After all, her name was misspelled and she was listed as a man.
The 60-year-old president and CEO of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc. hopes others will be able to locate their ancestors in seconds, even if faulty record-keeping botches their names or transgenders them.
After five years of culling through mountain ranges of yellowing forms and endless spools of microfiche, Briganti’s company kicked off www.ellisisland.org last year. The site, which contains the original ship records for the roughly 22 million immigrants who made their way into America between 1892 and 1924, has since garnered more than 2.3 billion — yes, billion — hits. That translates to more than 6.5 million a day.
That 32-year time span represents the nation’s peak immigration period. Racist and xenophobic paranoia directed against the wave of Jewish immigrants and Catholics coming from Southern and Eastern Europe — fueled in part by eugenic studies proclaiming such groups to be of substandard intelligence — led to the imposition of quotas slowing immigration from these regions to a trickle.
“America’s always had a love-hate relationship with immigrants. We always want immigrants, but we’re always just about this far from shutting them out. At that time, there was a reaction to too many of ‘those people,'” said Briganti of the post-World War I outcry against Jews, Italians, Poles and others.
Briganti, the leader since 1982 of the private foundation and a descendent of southern Italian immigrants, recently traveled through the Bay Area on a fund-raising trip. With additional money, he said, the Web site could be expanded to include immigrants arriving as long ago as 1820 and as recently as the present day.
“I worked so many years, and suddenly when I found [my grandparents], I was like a little kid. Gosh! There they are! I thought we were the only Brigantis,” he continued. “It turns out there are 301 Brigantis. There are like 6,000 Cohens. How many Samuel Cohens must there be?”
The answer to that question: 283.
Those hoping to mentally recreate the experiences of their forefathers (and foremothers) are treated to a number of choice bits of information. Ships’ manifests list the passengers’ race (Jews are listed, invariably, as “Hebrews”), the addresses of the relatives the immigrants hoped to live with and the amount of money they carried into America. Only steerage-class passengers traveled through Ellis Island, so totals of $6, $3 or even only $1 are not uncommon.
What’s more, photographs, schematics, passenger capacities and histories of more than 800 ships are available on the site.
The records available, however, are “only as good as the people on the dock in Constantinople who were taking the information,” as Briganti’s own experience attests.
“Maybe, after doing several ships, they got tired and wrote down anything!” wonders Briganti. “If they knew that, 100 years later, we’d be computerizing the records, they might have been more careful.”
Jewish records are more difficult to nail down than most, Briganti claims. While, in the case of his own family, he was able to double-check material with records kept by local churches, in the case of Jews, most traces of their existence in Eastern Europe have been wiped nearly clean.
Still, ellisisland.org has answered a few questions — and raised a few more.
One friend of Briganti’s was shocked when he found both his grandmother’s and grandfather’s names on the manifest of a single ship, when he had long believed that they met in America. Another claimed his father came over on the same boat as Rudolph Valentino in 1916. It turns out he did — but several months earlier.
The Web site makes Briganti wish he’d taken an interest in his background decades ago.
“My grandmother was 17 when she came here in 1903. What it must have been like for her to leave! She never went back, never saw her parents again,” he said. “Unfortunately, I never recall asking her about it. I didn’t, and urge anybody to do it quickly. Genealogy is best served by talking to the elders in your family.”