Finding Immigrant Names On Degraded Ellis Island Manifests

Joel Weintraub

2019-06-08 21:15:27 UTC

X-No-archive: yes
Hi Group,

For the past few years I have been researching how to find immigrant records
on degraded Ellis Island manifest pages. About 5% of such ship pages showed
some sheet damage (ripped, creased, etc.) when they were filmed in 1943 and
1944. I've shared that research in my talks, and by answering and helping
Jenners trying to find "missing" people on the Ellis Island indexes. As was
recently announced, I've now put that experience to paper in an essay that
is posted in the JewishGen InfoFiles titled “Finding Immigrant Names on
Degraded Ellis Island Manifests.”

See: https://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/Degradedmanifests.html

In the InfoFile I discuss 10 different approaches for finding or at least
getting some clues to these difficult passengers, and show why some
strategies work and others will never work no matter how many name
variations you use. There are two main situations on degraded manifests that
reduce the chances of successful searches.

The first situation is the use of ellipses in the Ellis Island Database
(EIDB), created in the 1990s by the Church of Jesus Christ volunteers.
Volunteer transcribers replaced a missing part of a name on a ripped page
(usually the front of the name) with "...", or substituted "..." for part of
a name that the transcriber could not decipher (e.g. W...in...raub for
Weintraub in one case). The JewishGen InfoFile, "Ellis Island Database FAQ
& Tips", discusses the illegible name ellipsis problem. There are about
425,000 Ellis Island passenger names on the EIDB that contain an ellipsis or
about 3.5% of the often cited 12 million immigrants that passed through
Ellis Island. How many of these could be attributed to degraded pages, and
not illegible handwriting? Using as representative of a degraded manifest
the SS Sicilia's NY voyage in 1907, 79/546 of its passengers have partial
names (the rest of the name ripped off) on the filmed manifest or about
14%. If my very broad assumptions work, then I would expect that 5%
(chance of degraded page) x 14% (chance a name on those degraded pages is a
partial) = 0.7%. Therefore of the 12 million immigrants, I would expect
about 84,000 of them to have a name containing an ellipsis as a result of
damaged sheets.

The second situation is where the entire passenger name no longer exists on
the degraded manifest (but some or all of the rest of the line may still be
intact). How many names/lines of the 12 million might be impacted by this
problem? Using again the SS Sicilia 1907 voyage, 68/546 of its passengers
no longer showed any part of their name on the filmed manifest or about 12%.
(Their lines were not transcribed for the EIDB.) Thus 5% x 12% = 0.6% or
about 75,000 passengers of the 12 million immigrants.

I thank JewishGen for posting my essay and I hope it is helpful to
researchers confronted by degraded manifests and other situations of
difficult Ellis Island passenger searches.

Joel Weintraub
Dana Point, CA
***@cox.net

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