An Alien Made Manifest

 
Every ship entering the port of New York was required to provide customs officers with comprehensive details of its cargo, passengers, and crew. The "List or Manifest of Alien Passengers" (left) is a snapshot of a single moment--a century the  the past. It captures salient details of the 800 or so people who arrived on the same ship,
just as they were embarking on their wholly unknown future in a foreign land--the U.S.A.

The manifest allows us to look back upon our ancestors through the eyes of one of the first officials to welcome (and scrutinize) them as they stood before the officer, undoubtedly with  heart in throat, wondering if anything they said might provide an excuse to send them back whence they came.

Whoever looked at my grandmother, Lisi, when she arrived on the evening of September 26th, 1911, began filling in the twenty-nine columns on line 19 of the manifest with the details that the U.S. wanted to know about this "alien" prior to her entry into this country.

Line 19 of manifest for the steamer, Kaiser Wilhelm II

Columns 1and  2 -- her full name: Ebner, Erzsebeth (see detail, above)

Never mind what her real name was. They took the Hungarian equivalent, Erzsebeth, from her passport/Dienstbuch [for details of this dual-purpose document, see 6/14 post, When a Resume Worked as a Passport)

The mistaken transcription

Years later, when all this information was transcribed into a searchable database, her name was mistakenly copied as “Ebnor” with an “o” and Erzebeth was miscopied as “Erssebeth,” making my search just a tad more difficult. But because of the detailed information Lisi had written on the postcard of her ship (see last post), I found it. The U.S. wanted further bureaucratic information:

Column                  Question             Lisi's answers
3                                Age                         24
4                             Gender                        F
5                             Married/single             Single
6                             occupation                   Cook
7                             Able to read/write        yes/yes
8                            Nationality                   Hungary
9                            Race/people                 German
10                        Last Permanent
                              Residence                   Hungary, N[agy] Apold [Hungarian for Grosspold]
11                          Nearest relative
                            In home country           Samuel Ebner [father]
12                        Final Destination           Cleveland, Ohio
Compose
Aha! Question #12, the last question on the first page of the two-page manifest, is how I discovered that Lisi didn’t go directly to Chicago to meet my grandfather. Instead her first stop was Cleveland, where her stepsister, Maria Wagner,  lived. I hadn’t known this before.

The questions continued on the second page, allowing us to stand in the interrogator’s place, and imagine how Lisi appeared to him/her:

Height:                         5’ 4”
Hair:                             black
Eyes:                            grey [I recall deep brown eyes!]
Complexion:                fair [not really]
Marks of identification:  none

Is she’s a polygamist? No.
An anarchist?             No.

(Who would answer “yes” to these two questions?!

Condition of her health, mental and physical: good

Deformed or crippled?  No.
In possession of at least $50 and if not, how much? $40

Ticket to final destination? Yes
Who paid for passage?       Self
Ever in U.S. before?           No

Manifest showing (left) Lisi arrived with $40; Right: the name of
address of her destination: Rudolf Wagner, 4287 St. Clair Avenue,
Cleveland Oh

Going to relative or friend? If so [give] complete address:

Rudolf Wagner [her stepsister’s husband] 4287 St. Clair Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio.

I had seen that name before, and this piece of unknown information on the manifest was a revelation that connected Lisi's arrival to an incident forty years later.

A family of documentarians brings life full circle

I had never met the Wagner family--nor do I recall hearing about them--until I read my father's 1950 diary. During one of his many business trips out of state, he traveled to Ohio and made a side excursion to visit the Wagner family in Cleveland. By 1950 they had grown sons, owned a restaurant where the sons and father switched off to work night and day, and had many American luxuries. Another immigrant family that had fulfilled the American dream. Details to come.

Meantime, Lisi successfully passed inspection, both health and moral (no polygamy or anarchism!). Josef will have to wait a few more weeks to see his darling, but she let him know she had arrived safely.
Coming up: the postcard of New York Lisi sent to him and how a seemingly unimportant business card turned out to be a key clue as to how they connected in Chicago.