Well, I have had no luck at all with it—anyone else tried it? When you can finally get through (it’s jammed), it asks you the first and last names of the ancestor you’re looking for. I have tried every permutation of what I THINK were my great-grandparents’ names when they came from Russia and Transylvania between 1901–11, but so far I have come up blank. I even tried their Americanized names. Do you have any idea how many Isaac Katzes hit our shores? Yikes!
I note that the site is at least partially thanks to the Mormon Ancestry records. I have logged onto that as well, and have found numerous factual errors in it . . .
I’ve also had problems connecting to it. I only managed to get one query through successfully (and then, it didn’t have any information I was looking for). I’m just going to wait another two weeks or so until the demand dies down a bit.
NEW YORK (AP) - People searching for information about their ancestral roots have overwhelmed a new Ellis Island Web site that debuted last week. The site had 26 million visitors in its first 54 hours of operation, and many more were unable to get into the site because of its popularity, said Peg Zitko, a spokeswoman for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. The site, which went online April 18, includes arrival records of 22 million immigrants who entered the port of New York between 1892 to 1924.
“We knew it would be popular because 40 percent of Americans can trace their roots back to someone who entered the country at Ellis Island,” Zitko said, “but we didn’t expect it to be an international phenomenon.” The site began operating with 10 servers and three backups and had to add 10 more to handle the load.
The database was put together by the foundation and the Mormon Church, which encourages its members to identify ancestors and baptize them into the faith. Until now, the information was only available on microfilm at the National Archives in Washington or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
—Well, I still haven’t been able to find MY family. Maybe they just sprung from the heart of a rose? Or the stork brought them here, bypassing Ellis Island?
Wow. I’d tried to access it when it first came out, (yea, like I’ll have any luck with that), saw your thread topic, thought ‘gee, let’s try again’, et voila - I found grandpa!
(or at least I’m pretty damn sure, right name, correct background and approximate year and age). Of course, after it located him, it sent me off to ‘register’ for the site, and by the time I did, the site was too busy for me to access his records closer so I could make sure. harumph.
We managed to find my great-grandparents on my mom’s side. And confirmed it was them…we knew the names, and it brought up everything on them, including what they said their destination in the US was. (Which is how we confirmed it was my great-grandparents…)
Now we’re just waiting for my dad’s mom to send a letter with her parent’s full names. Both grandparents are THRILLED that we can find this stuff…my mom’s mom even started crying.
…and we have documentation that my mom’s name is inscribed on the wall of honor. When I filled out all of the fields, I got an immediate reply that stated the name could not be found because my query was “too short”. It makes me wonder if the site is so overloaded that it just automatically gives you that reply, or if they honestly could not find her name. Her maiden name was Kühn but at the time we sent the documentation in we had “americanized” it to Kuehn so that the umlaut would not be a problem.
I haven’t tried this yet, but people I’ve talked to who have have reported the same thing I see here – they can’t get through.
When I was living in Salt Lake City they had all of this data on microfilm, and I went through it to find the records of my grandparent’s arrivals at Ellis Island.Since the Mormons are doing this Ellis Island site, I imagine it’s the same system.
I was able to find the records of BOTH of my grandmother’s entries. I was lucky enough to know the rough dates and, in one case, the name of the ship. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the record of either grandfather. The system used to transcribe foreign names is a maddeningly vague orthography called the “SOUNDEX” system that groups similar-sounding consonants together under one heading. Surprisingly, it works, but (since it tends to coalesce names rather than separate them) it makes your search times longer. The good news is that the system is impervious to umlauts and to American mispronunciation, but you pay for this in having a much coarser separation of names.
I’d like to try and find my grandmothers on-line, but I think I’ll wait 'til the traffic dies down.
What about those of us whose families didn’t pass through Ellis Island? White trash has heritage too you know. My ancestors passed through Rouses Point on their journey from southern Quebec to northern New York. It was an epic voyage by pick-up truck that took the better part of a weekend.
Yeah, my ancestors didn’t come by way of Ellis island either. In the late 1700’s Ellis Island was not, to my knowledge, the huge terminus for immigrants that it later became.
My father always said that our family were Welsh coal miners who dug their way across the Atlantic, underground, headed for New York, but came up by mistake in Baltimore, chiseled their way into the stone masonry business, and decided to stay. I believed that story about the underground transatlantic crossing for most of my early childhood. I found it vaguely disturbing.(There were, incidentally, many Masons in my family. The kind who have secret arcane magical meetings as well as the chippers and carvers.)
Dagnabbit! Only found one name, and it had to be wrong. Gaspar Krupansky was listed as being 5 when he arrived in America in 1923. Can’t be: my mother’s maternal grandfather, with that name, was 24 when he arrived in 1910. Didn’t find her other three grandparents, didn’t find my father’s mother’s parents, or his mother, who was with them (she was five), or his father’s father. And they all did go through Ellis Island!
I was so excited when I found Gaspar! Called my parents; my mom squealed, then said, “That can’t be him.” Sigh.
Where do these people claim to get their information from?
And like many of you, I tried alternative spellings. My mom was indignant, but I said, “The immigrations officials were probably overworked and cranky. They must have noted info either by hand, or with one of those primitive typewriters, so misspellings are to be expected.” Tried Siftar, Sifter, Sefter, and Seftir (long shot, that last), but came up empty on all. The Italian names are similarly vulnerable. Zip.
My ancestors have the unusual English name (from Yorkshire) of Killerby. I see that “Ellis Island” had a bunch o’ them going through in 1892. Great! sez I. Huzzah! These might be missing rels!
Sorry. Can’t get info unless I register.
I try. It crashes.
According to Rootsweb, you should try in “off-peak” hours. Uh, uh. Don’t work. Which lamebrain thought Ellis Island is only an American thing in genealogy, huh? Huh?
Try twice to register. I think I got through. No go. So, somewhere in their 1-volt server, I’m a registered user, who can’t use it. They can’t even send me passwords to my e-mail.
sigh
I’ll wait. I’ll always wait. Genealogists are good at waiting.
And then we strike. BTW: Any Killerby’s out there?
i thought of giving it a try. jens jensen isn’t THAT common a name… right??? hee, hee, hee, ha,ha, ha,etc.
on the russian side, we just figure they were beamed down from the bizarro world. 3 kids and not one of them agree on one thing about their parents. well, maybe just the fact that there was a mom and a dad.