If you do genealogical research on the internet, you have probably realized that the amount of historical information that is available online increases each day. Today I heard about a wonderful new addition to the Ancestry.com website. As the result of a joint effort of the National Park Service and Ancestry.com, the oral histories of about 1,700 people that passed through Ellis Island beginning in the late 1890’s can now be accessed for free in the “Immigration” section of the Ancestry.com web site.
The National Park Service began conducting the interviews some time during the 1970’s and they were available to visitors to the immigration museum on Ellis Island in New York. The Ellis Island Oral Histories are just a part of Ancestry.com’s huge collection of United States Immigration resources, which include 170 million records that range from ship passenger lists to border crossings, naturalization records, and more. I went to Ancestry.com to check out the oral histories, which can be accessed for free, and found an extra bonus – all of the Ancestry.com immigration collection is accessible for free from today until Monday, September 6, 2010.
I randomly selected an oral history to listen to, and I was transported back in time as Lillian Galletta recounted how she, her mother, and four siblings left Sicily in 1928 to come to America to reunite with her father, who had made the journey earlier. It was fairly common not only for Italians but for immigrants from various places, for one parent to journey to America alone to being working and making money that they would send back to their home land so that the rest of the family could then make the journey. According to Lillian, there was not much work in Italy for men, and her father came to America so that he could work and provide for his family. Lillian was four when she traveled from Sicily to America to be reunited with her father, and the emotion with which she tells her story conveys that the memories of that voyage and the resulting reunion were still vividly etched in her mind in 1991 when she was interviewed. ‘
Don’t miss your chance to search through the vast immigration resources on Ancestry.com for free, now through Monday. While you are there, be sure to check out the Ellis Island Oral Histories, as they are a unique and very personal recounting of the passage to America as told by those who experienced it.