Ellis Island Project Will List Immigrants

The Ellis Island Family History Center is working to make it possible for a visitor to tap a computer key and find out how much money immigrant ancestors had in their pockets when they first came to America, how well they could read and their state of health on arrival.

The center is conducting the largest study ever of American immigration, said Ira A. Glazier, director of the Temple-Balch Center for Immigration Research in Philadelphia.

Glazier and teams of researchers aided by volunteers will use passenger lists to compile information on millions of people who entered the United States via Ellis Island, and will feed the facts into a computer. The data will provide a wealth of knowledge for people curious about their family backgrounds and voluminous research materials for genealogists. The ships’ manifests are said to be the richest source of data on immigration in the Western Hemisphere; some go as far back as 1820.

“It’s a new source for immigration history,” said Glazier. “U.S. ship passenger lists have never been used this way before.”

Not everyone is convinced that the project is feasible. One skeptic said the researchers will be overwhelmed by the volume of manifests and the millions of details they contain.

“What they’re trying to do is not possible, because they don’t have the volunteer man-hours and they don’t have enough computer hardware and indexing software--nor do they have the language skills to handle all the information,” said Jayare Roberts, an ancestral files specialist for the Mormon Church, which maintains the world’s largest genealogical archive.

The head of the Ellis Island project said it will deliver what it promises.

“We now have from various sources, including the Balch Institute, National Archives and Immigration and Naturalization Service, the records of 17 million Ellis Island immigrants, and we plan to put these on computer,” said Philip Lax, president of the Ellis Island Restoration Commission. “We should have it in place by 1992. There may be some glitches--you never know--but that is our goal.”

The center is paying for the $14-million project through private and public fund-raising.

The computer terminals will be on the first floor of the Ellis Island Museum. Work stations, which can be used by up to four people at once, will be equipped with computers that are relatively simple to operate.

Type in an ancestor’s last name or certain other pertinent information, and the screen will display a “menu” of background data on the immigrant--such as degree of literacy, date of arrival and other trip information, profession and physical characteristics.

The center expects the computer stations to be a popular feature, since visitors will be able to get a personalized view of the immigrant’s experience.

“My grandfather is dead now and I’d love to have something that would put me in touch with him,” said Andrea Larsen, 27, who visited Ellis Island from Orlando, Fla. She said her grandparents came through Ellis Island from Kristiansund, Norway.

“I’d love to use it and find out when they came over” and whether or not they traveled in steerage, she said. “I’d also want to find out what the weather was like, and how long they had to stay here.”

Each visitor will be allowed up to 12 minutes at a terminal. A nominal fee, the amount still undecided, will be charged for a printout. About 200,000 people are expected to tour the center each year.

“Unless your family was the dance band on the Mayflower, everybody had some family who has come through Ellis Island at one point or another,” said Don Bravo, 31, of Boston, as he headed for the island aboard a tour ship.