Immigration at the Museum of Family History: A Review of Two Current Exhibitions

For those of you who haven't yet visited the Museum's exhibition titled "A Multitude of Immigrants," may I suggest you do so at your convenience.

The online exhibition contains eleven articles written between 1891 and 1910, and published in such New York City newspapers as the Daily Tribune, the World and the Sun. The articles are interesting in many ways, particularly if you're curious as to how these newspapers portrayed the "flood" of immigrants that passed through New York City ports around the turn of the twentieth century, as well as how they tried to regulate the inflow.

As a sort of "companion" piece to this exhibition, please visit "Castle Garden and Ellis Island: Ports of Immigration." Here you may read any or all of the dozen newspaper articles that talk about the history of Castle Garden and Ellis Island, all written and published between 1887 and 1909.

When read as a whole these articles give us a chance to "taste" the sentiment of the time toward immigration and the Jewish immigrant specifically.

You can find the exhibition "A Multitude of Immigrants" by clicking here.

You can find the exhibition "Castle Garden and Ellis Island" by clicking here.

Want to Learn More About Ellis Island and Castle Garden?

For those of you who wish to become more knowledgeable about the history of Castle Garden, as well as Ellis Island, this is your chance. If you read through each of the exhibition's pages, you will learn more about Castle Garden including its interesting history (P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind to America to perform at Castle Garden in 1850, before Castle Garden became an immigration station).

You can read about the early history of Ellis Island here: the opening of Ellis Island in 1891, the fire that gutted most of the buildings on the Island in 1897, as well as its reopening in 1900. You can also learn a bit about the hospital at Ellis Island as well as the rooftop playground that was created at the immigration station for children to play in beginning in 1904. Also there is an interesting but sad group of stories of immigrants who were rejected and sent back to the port from where they began their trans-Atlantic voyage.

This is an good augmentation of the previous Museum exhibition about Ellis Island, and is filled with interesting articles that were published in such defunct New York City newspapers as the Tribune, the Sun and the World around the turn of the twentieth century.

You can visit the exhibition at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/mfh-ellisisland.htm .

Castle Garden and Ellis Island: Ports of Immigration

If you haven't already visited the Museum's small, seven-page exhibition about Castle Garden and Ellis Island, you may wish to do so now.

You may enjoy the short texts on each page, as well as some photographs which you may never have seen before. Just added today is a page straight out of the Sun, a New York newspaper that last published in 1950. The article is dated May 1887 and is entitled,

NOTED AT CASTLE GARDEN.
A HALF HOUR AMONG A SHIP'S LOAD WAITING TO BE LANDED.
Weeding Out the Ailing and the Friendless and the Very Poor –
An Unhappy Russian Family – A Marriage in the Rotunda.

This article is one of the many one can find by searching in old newspapers, many of which would be interesting for those who enjoy "going back in time" and learning not only what such events as immigration was like for our ancestors, but also what people were likely to read in newspapers. One can only imagine what these people thought about Jews back then, compared to now. It does give one food for thought.

I am currently going through New York newspapers from the late 1800s through 1910, and I find it interesting to see what newspapers said about the Jewish people, about immigration (as well as the fear of too much immigration--especially the Jews!), etc. I will present some other articles along the way that might be of interest to you, and I hope that you will enjoy reading them.

The link to the exhibition "Castle Garden and Ellis Island: Ports of Immigration" is www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/mfh-ellisisland.htm. Just click on the "enter" link at the bottom of the first page, and subsequently, the "next" link at the end of each page's text.