes Media Inc., a privately held company which publishes “Forbes” in eight foreign languages, reaching five million readers worldwide.


EDUCATION
Donna E. Shalala — President, University of Miami, Dr. Shalala has more than 25 years of experience as an accomplished scholar, teacher and administrator. Under President Clinton, she served eight years as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, becoming the longest serving HHS Secretary in U.S. history. Her paternal grandfather came from Lebanon in 1900.

ENTERTAINMENT
Mel Brooks — Director, producer, writer and actor, Mel Brooks has created many comedy film classics as well as the popular television show “Get Smart.” His latest project is “The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein” currently playing on Broadway. His father emigrated from Austria as a child in 1896.

Average Age of Kiwis Goes Up

Eric King-Turner, 102, has moved from Britain to New Zealand—his wife's homeland—making him that country's oldest immigrant.

"It's a wonderful new adventure and I would say to anyone that if you want to do something you should do it straight away while you can. What's important is that when I'm 105 I don't want to be thinking 'I wish I had moved to the other side of the world when I was 102'."

Mrs King-Turner met her husband, both widowed, while researching her ancestry. Despite sharing the same last name they were not related but decided to meet anyway. [Link]

Sure, you let one of them in, and then another, and pretty soon the whole damn country is overrun by centenarians.

Lou Dobbs: He Doesn't Know and He Doesn't Care

Genealogy Gems caught an interview with CNN anchor Lou Dobbs in which he proudly proclaimed that, when it comes to genealogy, he is both ignorant and incurious.

When Conan declared Dobbs the “face” of the immigration debate, and then reminded Dobbs that he has stated in his book that he is against days like St. Patrick’s Day, and Columbus Day, declaring that he is worried that they are damaging the country, Dobbs reply was succinct:

“I’m an all American mongrel,” he went on to say. “I have no idea who in the heck or where in the heck my grandparents or their grandparents came from. I don’t even care.”

(Almost) Forgotten Ellis Island

Lorie Conway has filmed a documentary about the 22-building hospital complex at Ellis Island. There are also a Forgotten Ellis Island book and website.

Ms. Conway found that hundreds of thousands of patient records had essentially disappeared; she hopes that her film will turn up new clues as to where they have been moved.

Over years of research, Ms. Conway said, she was able to find only one complete patient record — that of Ormond J. McDermott, an Australian who was not trying to immigrate, but merely visit to New York, in 1921. He accidentally left his passport on a ship, and was detained at Ellis Island while the authorities investigated his claims to be a sales apprentice, rather than a contract laborer. While on Ellis Island, he developed scarlet fever; he died. Mr. McDermott’s file ended up at the State Department after his father, part of an influential Australian family, filed a complaint and asked for an investigation. [Link]

In Need of a Wife ... and a Proofreader

We've seen before that the immigration station in New York was perceived by some as a place to find marriageable women. Here's another example, from The New York Times of Sept. 1, 1883:

NO RED-HAIRED GIRL NEED APPLY.

Superintendent Jackson, of Castle Garden, frequently receives letters from single men asking him to find wives for them from among the immigrant women at the Garden. The following letter addressed "C.O.D., Passenger Agent, Castle Agent," was received yesterday:

Detroit, August 29.

Dear Sir: I take the plusur of Writing you a few Lines over Wich You May Laugh But I Mean Business and Want to Pay you for your Troubl if tended to I Will pay you ten dollers $10 in money Next Mont. if there is any emegrants from Germany I wis you would make it your Bisness if You could find some deasant Girl who is pratey and from 25 to 30 years of age Who Wished to Get Married in respectble to a Machinist who is 30 years of age and a Germen who has an old Mother livin With him. a Red hair pirson need not aplye if pasably so from Saxon or a Mackleburg or Byron please write to me and then we can come to a better understanding I Will send her a pass When the partie is found. my address is

JOHN KEEL, 435 Lefyett-street, Detroit, Mich.
[Link (pdf)]

A Pretty Normal American Family

Stanford University history professor Richard White knows that not every illegal immigrant speaks Spanish.

White found that his grandfather tried to immigrate from Ireland through Canada in 1936 because he could not get a visa under the quota laws.

"He tried to come through Detroit. It was hard to get caught at Detroit, but he managed to get caught," White said. Back in Canada, his grandfather called his brother, a Chicago police officer, who crossed the border and met him there. The two then walked to Detroit, his brother flashing his Chicago policeman's badge to U.S. customs officers who waved the pair through.

"I wouldn't be here, my brothers wouldn't be here if illegal aliens had been rounded up and dragged out," said White, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist. [Link]

As White argued in a 2006 article, our public discourse on immigration should focus less on abstract principles and more on the concrete, complicated practices that shaped family histories like his own.

My other grandfather nearly got deported back to Russia, where he was born, for crimes of "moral turpitude," until he became, as my father liked to say, the only Democrat ever pardoned by Herbert Hoover. My wife's father spent his last demented year in Arizona trying to persuade his wife to rent a jackhammer to cut into their slab foundation and hide the money from the Mexicans, whom he thought were about cross the border en masse. My brother-in-law was born in Mexico, and became a citizen in the last amnesty.

I consider myself part of a pretty normal American family.

It's Time for Him to Shove Off

Eric King-Turner and his wife are moving to New Zealand next January. At 102, he may be Britain's oldest emigrant.

Says Eric: "We not only had to produce a marriage certificate but we had to produce evidence that we were in a long and stable relationship!"

Eric says he was not asked about his age but had to show that he could support himself financially in New Zealand. [Link]

Sikh and Ye Shall Find Two Surnames

A Sikh group in Canada is upset over a policy that requires immigrants with the surname Singh or Kaur to change their names.

Karen Shadd-Evelyn, a spokeswoman with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, said the reason for the policy is that it helps officials with the paperwork and allows them to identify people's files quickly, efficiently and accurately.

"You can imagine you wouldn't want your file to be confused with someone else's," she said.

Singh and Kaur are common names in the Sikh community. In a tradition that began more than 300 years ago, the name Singh is given to every baptized male and Kaur to every baptized female Sikh. There are millions of Singhs and Kaurs around the world. [Link]

During the Sikh naming ceremony, the holy book—Guru Granth Sahib—is opened to a random page. The given name of the child is left to the parents, but must start with the first letter of the first word on that page.

In older days parents were not very fussy about choosing the name. We often hear such names [as] Vir Singh, Jodh Singh, Lal Singh, Kala Singh, Teja Singh and Ganda Singh. Literally translated some of these would mean red, black, sharp and onion. [Link]

From Iberia to Siberia

During Spain's 1936-1939 civil war, about 3,000 children were evacuated to the Soviet Union. Some of them are still there.

The government of the USSR helped those children retain their language and culture, and provided them with education and professional training, but - in contrast to their fellow exiles in other countries - Moscow did not allow them to return to Spain after the Civil War was over.

According to the Centro Español in Moscow, living currently in Russia are some 315 "war children," who - along with their own children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren - form a community of 1,200 to 1,300 people. [Link]

Mary's Immaculate Record of Conceptions

Onorato Vacketta came to America as a boy, but returned to Italy to marry and start a family.

He came back to the U.S. in 1891, leaving his wife and two children and arriving in New Orleans, trying to earn a living in the sugar cane fields.

He became ill and returned to Italy in 1895, and returned to the U.S. in 1897 – moving from New Orleans to Chicago and several other Illinois cities working in the coal mines and, eventually, coming to Westville.

In 1901, he wrote his wife, who now had four children, that he was thinking of coming home.

"It wasn't talked about back then, but it seems that there were more children each time Onorato came back to Italy," said descendant Tom Jenkins of Danville. "Mary said to send her the tickets and she and the children would come to him." [Link]

No, Mr. Jenkins is not alleging that Mary conceived children in her husband's absence, but rather that the couple made up for lost time during his visits. Just to make sure, I checked the 1910 census, which shows that the Vackettas had children aged 18, 14, and 13, all born in Italy, and four more children born in Illinois. Another son, Giorgio "Vacchetto," aged 20, passed through Ellis Island in June of 1910. Those ages are consistent with the dates of Onorato's trips to Italy.

Immigration Expert Running for Senate

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning is challenging Senator Chuck Hagel in the next Republican primary. He says that Hagel is all wrong on immigration.

I've got a picture here on my desk of my great great grandfather and my great great grandmother who came to Ellis Island in 1861 and ended up in Nebraska, in the little town of Bruning, by the way. They came in the right way… [Link]

The immigration station at Ellis Island didn't open until 1892, which suggests that Bruning's ancestors bypassed the station at Castle Garden to slip into the country undetected. If Mr. Bruning thinks that that is the "right way" to enter this great land of ours, I have to wonder how many fugitive Taliban leaders he's harboring in his basement.

(As it happens, Bruning's ancestors actually did pass through Castle Garden in 1861, before settling in Thayer County, Nebraska.)

Why Windish?

Sometime prior to 1920, the Slovenian population of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, stopped being Slovenian. Stephen C. Antalics explains why:

A review of the archives of Ellis Island ship manifests for these first immigrants reflects only Slovenian ethnicity. The 1920 federal census for these same immigrants in Bethlehem reflected them as 100 percent Windish. So, were they Windish or Slovenian? And why is Bethlehem the only place in the world where the term "Windish" is used today?

The Hapsburg Empire had two Slovenian communities, one in Austria, the other in Hungary. This gave rise to severe dialect differences. Dialogue was very difficult. The Hungarian government dispatched clergy to America to encourage its Slovene immigrants to preserve Hungarian sympathies over their Slavic ethnicity by becoming "Wends." This plot failed in every U.S. community -- except Bethlehem. [Link]

Europe's Exit Door

A new museum is opening July 5th in Germany called Port of Dreams - BallinStadt Emigrant World Hamburg. It's the mirror image of Ellis Island.

BallinStadt re-creates the world of the emigrants. Who the people were who left their homes in eastern and middle Europe, and why. How they got to Hamburg. What life was like in this last stop before their trans-Atlantic adventure. What happened to them at Ellis Island. Where they went next and how they fared in the New World. Some historians estimate that 20 million Americans may be descended from these Hamburg emigrants. [Link]

The Gravity of the Situation

Derek Bourner moved from Britain to New Zealand a few years ago to live near his daughter. Now immigration authorities are kicking him out because his family's "centre of gravity" is in the wrong place.

Immigration officials say because he has two daughters in Britain and only one in New Zealand, the family's "centre of gravity" is considered to be Britain.

The immigration policy states that parents of New Zealand residents will be given residence only if they have "an equal or greater number of adult children living lawfully and permanently in New Zealand than any other single country". [Link]

This is a useful concept. Giving each family member equal weight, one can figure out the center of gravity of a clan, and then hold a family reunion at that location. Most of my immediate family lives in Maine, but I have a brother who lives in Florida, which would shift our reunion spot to the south.

The folks in New Zealand have made the mistake of allowing only two possible residences for Derek. If they really wanted to teach him a lesson, they would deport him to the true "centre of gravity" of his family—a place half as far from Britain as from New Zealand. Pakistan, I think.

April Showers Bring Free Passenger Lists

Ancestry.com is offering free access to its U.S. Passenger List Collection from April 12 through April 30. This includes the recently added Canadian Border Crossings, 1895-1956. My ancestors from Quebec and New Brunswick would join me in celebrating if they weren't so dead.

Ellis Island's Very Busy Day

April 17th will be the 100th anniversary of the busiest day in Ellis Island's history—a day when 11,747 people passed through the immigration station.

A usual day saw some 5,000 immigrants processed. It was the highpoint of 1907 when 1,285,349 immigrants entered the United States, with Ellis Island processing nearly 80 percent of those new arrivals. The country would not welcome as many immigrants again until 1990. [Link]

By way of comparison, on a typical day in 2006 [pdf] U. S. Customs and Border Protection processed 1.1 million passengers and pedestrians—240,737 arriving by air, 71,151 by ship—and 327,042 incoming privately owned vehicles.

One Last Check Before Leaving

Ralph Lung Kee Lee came to Canada when he was 12, and paid the $500 head tax all Chinese immigrants were then required to pay. Lee finally received an apology from the Canadian government and a $20,000 redress check on March 10—his 107th birthday, and five days before he died.

"It was almost like, 'I waited this long, here I am. I'm going to stay alive to get it,"' Lee's daughter Linda Ing said of her father, who received his apology and compensation 94 years after coming to Canada.

Lee had a fun and loving personality, Ing said, and he was quite tickled when he finally received his redress cheque.

"I said, 'You're going to be 107,"' Ing recalled telling her father the day before his birthday.

"He said, 'Me?' I said, 'You,"' Ing said in mock wide-eyed amazement. "'You're going to get your cheque.' And he just laughed." [Link]

Kissing is Cultural

This quotation is from a brief article in Ancestry Magazine on the Kissing Post at Ellis Island—the spot where new arrivals were reunited with their families.

The Italian kisses his children but scarcely speaks to his wife, never embraces or kisses her in public. The Hungarian and Slavish people put their arms around one another and weep. The Jew of all countries kisses his wife and children as though he owned all the kisses in the world and intended to use them all up quick.

—Maud Mosher, 1910, matron at Ellis Island

Ellis Island to Be Destroyed

An important part of the "Ellis Island experience" is only visible at low tide. The ferry that shuttled millions of immigrants from the island to Manhattan between 1904 to 1954—the Ellis Island—sank at its moorings in 1968.

For nearly 40 years, the remains of the ship have wasted away just a few hundred feet from where boatloads of tourists hop on and off newer ferries to visit the museum and trace the paths of their ancestors. At low tide, the corroded hull of the Ellis Island can still be spotted poking through the surface.

In June, the park service intends to have divers slice the ferry into pieces that can be hoisted onto barges, park service officials said. “There’s not much there at all,” said David L. Conlin, an underwater archaeologist for the park service. But he added that there were “a couple of pieces we’re very interested in,” including the engine and propellers. [Link]

Millions of Americans have a personal connection to this vessel, including me. I assume that my great-grandparents were among her passengers, as neither was a strong swimmer. Now that I know she stills exists, it's a shame to see her go.

You can read more about the Ellis Island here, here, and especially here.