Finding Grandma at Ellis Island

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.