When I watched the movie Brooklyn
last week, I remembered my search of the Ellis Island records for my own
family, nearly 15 years ago.
I had noticed a small news item in American Heritage
magazine about how the Mormons had contributed millions of volunteer hours to
scan all of the immigration records from Ellis Island for the period of 1892 to
1924. And—this part was so amazing—the records could be accessed for free on
the Internet.
I decided to try to look for a record of Grandma Baker, my Dutch
great-grandmother who had sailed from Rotterdam with her three children. I knew
it was around 1906, because my grandma, who was one of those three children,
always said she was 5 when they came, and she was born in 1901.
Grandma Baker came to America to join her husband, who must
have left Holland about 3 or 4 years earlier, since the kids were aged 4, 5,
and 6. I always secretly wondered whether he sent for the family. Could he
possibly have deserted them, and Grandma Baker just packed up the kids and came
after him across the Atlantic? She was spunky as hell, and I loved the idea of
her showing up on his doorstep with their three kids. I knew my imagined
desertion story was not very plausible, since the two of them did indeed get
together in the new world and have six more kids, plus I never heard anything
bad said about him. So I never asked.
He died before I was born, but I knew Grandma Baker. When we
visited, she sat on the sofa, usually knitting—a pair of mittens, a sweater,
maybe—talking animatedly in a rich Dutch accent full of rounded vowels and lots
of “ach’s” and “ya’s.” She had very azure-blue eyes that, I swear, twinkled
when she laughed, and she laughed a lot, because quips and jokes were standard
fare among the Bakers. Her cheeks were moss-rose pink, with soft wrinkles. She
had snow-white hair, twisted into a soft pile on top of her head—not drawn
tightly back, but pulled gently up so that it waved a little bit around her
face.
She was already in her 80s when I was old enough to realize
that she was a pretty neat commodity to have, because none of my friends had an
alive great-grandmother.
As I typed in www.ellisislandrecords.org, I pondered—as I
had many times—what it must have been like for her to say goodbye to her family
in Holland, knowing, very likely, that she would never see them again. Did she
know anyone else who was boarding the ship? I imagined the kids bundled up in big
coats, wearing hand-knit mittens and scarves. Was there a big trunk? Did each child
carry a little suitcase or bag? Were they crying or happy? What did they eat on
the ship? Did they get seasick?
What I knew about that journey was that Grandma Baker did join my great-grandfather, who
was living in Hoboken, and for several years the family lived on the
fifth-floor of a tenement house there. My grandma, who had been the 5-year-old
on the trip, told me that when she started school, all the kids spoke different
languages. I love the notion of that Tower of Babel classroom, with students speaking
Dutch and English, German and Italian, Russian and Norwegian.
Another story—the only other one Grandma told me about her
life in Hoboken—was that when her dad played cards with his pals, he would send
her and her brother to buy a pail of beer, which cost a nickel. When they
brought back the beer, they attached the pail to a rope, and their dad hauled
it up to the fifth floor. How I wish I had heard more stories. How I wish I had
asked more questions.
The search engine for the Ellis Island database allows a
search for a range of years, so I tried 1905-1907. I didn’t think that the
children would be listed by name, so I searched for Grandma Baker. She was
called Minnie, but that was a nickname for something like “Jaquemina.” I wasn’t
sure of that spelling, but I gave it a go.
Given the spelling challenge, it was no surprise that there
were no matches for “Jaquemina Baker.” I tried “J Baker” and was rewarded with
97 matches. Each listing gave some summary information—residence, year of
arrival, and age. I pored over the matches that came back—Jacob Baker, Jaenne
Baker, J. Allen Baker—but there was no one from Rotterdam. No one even from
Holland.
I started over, using simply “Baker” with no first name or
initial. This yielded 970 names, but, again, when I scrolled through all of the
records I found no one from Holland. I wasn’t sure what was wrong. Could I be
searching on the wrong years? Was I not using the search engine correctly?
Could those Mormons have missed someone?
Maybe “Baker” was an incorrect spelling, although that was
one question I had asked Grandma, because “Baker” never seemed very
Dutch to me: “Did the name Baker get changed from Baaker or something after you
came to America, Grandma?”
“No. It was always Baker” She was adamant. But now I
wondered if she could have been wrong. After all, she had been only 5 years old.
and everyone knows the stories of how those Ellis Island clerks assigned new
names willy-nilly.
The Ellis Island search engine suggests variant spellings,
and for Baker it offered a couple dozen alternatives, many of which I would
never have thought of—everything from Baaker and Beker to Bacere and Baeger. It
allows searches for two variant spellings at a time, so I tried again for the
years 1905-1907, this time searching for the variants Baaker or Bakker, which
seemed pretty Dutch to me.
That search returned a list of 115 passengers. I started
reading through the entries. Mrs. A. Bakker. Aart Bakker. Abraham Bakker. Ailke
Bakker. When I got to the “C’s” my heart jumped with a shock of recognition: Cornelia
Bakker, Rotterdam, age 7. It was Aunt Cornelia! I clicked on her name. The
next page was her passenger record, stating that she had arrived on November 4,
1907, on a ship named Rijndam.
I clicked on “View Original Ship Manifest.” Wow. Here was a
scan of an actual ledger page from Ellis island, listing individual steerage passengers. I scrolled slowly
down the list of passengers from the SS Rijndam, reading each name, not
breathing. Then I saw them. All together, lines 25 through 28:
Jacomina Bakker; female; age 29
Cornelia Bakker; female; age 7
Jannneke Bakker; female; age 6
Jan Bakker; male; age 5
I stared at the names. There they were, a tidy little group.
A family. My family. I was bursting with a thrill so deep it filled
every cell, and I had to stand up and walk around the room, crying and
laughing.
When I calmed down, I went back to my desk and studied the
ledger for more details. So, Grandma, who went by Jennie, was originally
“Janneke,” and she was 6, not 5, when they came to America.
The record gave more information than I expected—not that I know
what I expected. Written carefully in columns across two ledger pages were the
facts about hundreds of passengers booked on the SS Rijndam, which had sailed
from Rotterdam on October 26, 1907.
The columns following Jacomina Bakker’s name offered these
details: Occupation: wife. Able to read: yes. Able to write: yes.
Final destination: Hoboken.
I pictured the hundreds of weary and excited immigrants,
everyone wearing brown and gray (because, of course, that’s how they are in the
movies). I saw them at the processing office, waiting in a long line to be
logged into this ledger book by an immigration officer. I saw a young Grandma
Baker, a 29-year-old Grandma Baker, to be exact, clutching a suitcase, relying,
no doubt, on 7-year-old Cornelia to keep the two younger kids in line.
I saw the whole scene: Seated behind a big oak desk, holding
a black fountain pen, was a clerk who wore black worsted trousers fastened to
brown suspenders over a white shirt. The registration rooms were cold and
drafty, so he kept his wool jacket on all day. He, too, was weary, dipping his
pen in an inkwell in the desk, bending over the book, recording bits of
information about hundreds of passengers in 29 columns across the ledger,
asking over and over, “Name? Age? Occupation?”
I read across the columns of the ship’s manifest and
learned, from Column 15, that Grandma Baker and the three children had indeed
been sent for by my great-grandfather: “By whom was passage paid?” The answer: “husb, self.” For each of
the three children, the answer was “fath, mother.”
The answers to the Column 16 question confirmed that they
were poor, though I had never thought otherwise: “Whether in possession of $50, and if less, how much?” The
immigration officer had written “0.”
Column 27, “color
of eyes,” was blank for Grandma Baker. Incredible. The immigration
officer must indeed have been weary not to have noticed her blue eyes. I
suppose they were not twinkling right then.
* * * *
I called my 24-year-old Rachel that night and told her about
the amazing Ellis Island records, about the years of work by the Mormons, about
finally using the different spelling for Baker and finding Aunt Cornelia, about
finding the little family of names, about being overwhelmed with joy and tears.
She took it all in and paused for a few seconds before she
said, “You know what this means, don’t you, Mom?”
“No, what?”
“We’ll have to become Mormons.”
She’s a Baker.
