Haunting Ellis Island

Apostolia Pentogenis

Just off the busy shore of the one of the busiest cities in the world stands the shell of a building haunted by hundreds of visitors everyday; Ellis Island. Once the first stop for hopeful immigrants coming to America, it is now a museum filled with explanatory billboards and audio tours.

Ellis Island is an important part of America’s history. For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was the primary point of entry for virtually all immigrants coming to America. Most modern Americans can trace their family history through Ellis Island, which is why so many people take the time to visit it each day. People like Kristine. Just in from Missouri, Kristine isn’t here for just a photo opportunity, she’s here to search the Island’s computerized immigration logs. Kristine is looking for her husband’s great-great grandfather who came to America in about 1866. An immigrant from Ireland, he came through Ellis Island to find work and eventually start a family.

Kristine admits that she doesn’t know much about the man she is looking for but she and her husband have spent a considerable amount of time looking for him. They even traveled to Ireland to visit his hometown to no avail. However, what little she does know may have paid off during her search through the museum’s database. She discovered three other immigrants that share her long lost relative’s last name. And although the recorded year of their entry is different than what she was looking for, she believes it may still be a relative that followed in her great-great grandfather’s footsteps.

It’s this little glimmer of hope to find distant loved ones that keeps the museum’s computerized immigration logs busy. People line up for hours to pay five dollars for access to the logs and search for ancestors they often know very little about. If they can’t find what they are looking for, their next stop would have to be the National Archives in New York to search through years of microfilm. It’s a labored love but one that many go through to help them retrace the journey of their ancestors.

The polished floors of the Ellis Island museum seem to contradict the squalid conditions that must have met Kristine’s distant relative when he came to Ellis Island. She doesn’t know much about what her husband’s ancestor had to go through once he arrived, but the museum tries to paint that picture for her. Photographs throughout the museum show the unwashed masses arriving by the thousands, often in tattered clothing and sick with yellow fever or other diseases. Pictures of nameless faces waiting in line or being inspected by a doctor adorn neat presentation boards with short captions that give statistical information. Although she believes the museum had been restored considerably since it’s time of use, she still imagines the difficultly of getting through the test of immigration inspectors.

As time has moved on, many things about the island have changed, however, in some ways it is the same. Ferries arrive every half hour toting waves of people eager to disembark and discover this new land. Lines of people still file into the building just as they did for nearly two centuries and snack vendors collect money from visiting tourist from all over the world, just as food stands once sold food to starving immigrants as they disembarked from their long journeys.

But the museum has taken up other characteristics as well. The manicured grounds of the island serve as a happy playground for frolicking children. The large and once packed quarters of the building are now unlived in, except for the clusters of walking tours who visit periodically. Most notably absent is the sadness of would be deported immigrants who had to return home due to sickness or bureaucracy. If a newly arrived foreigner didn’t pass health inspections by doctors or didn’t have appropriate paperwork for travel, they where often turned back to the boats they came from. Being approved for American citizenship was often the biggest test of the journey to America.

Ellis Island’s past is speckled. Some of the stories it helped to write were happy ones; the joys of beginning a new life in America. However for every story of success there were also those full of sorrow. Thousands of people came to Ellis Island hoping for citizenship and a new life, instead they were sent back from where they came, their long journey unrewarded. But these tales don’t live in the shell of the building that remains; it is in the thousands of people who visit each day and try to remember the history that once happened here. And so, Ellis Island is forced to relive its past, haunted with visitors that mimic its earlier days of immigration.