The first immigrant to set foot on Ellis Island was Annie Moore, a 13-year-old girl who sailed across the Atlantic on a ship called Nevada from the port of Queenstown in Cork. She landed on January 2nd, 1892, and a statue at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum commemorates her.
Details such as these are now easy to find since Ellis Island has put its passenger records online.
Between 1892 and 1924 (the peak years of Ellis Island's processing) more than 22 million passengers and members of ships' crews came through Ellis Island and the Port of New York. The ships' clerks kept detailed passenger lists, which they called ships manifests. In the early years the details were hand-written, in later years they were typed.
In all, data from the documents cover 11 fields of information such as the immigrants given name and surname, gender, ethnicity, last town and country of residence, port of departure, ship of travel and date of arrival.
The data, taken directly from 3,678 microfilms of ships passenger manifests from more than 800 ships provided by the National Archives and Records Administration, has never before been available electronically.
Over the past eight years, 12,000 volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) extracted and transcribed them into a vast electronic archive. The data can be accessed at www.ellisislandrecords.org or for a $5 (#5.60) fee at the American Family Immigration History Center on Ellis Island, which is situated off the tip of Manhattan.
This fee includes a printout of an immigrant's arrival data. In future, a scanned reproduction of the original ships manifest, as well as a photo of the ship of passage, could be reproduced either on CD-Rom or on archival paper for an additional fee.
The website opened on April 17th with a ceremony on Ellis Island. The launch date was significant because it was on April 17th in 1907 that 11,747 immigrants, double the usual number, were processed on one day.
Since the site was set up, the response has been so great that, in the first two weeks, the site received 316 million hits. Ms Peg Zitko, director of public affairs at The Statue of LibertyEllis Island Foundation, which administers the site, said it is averaging between 17 million and 18 million successful hits a day.
"It stays pretty busy all day long and actually gets the busiest in late afternoon," she said. "While the website may have been difficult to get onto, it never crashed," she added.
The Foundation began with 10 servers and three servers as back-up but, since going live, Compaq Computer has had to loan it an additional 10 servers. "In the first week, we quadrupled the memory on our database servers and were taking further steps [to accommodate demand]," Ms Zitko said. "We know this is a spike period so we want to see where it will level off."
Such interest in the site is not surprising. About 40 per cent of Americans can trace their roots back to Ellis Island and about 60 per cent are interested in family history research. In fact, the Port of New York accounted for 71 per cent of all immigrant arrivals to the US during 1892 and 1924.
Although Ms Zitko did not have detailed figures on ethnic groups most frequently accessing the site, she did say that 330,000 people have registered as users and the top three countries represented are the US, Italy and Canada.
The Republic is 13th on the list after Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Australia, Greece, Denmark and France. The words Ellis Island were also the number one search term on the Lycos search engine two weeks ago.
At the Ellis Island site, visitors can research, access and download family immigration records. Soon, they will be able to electronically scan and enter family documents, photos and records into their own file in the Family History Scrapbook, which is available to Foundation members, to view six family history vignettes, and to order passenger manifests and ships pictures.
A variety of ethnic spellings will be added to the software program to help narrow searches. "Changing names was not standard practice at Ellis Island," Ms Zitko said. "Many names got changed by immigrants later for naturalisation." Those searching the database need to know the names their ancestors used when entering the country.
One of the US's most famous immigrants was the composer Irving Berlin, who was born Israel Baline in Mohilev, Russia. His family emigrated to the US in 1893, entering through Ellis Island, when the boy was five. In 1907 he changed his name to Irving Berlin.
At the Family History Centre, there are 41 computer workstations, 31 are used for searching the database and the other 10 allow users to create scrap books.
"The experience at Ellis Island is not affected by traffic on the Web," Ms Zitko said. "If you get into the centre you won't be told we're too busy and to come back later."
The foundation is taking reservations online for visits to the centre.
In May 1982, Mr Ronald Reagan asked Mr Lee Iacocca, then chairman of Chrysler, to head a citizens group to raise funds for the preservation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation has raised more than $500 million from the American people and it was responsible for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
The Ellis Island Immigration Museum re-opened its doors to the public in September 1990, with many rooms appearing as they did during the height of immigrant processing. It was the foundation, working with the National Park Service - the administrator of the two monuments - which planned and developed the new centre.
