JimTedrick@aol.com wrote: > > Dr. Prpic may have a point in his observation that the people came to get > money and return home. My gr. grand father Gajo stated on the manifest in Feb > of 1913 that he had been in the USA in from 02/04 and he was headed to > Lebanon Pa. to see a brother in-law whose name I can't make out. It drives me > crazy that I can't make out the name or find a manifest for Gajo coming in > about 1902 hence my question about searching the Ellis data base by last > address to see if his name was butchered in the transcribing. > > My grand father Stojsa said he came here so he could own land (which he did > own a beautiful farm) and Mom said she saw a letter as a child, in a foreign > language, from his parents asking him to come home, because he was the eldest > and it included some strange currency. Noted that in 1913 ship manifest your gr. GF Gajo's surname was spelled with Croatian diacritic letter c' (ch) as it should have been. However, this was unusual in manifests. His ethnicty was listed Hungary, Servian which was probably in error. Would have expected Croatian/Slovene. If you meant being able to search EIR database by Last Residence then this would not have helped in search for your surname. If surnames were mis-transcribed from time to time, place name misspellings was much worse and more extensive. This was true regardless of from which country in Europe. Once while researching a surname from Croatia found it listed under 13 different place names as Last Residence. Except all these places were the same village but misspelled. And the correct place name was a 14th spelling.