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.

Things That Went Missing

You know that parlor game where you name the person, living or dead, whom you would most like to have dinner with? Well, this is not about that. This is about mysteries.

My fantasy is that there will be a great day of revelation when I can get the answers to all my unanswered questions. The unsolved mysteries of life. The deep secrets that have nagged at me. No, not how Stonehenge got there. Not the crop circles. Certainly not the Big Bang.

The missing pieces from
the unicorn puzzle

My unanswered questions are deeper questions, question that keep you tossing and turning at night. Like, where are those two missing pieces from the unicorn puzzle? Also the ibuprofen pill I dropped in the downstairs bathroom last August. I looked for it, on my hands and knees, for at least 4.2 minutes. Where is it? 

These are Things That Went Missing, and I want to know where they went. Even if they no longer exist, the unanswered question is, where did they go?

To put a fine point on it, this fantasy of finding out what happened excludes the things that I lost. On the great day of revelation, when I get the answers, I don’t have to know about the glove I dropped on the subway, or the cell phone that I left in the movie theater on 48th Street. I know what happened to them: I lost them.

But there are other things that I didn’t lose. Like the cat brush I mailed to Rachel when she lived in Brooklyn. It was a great present. It was a surprise. It never arrived. Nor was it returned to me by the post office. It is a Thing That Went Missing, and by god, I want to know what happened to it.

The cleaver with wooden handle

Until now I never actually made a list. But I’m going to. What happened to the teddy bear that disappeared from my tent at Camp Anna Behrens when I was 10? And that roll of film from the 1984 vacation in Port Huron? I mailed it in to the processing place and they “lost” it. Well, it went somewhere, and I want to know where. And I definitely want to know about the meat cleaver with the wooden handle that was just no longer in the knife drawer one day. 

I’m pretty patient about these things. And optimistic. Long after others might have considered it hopeless, I believe a Thing That Went Missing will turn up. Tom’s two favorite mugs, for example. They are here. They will surface. For the first year I was sure I would come across one or the other—maybe on the shelf by the washing machine, maybe rolling around in the back seat of the car. Even now, going on Year Three, I’m confident the mugs will be found. Perhaps a little less confident than before—I admit it—I bought replacements.

The cat with tourmaline eyes

Some things that went missing are found, and, as noted by Jesus in the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3), there is great rejoicing when this happens. Like the tourmaline gemstone that serves as one of the cat eyes in the Steuben glass cat that reposes on the mantel. One day, shortly after we moved into the house, I noticed he had only one eye. What?! When did that happen?! Tom and I searched, and searched, and searched. No dice. Also no cat’s eye. Then, about four months later, I found the little thing in the corner of my jewelry box. Vaguely I remembered putting it in a safe place (the surest way to lose something, I might add) before we moved. Much rejoicing.

The missing earrings

In my fantasy of the great revelation, the missing socks (that universal experience) will also be accounted for. Their mates are somewhere—and I will sit down with the God of Missing Things and find out where. Until then, I keep the singleton socks in a special little cloth bag in the bottom drawer. Similarly, I keep the singleton earrings in that special section of the jewelry box where I found the cat’s eye.

Searching for lost things, holding on to the unmated socks--these are the works half of the faith and works doctrine (“faith without works is dead”—James 2:20). We have to do our part: I hold on to the unmated socks, I continue to search for the mugs, I go to the post office and ask about the lost packages. And I am optimistic (faith) that they will be found.

Most of all I dream that on that great day of revelation, all will be found.

Can this Turtle Be Saved?

This is a true story.

Clyde the desert turtle had been part of Bob’s family for 12 years, and in the divorce settlement last year, Bob got custody of Clyde and his wife got the two kids. It has never really clear to me if there was an actual court battle over custody, because the obvious but un-askable question is, “Who won?” At any rate, Bob loves Clyde like a child.

My friend Judy was turtle-sitting recently for Clyde while Bob, now Judy’s fiancé, was out of town for the weekend. On Saturday morning Judy noticed that Clyde was dangerously close to the edge of the pool. (This story takes place in California, where, Judy assures me, all homes have pools.) Being a desert turtle, Clyde did not swim, so Judy carefully carried him to the bushes at the edge of the yard, as far from the pool as possible.

Thus discharging her turtle-tending tasks, Judy went through her Saturday ritual of doing her nails and hair, then left for lunch and shopping with her mother.

When she got back, you guessed it: Clyde was at the bottom of the pool. Judy became hysterical. Not hysterical enough to dive in, of course (she had just done her hair, remember), but hysterical enough to run out into the street shrieking, “Help! Help! Clyde’s in the bottom of the pool!” But no one was around (a fact for which I think Judy should be grateful). 

One can only guess the urgency and fear that gripped Judy in those moments. It reminds me of the time when Lassie got her foot caught in a coon trap, and Timmy had to run to the barn to get help, but no one was at the barn.

Finding no help at the barn, so to speak, Judy ran to a neighboring house. There she found a teenager who offered his services (don’t ever say today’s teens aren’t willing to lend a hand), and they raced back to the pool, where the teen dove in and brought up a limp, dead Clyde.

Judy knew how much Clyde meant to Bob, and she knew how to do CPR. Love can motivate us to do strange things. So, you guessed it, she turned Clyde over on his back and started pressing rhythmically. But, alas, after several minutes of pumping, there were no signs of revival.

Judy decided drastic steps were called for. She instructed the helpful teenager to hold open Clyde’s mouth, and she began blowing into it. Soon tiny bubbles started coming out of his nose, er, nose holes. More cardiopulmonary compressions. More blowing. Unbelievably, Clyde started breathing on his own! No doubt his little turtle heart started, too, but really, how can you tell?

But all was not well. Clyde’s back legs hung limp. Now Judy asked herself the heartbreaking question, would Clyde have been better off dead than living as a paraplegic? And even worse, what if he was brain-damaged? She faced the horrible fact that the moments lost while she ran looking for someone else to dive in might have been the difference between an able-bodied and a disabled Clyde.

But this story has a happy ending, at least for Clyde. Judy called the turtle doctor (remember, this takes place in California) and, as instructed, wrapped Clyde in blankets. When he came out of shock, he had full use of his legs and full mental capacity, Judy reports. (Another un-askable question: how can you tell if a turtle has full mental capacity?)

Judy told Bob the whole story, fully expecting a shower of gratitude and something akin to adoration for resuscitating a desert turtle. Bob, however, was more miffed that she hadn’t immediately dived in to save poor Clyde. So, the ending for Judy and Bob remains to be seen.

Baby's Last Name

In 1977 it was pretty radical for a married couple not to give a baby the father’s name. Actually, it still is. But Tom and I were feminists, and we recognized that a patrinominal system reflects a patriarchal society, which reflects a sexist society, which we did not support. So we decided our baby did not necessarily have to have his name. Our small decision did not change society, as I’m sure you all know, but back to my story. 

We did know one couple, our friends Bob and Linda, who also planned to buck the father’s-name system, but their plan was not being tested by an actual pregnancy. Their plan was that any girl children would have Linda’s surname, and boys would have Bob’s. But Tom and I didn’t want to go in that direction and let sex determine the name. As it turned out for Bob and Linda (for those of you who like to tie up loose threads), they did later carry out their plan. Conveniently, they had one boy and one girl.

We considered combining our names. Goode and Wiseman were, after all, not bad contenders for a merger. Sure, Wisegoode sucked, but Goodman sounded fine. However, we felt Goodman, or even Goodman, would sacrifice the integrity of both our names. The integrity of a name was just a vague notion to me at the time, but in the years since I’ve developed a clearer sense that a name does have an integrity—a wholeness and a clarity that should not be distorted.

We thought about hyphenation. Goode-Wiseman? Wiseman-Goode? But what would happen when a Wiseman-Goode married a Nowinski-Nykoruk, and then the Wiseman-Goode-Nowinski-Nykoruk married a Baker-VerPorter-Waeckerle-Heitman? This clearly could not end well.

Using my name as Baby’s middle name was a possibility we considered. There were plenty of models for such use of family names. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Lyndon Baines Johnson. Richard Milhous Nixon. But I really didn’t want to saddle Baby with having to become President.

Ultimately, we decided we would name one child Goode and one Wiseman. Naturally we intended to have only two children, doing our part toward zero population growth.

Then the friends started weighing in: A kid without the father’s name would make people question whether we were really married. We would be sentencing a child to playground ridicule about being a bastard. Everyone would think the kids were step-siblings, thrown together from two divorces. Our children would have lifelong identity problems. Different names would provide a breeding ground for divisiveness in our family, would worsen sibling rivalry, would lead to each child’s emotionally aligning more with one parent than the other. 

You have to put this in the perspective of 1977, mind, long before the term “blended family” came into common parlance. Also, this was before 40.2% (I just checked) was the proportion of babies being born to unmarried women. And, really, hardly any of them are called bastards. (OK, I didn’t check on that, but you hardly ever hear that name being yelled out on the Metro.)

Ignoring our friends, Tom and I stuck by our plan to divvy up the surnames of our planned two kids. But whose name would go to this first baby? In the end, it was the opposition from our friends that convinced us to give Baby my name—Wiseman. Our thinking was that if we chose Tom’s name for the Baby 1, we would make people happy, but all hell would break loose when we switched to Wiseman for Baby 2. Conversely, by using Wiseman first, the opposition would feel relieved when we named the second child Goode. (“Tom and Marian have finally come to their senses!”) Or, failing that, the outrage would have been spent because of Baby Wiseman, and they would no longer care. 

Once Rachel Wiseman arrived, I was astonished by the pleasure it gave me that she had my name. What exactly was this feeling? It was more than the extraordinary love I felt, more than the bond of motherhood. It was a feeling of great satisfaction connected specifically to her having my name. I had never suspected such a feeling even existed in the universe of human emotions. Is this what men have felt for generations? All the patriarchs of history? Small wonder the patrinominal system is so entrenched. 

None of the repercussions portended by our friends came true. Sure, Tom was Mr. Wiseman to all of her teachers, but he never objected. 

One time—she just have been eight or nine—Rachel told me that she and her best friend had been talking about what their names might be when they got married. I give myself great credit for my self-control when I heard this. I did not start shrieking, “You’ll change your name over my dead body!! You think you’re going to cave in to male dominance and set feminism back 30 years?!! Do you think your father and I gave you your name for nothing?!”

No. I was calm. Serene, even. “You do realize, don’t you, honey, that you don’t have to change your name?” With great objectivity I pointed out that it was her choice. I conceded that many women still do take their husband’s name. And I’m quite certain I did not roll my eyes when I said that, though I admit my tone might have hinted that those poor, unenlightened souls were to be pitied. I reassured her that it would be up to her when the time came.

To my friends I said, “If she changes her name, I’ll kill her.”

Keeping My Name

When I got married—the first time, in 1974—I didn’t change my name. Not taking the husband’s name was a newer concept then, and it wouldn’t actually have occurred to me if Tom (first husband Tom, not current husband Tom) hadn’t suggested it.

Tom’s family was supportive to a fault. Example: For our wedding present, his mother embroidered a set of sheets, with “His” and “Hers” nested amid the beautiful flowers and curlicues on the pillowcases. Some time after we opened her gift, she sought me out privately to say, in her quiet, unassuming way, “I hope the ‘his’ and ‘hers’ is OK on the pillowcases. I knew to stay away from ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ but I wasn’t absolutely sure about ‘his’ and ‘hers.’ Tears filled my eyes as I hugged and reassured her. How thoughtful to be sensitive about such a thing. How hilarious to wonder about ‘his’ and ‘hers.’

My own mother, though 10 years younger than Tom’s, was less hip, or perhaps just less agreeable. She knew I was retaining “Wiseman,” but after the marriage her weekly letters, formerly just to me, now came to both of us, with the envelope addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Goode.” The kind interpretation is that in 1974 Mom did not know how to address an envelope to a married couple with different surnames, since neither Emily Post nor Ann Landers had as yet directed the world on how to do it. That’s setting aside the possible interpretation that Mom was being passive-aggressive.

I didn’t want to confront her about it—afraid to learn she had disapproved of my decision, perhaps, but also, it must be said, because I avoided confrontation of any kind. (This was before therapy, obviously.) Tom, however, had no such misgivings and became increasingly irritated by the incorrectly addressed letters.

The turning point came when my birthday present arrived addressed to “Mrs. Tom Goode.” I didn’t like it but was willing to let it go (note the “before therapy” comment, above). Not so, Tom. He said if I didn’t talk to Mom he was going to send the present back, with a note that there was no such person as Mrs. Tom Goode. (I was just beginning to realize, in that alarming first-year-of-marriage way, that Tom was pretty bull-headed about some things.) His confronting my mother, or, more likely, accosting her, was out of the question, of course.

So, I had to tell my mother to address me by my actual name of Marian Wiseman. She complied immediately, and it was so easy! No questions asked, no resistance, no difficulties of any kind. If I had realized then how effective assertive behavior was, I might have avoided those years of therapy.

I was surprised recently to find out how uncommon it is, still, for women to keep their birth name at marriage: only 20% of women do so; another 10% or so use a hyphenated name or some other modified version of their birth name. But there is apparently a small trend toward maintaining one’s own name. Some commentators believe that the rise of social media is contributing to this trend, as women face inconveniences in changing online accounts or realize that their Facebook or Linked-In histories and identities are lost if they create an identity under a new name.

For me, I have never once regretted my decision to keep my own name when I married in 1974, or when I married again in 2000, for that matter. Ah, one name. Permanently.

I would love to hear your views on this issue, whether you are married or not, or female or not.