Voices From Ellis Island (NY): "The day I left home, my mother came with me to the railroad station. When we said goodbye, she said it was just like seeing me go into my casket. I never saw her again." -- Julia GONIPROW, a Lithuanian immigrant in 1899. "I had a small steamer trunk for a start. One of those small ones you can push underneath a bunk. I didn't bring very much clothes, just a work suit and my best suit. And I had this pound of butter wrapped up. I guess somebody told me to take it to somebody who'd like Irish butter. It was good butter my sisters made." -- Joseph Patrick FITZPATRICK, an Irish immigrant in 1910. "They found my grandmother had a black nail. She raised us, all the years, with that hand and with that nail. There was nothing wrong with it. And they held her back. They sent her back. They were stupid, to let an old woman, when she has her whole family here, to let her go home by herself. So we never saw her again. That was heart-breaking. I'm still crying over it." -- Evelyn GOLBE, a Russian Jewish immigrant in 1914. "The second day I was there I noticed this old man. He must have been about 70. He took two tongue depressors. And he made a cross out of them. And he got at the end of the bed. And he would kneel and pray. The poor man was so scared and lost. No one to talk to." -- Oreste TEGLIA, an Italian immigrant in 1916. "The first time I saw the Statue of Liberty all the people were rushing to the side of the boat. 'Look at her, look at her,' and in all kind of tongues. 'There she is, there she is,' like it was somebody who was greeting them." -- Elizabeth PHILLIPS, an Irish immigrant in 1920. "We were put on a barge, jammed in so tight that I couldn't turn 'round, there were so many of us, you see, and the stench was terrible." -- Eleanor Kenderdine LENHART, an English immigrant in 1921. "My mother was a twister in the Lawrence mills. It was unusual; in Italy, there were no jobs for women. In fact, people that heard about it back in the village didn't like the idea of the women working. But my mother felt she was doing no different from all the other women, so she decided she was going to work. Make some money." -- Josephine COSTANZO, an Italian immigrant in 1923. "It was kind of bad for awhile till we got to know people and speak the language and quit being called greenhorns. People say, you ought to preserve your own heritage or something, but all we could think of was, we didn't want to be different, we wanted to be like the rest of the Americans." -- Walter WALLACE, a Lithuanian immigrant in 1923. "There was a man that came around every morning and every afternoon, with a stainless steel cart, sort of like a Good Humor cart. And the man was dressed in white and he had warm milk for the kids. And they would blow a whistle or ring a bell, and all the kids would line up, and he had small little paper cups and every kid got a little warm milk." -- Donald ROBERTS, a Welsh immigrant in 1925. --Excerpts, "Ellis Island, An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience," Chermayeff, Wasserman, Shapiro (Macmillan Pub. Co. NY 1991).