ELLIS ISLAND, N.Y. — The massive Great Hall teems with people now, all brought here by boat for a short stay. That is just as it was for dozens of years from 1892 to 1954.
The difference, to be sure, is that in the former years, the people who came to Ellis Island were both expectant and scared, here to be processed as newly minted immigrants. Most had been brought to the island by barge from carrier ships, docked in New York Harbor, on which they had sailed primarily from Europe.
Today's visitors come by Circle Line boat tours from Battery Park in Manhattan or Liberty Park in Jersey City. They are not as expectant or nervous as their predecessors, coming instead to see some history.
Now they can come a bit closer to the past. As of Tuesday, they'll be able to see not only artifacts of the great migration, but also records of the passage. Profiles of all of the nearly 22 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island and other New York ports between 1892 and 1924, the peak years of immigration, will be available from computer terminals at the Ellis Island National Monument and, in a more truncated version, on the Internet (http://www.ellisislandrecords.org).
"We always wanted to do this project, but we had to get done other things first," said Stephen A. Briganti, president and chief executive of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.
The first task of the nonprofit foundation, which was established in 1982, was to refurbish the Statue of Liberty and the main immigration buildings on Ellis Island. When that project was substantially finished four years later, the foundation turned to the idea of cataloging the immigration data.
"By that time, technology had changed to make it more accessible," said Briganti. "And then two years later, as the Internet had become more popular, we decided to add that component as well."
The manifests of all the ships that legally brought people into New York during those years have been available at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., but the five-year effort to catalog the immigrant data makes extracting information from the records significantly easier. Viewers no longer need to travel to Washington to read microfilm, nor do they need to know the name of the boat that carried the people they're looking up. (Without the name of a boat, it would've been necessary to search manifest after manifest to find a passenger.)
