Melting Pot

My father is turning 80 this August and as part of his gift, my sister and I have been working on a family photo/history project. As a result, I've spent a substantial amount of time today on an amazing site...EllisIsland.org...where one can search relatives that came to America through Ellis Island in the late 1800's-early 1900's. I may be a bit wierd when it comes to this stuff, but looking at copies of ship manifests and seeing the names of my ancestors in print sent shivers down my spine. It is really impossible for me to imagine what they were thinking and feeling when they arrived here from Southern Italy full of youth, hopes, and imaginings of the American Dream. From what I hear and read, the conditions on those ships left something to be desired and leaving family behind in a culture that is built upon it, must have taken some kind of conviction that I'm not sure I possess. (BTW, the ship manifest also contains passenger's answers to questions like: "Are you a polygamist? and "Are you an anarchist?"...when I realized this, I scoured several documents looking for a "yes" answer to either of those questions and never found one...hmmm.)

What really astounds me, though, are the sheer numbers of people listed on any given day. Even looking up just one last name resulted in pages of entries. Immigrants all. As I gazed at the list of names on the same page as my grandmother's, I couldn't help but wonder how many of them were going to be reunited with spouses that had preceeded them on the journey in order to establish themselves and start earning a living wage as my grandfather had. I wondered how many would go on to learn English from radio shows and comic books as my grandparents did. I wondered how many of them might be coming to America expecting an easy ride. I wondered how many of them prospered and how many failed. Mostly, though, I wondered where America would be without them.
Europa...the ship that brought my grandmother to America