Friday, November 24, 2006

Ellis Island surprises

While taking advantage of Ancestry.com's free access to its immigration and naturalization records to get digital copies of Ellis Island ship manifests, I came upon a page for Simon Jellen that I had never seen before. It was the last page of the ship manifest for the S.S. St. Louis which Simon and his family took from Liverpool when they immigrated to New York in 1916. It is titled "Record of Aliens Held for Special Inquiry" Here's a copy of it: Simon is listed on the third line.

The first surprise was that Simon and his family (wife Leah and sons Joseph and Morris) were detained at all. Unfortunately, I cannot yet find out what the reason for detention was; I found "1pc 2d cabin 930", listed in the column "Cause of Detention" which is not a standard notation. You would generally find items related to questionable health, mental disabilities, lack of money or waiting for relatives to contact them. You can see in the "Actions of the Board of Special Inquiry" column that they were all admitted the same day that the ship arrived. While in detention they received 15 breakfast, dinner and suppers. The cost of the food is then charged to the ship that they arrived on. The second, and even bigger surprise, was that a Sarah Lipowsky was listed as a member of his party - a cousin. (Look at the 4th line down from Simon) Hmmm, Lipowsky is not a surname that I've run across before in my research. I pulled up the manifest page that she was listed on and learned this about her: she was 15 years old, and born in Glasgow, Scotland. She was going to join her sister (Lillie?) in Fresno (though the sister's address was listed as San Francisco). Her father's name was Abraham Lipowsky and he lived in Glasgow. I then looked Abraham up on the 1901 Scottish census, and found him in Glasgow, living with his wife Jeanie and children Maniel, Leah, Samuel and Goldie. I then found Sarah's birth record showing that she was born to Abraham and Jeanie Lipowsky not long after the census was taken on April 1, 1901. Sarah's mother's maiden name was Fine, which is not in either Simon's mother or father's line - at least as far as I can tell. Plus, Abraham and Jeanie were both born in Russia. My guess right now is that Sarah is probably related to Simon's wife Leah, only because there doesn't seem to be any "Fine's" on the Jellen side of the family, and also because Leah was also born in Russia.

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