Another Year, Another... What?
Originally published to the Jon S. Randal Peace Page on Facebook.
It was the last day of the year 1891. The sun was getting low in the western sky as the Steamship Nevada was maneuvered into New York Harbor. First- and second-class passengers stood on the upper decks, hoping for a clear view of the relatively new French immigrant towering over the harbor. She had arrived only seven years before and now stood on Bedloe's Island, glistening in the evening sun.
Lady Liberty’s torch seemed to guide them as they sailed into that port. In following years an estimated 12 million more immigrants would pass through that same harbor and onto Ellis Island. Ellis Island had previously been used as a Naval storage facility but now was a shiny new building housing the intake lines where immigrants passed on their way to U.S. Citizenship.
New York City was celebrating the arrival of the New Year as only New York could. People in the streets, church bells pealing and steam whistles blaring. Because of the auspicious nature of what was to occur, the Captain had allowed third-class steerage passengers onto the main deck where they would be out of sight of the more affluent passengers standing on the decks above. The captain knew that some of the wealthy would have been offended by having to share deck space with dirty and smelly individuals who they might have viewed as “street urchins.”
This story is about one of those third-class passengers―a young Irish girl. The Nevada had taken on 127 European immigrants as steerage passengers. They would be the first immigrants to pass through Ellis Island. To a lesser extent, the story is about the girl’s two younger siblings and another woman with the same name. This New Year’s Day 2023 marks 130 years since Annie Moore, then a 17-year-old Irish girl, became the first immigrant to pass through those gates and into America.
When the time came, disembarkation would be through the newly built Ellis Island Federal Customs and Immigration station, a new facility built almost in the shadow of that enormous statue, the gift from France most called Lady Liberty. The sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, called her “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.” On this day, the Steamship Nevada had arrived too late to disgorge its human cargo. The first immigrants to set foot on United States soil at Ellis Island were made to wait until the next morning―New Year’s Day, 1892.
For the moment though, the steerage passengers, cooped up for the entire journey in a dank and dark space below decks, clung to the handrails and watched as the dazzling city celebrated. It was an amazing sight for them― fascinating for many, including those who had come from rural villages or struggled in impoverished European cities. They had never seen anything like the New York skyline.
Annie and her brothers had a different story. Their parents had left the three in Ireland in the care of relatives while they and their two oldest children had made the voyage to America four years earlier. They had arrived in the city, obtained work, found a tenement apartment, and saved their money until the time came when they could send for the younger children and unite the family. By immigrant standards, the Moore family was well off. All four were waiting in the crowd on shore when the facility was finally opened.
Our newly arrived children had departed Queenstown Port in Ireland twelve days earlier. Annie and her siblings spent those days, including Christmas, crossing the rough waters of the North Atlantic while stowed in the bowels of the steamship. Now, finally, the children from County Cork were breathing fresh air, just hours away from the reunion. The wait was excruciating. First, there was the overnight delay with their long sought-after destination seemingly only an arm’s length away. Then when morning came and the signal was given to begin disembarkation, the highbrow passengers got to be first down the gangway. Steerage passengers―immigrants―had to wait.
“The ships waiting in the harbor on Jan. 1, 1892 were decorated with red, white and blue bunting in preparation for the festivities. At 10:30 a.m. the next day, the ships docked in full view of the iconic Statue of Liberty to prepare to drop off their passengers on Ellis Island,” writes author Gina Dimuro in her book, The Story of Annie Moore – Ellis Island’s First Immigrant. “When a flag on Ellis Island was dipped three times, signaling that the facility was ready to process the immigrants, all the boats began sounding their foghorns.”
The brown-haired Irish teenager (one of the many incorrect reports claimed her hair to be red) was the first to bound down the gangway with her brothers scampering to keep up. Being first wasn’t easy. She had to struggle to gain that position. As the tale goes, an Italian man tried to jockey into position to be first off, but when he saw her tears, he gave up his position and pushed her ahead. Then a large German tried to ensure he would be the first by planting a foot on the gangway and blocking the port with his portly belly, only to be held back by a sailor who stated firmly, “Ladies first!”
At the landing, she crossed a short space before entering the facility through enormous double doors. She skipped two steps at a time up the main staircase inside the building. her brothers trailing behind. As directed, she turned to her left, and then she was ushered into one of ten rope-lined aisles, where she quickly arrived at a tall lectern-like registry desk. There a kindly looking old gentleman sat, peering down at her over spectacles.
“What is your name, my girl?” asked Charles Hendley as he leaned forward. Hendley, a former Treasury Department official, had requested the honor of registering the new station’s first immigrant. “Annie Moore, sir,” she replied with a high-pitched lilt. On the first page of a fresh registry book, Hendley inked Annie’s name and those of her brothers, Anthony and Philip, along with their ages, last place of residence, and intended destination.
From there, Annie was directed into an adjoining room. There she found John B. Weber, a former congressman, now the federal superintendent of immigration for the port of New York. He smiled as he gave Annie a ten-dollar gold piece, wishing her a Happy New Year. According to Dimuro, it was “the first United States coin she had ever seen and the largest sum of money she had ever possessed.” Annie declared that she would “never part with it but [would] always keep it as a pleasant memento of the occasion.”
As she worked her way down the line she came to a Catholic chaplain, who blessed her and gave her a silver coin. An unnamed bystander slipped her a five-dollar gold piece before she was finally ushered to the public waiting room and into the arms of her family.
Over the course of the next sixty-two years, the Ellis Island facility would process those twelve million immigrants and possibly more. Each of these would follow one way or another in Annie’s footsteps. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that forty percent of our country’s population can trace its origins back to New York Harbor and Ellis Island.
As Tyler Anbinder notes in his book, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, Irish immigrants composed just a small portion of the passengers aboard the Nevada. Most of the immigrants were from southern and eastern Europe, most were Jews, and most did not speak English.
Annie’s story is that of a fair-skinned, English-speaking, “rosy-cheeked Irish lass.” She became the poster child for immigration at a time when Irish immigrants had already gained important status in American political and cultural life. “Her story was misrepresented in the newspapers by reporters seeking the story that would sell papers and build their reputation,” writes Anbinder. “She was not age 15, as some reported, nor was her birthday coincidentally January 1st.
The true story is that once the hubbub of her storied arrival died away, Annie very nearly faded into obscurity, and would have were it not for the work of a tireless group of sleuths. Blending into the fast-growing city wasn’t difficult in those times. It wasn’t until decades after her death and the closing of the Ellis Island immigration center that she was rediscovered. In the 1980s, when Ellis Island was going through a historic restoration Annie’s story found some rebirth. She once again became the public face of the immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island. Unfortunately, the face given to the revived story was not Annie’s. What we had here was a classic case of mistaken identity.
“For years it was thought that Moore had married a descendant of the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell, met a tragic end in 1923,” says Genealogist Megan Smolenyak. “This other Annie was celebrated for years, with her descendants invited to ceremonies at both Ellis Island and in Ireland.” According to the mistaken tale, “She left her new home in New York City as a young adult. She was believed to have moved west, depending on the story, to Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico, and eventually Texas. She married, had many children, and was killed in a tragic streetcar accident in Fort Worth. Texas.”
It wasn’t until 2006 that it was learned that the Annie Moore who died in the streetcar accident was born and raised in the United States. Smolenyak, along with Brian Andersson, the New York City’s commissioner of records, found that the Annie Moore who passed through Ellis Island lived out her short life "on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, never venturing beyond a few short blocks from that first home established by her parents."
“She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life,” Smolenyak told Sam Roberts of the New York Times in 2006. “Moore married Joseph Augustus Schayer, a German American, and she gave birth to at least 10 children, five of whom died before the age of three. The family had enough money for a family plot, but Annie’s children were buried without headstones, as was she after her death.”
She died of heart failure in 1924 at the young age of 50. According to family lore, Annie had become a quite large woman. Her casket was too large to squeeze down the narrow apartment staircase, so it had to be transported out of a window―a final indignity suffered by an iconic woman.
The confusion surrounding Annie’s story continued to get deeper. As Smolenyak tells us, “fictitious Ellis Island Annies began to surface in children’s books, published in Ireland and the United States.” Three of these books were written by Eithne Loughery. They contain some elements of fact, “but are almost completely based on the author’s imagination.”
“In the Loughery book, First in Line for America, she invents Annie adventures, friends, work in a laundry, and even fabricates letters supposedly written by Annie’s mother and Annie. In The Golden Dollar Girl, writes Smolenyak. “Annie works as a servant for a wealthy family in Manhattan, misses the fictional Mike Tierney whom she supposedly met on board Nevada, and finds her life saved by another fictional character, Carl Lindgren.”
Eve Bunting, another children’s author, writes of a fictional Annie Moore experience aboard Nevada in Dreaming of America: An Ellis Island Story. The tale is based on an entirely misleading description of the experience of immigrants traveling steerage and conscribed to below decks. Annie was incorrectly imagined as age thirteen, and the boys were eleven and seven. “It is almost impossible that Annie and her brothers had a ‘private room’ in steerage as the tale describes,” writes Smolenyak “or that they remained ‘crisp and clean throughout the voyage,’ or enjoyed ‘meals at a dining table with white, ironstone crockery.’”
This is debunked by Mia Mercurio, writing in the May/June 2008 issue of the Journal of Social Education. Murcurio describes the conditions likely faced by Annie and her brothers in that era of steamship travel. “Steerage was in the deep bowels of the steamship. There were no private rooms.”
“Steerage is the same level that may have accommodated livestock on a previous voyage,” writes Mercurio. “Steerage passengers lucky enough to claim one slept on metal bunk beds squeezed into long rows along the bulkheads. They slept on straw-stuffed mattresses. All others slept on a straw-covered floor. Lucky passengers got a blanket, a metal plate or cup, and possibly a spoon. Barrels of water were available for drinking or cleaning. The compartment was below water level so there were no ports for light and no ventilation. There was no privacy, and the stench of so many passengers packed into such tight quarters for such a long journey would become overpowering.”
This is how Annie came to America. It was not glamorous.
Sam Roberts followed Smolenyak’s work as she ferreted her way through the piles of obscure records and completed her years-long search for the family Moore left behind in Ireland. That was in 2008, and not long afterward the real relatives of the correct Annie, from each side of the Atlantic, finally met.
Prior to this point, it is unlikely that any direct descendants of Annie had met. None had been identified, but two from her brother Phillip’s line were. “Paul Linehan, a forty-seven-year-old tenor from Narraghmore, County Kildare, and Michael Shulman, a financial analyst from Silver Springs, Maryland, had lunch with Smolenyak at the appropriately named Annie Moore’s Pub in Manhattan. They then attended the Irish America Hall of Fame luncheon, where Linehan sang a poignant rendition of Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears, the ballad about Great Aunt, Annie Moore’s journey.”
Today Annie Moore has a webpage, maintained by her living relatives. From it, we learn that “[s]ome immigrants who first arrived on Ellis Island went on to settle in the far-flung corners of the United States, some half a world away from the homes they had left. Others arrived in New York and stayed for the rest of their lives.”
That little girl who bounded down the gangway was one of the latter. By 2008 Smolenyak had tracked down the correct Annie – the one who settled in New York City and who had “led the kind of small, difficult life common to so many immigrants at the time.”
Upon her arrival in 1892 she “joined her parents in a tenement in the Lower Eastside, likely never traveling farther than a few blocks beyond the neighborhood after her journey across the Atlantic. She married a bakery clerk, with whom she had eleven children, five of whom died before the age of three. And then Annie herself died in 1924 at the age of fifty and was buried in an unmarked grave at Calvary Cemetery in Queens.”
We had lost so much of Annie’s story, to time, an unfortunate fire, and her relative obscurity. This could be the story of many who made that crossing, and the bits and pieces that we learn sometimes lead to alternate storylines. The original Ellis Island facility where Annie had been welcomed so warmly, burned to the ground just a little over five years after she passed through. There were no deaths in the fire, but five and a half years of leather-bound logs, listing every immigrant that arrived from the grand opening forward, were lost.
Even with all the accidents and obstacles, thanks to the work of some talented investigators, she is now remembered. On October 11, 2008, a ceremony honoring Annie Moore was held at her grave site. A gravestone was placed where once there was none, finally identifying the final resting places for Annie and her children.
The town of Cobh (formerly Queenstown), in County Cork, honored her and her brothers with a "beautiful and hopeful" bronze statue at the port where their great American story began. On this side of the pond, at the restored Ellis Island where Annie became a brand-new American, the twin of that statue stands.
According to Smolenyak, “her family's gone on to do quite well for themselves. And she's got amongst her descendants investment counselors and Ph.Ds. They've got pretty much every ethnic group you can think of. If you want Italian, if you want Irish, if you want Jewish, if you want Scandinavian, you can count them amongst her descendants.” There are other stories of Dominican and Chinese family members as well. If true, that would be appropriate for a story such as Annie’s.
Annie Moore's story has often been romanticized, leading to misconceptions about her life. As noted in a Social Education article, "Many stories of immigration, such as the story of Annie Moore, have been romanticized over the years and in the process some have become untrue." That was Annie Moore, before those sleuths completed their mission. Ironically, the Social Education article, which is a guide for teachers, misidentifies Annie’s age when she arrives. The misinformation goes on.
In the end, Annie is unique only because she was the first, Hers is a story made special only by fate―a story that could have been about generations of immigrants.
The eloquent pundit Blackie Sherrod would have called them, “the Great Unwashed.” They were fleeing the deprivations of their native land in search of a brighter future, for themselves and their progeny, by coming to America. Some, I would hope most, found what they were looking for.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Happy New Year, all. I hope that 2025 isn’t going to be as scary as it looks. Regardless, please remember that no matter who we are today, we all come from humble roots.
Above all, remember that we should all be kind to one another.