SNIPPET: Unbelievably, Ellis Island doctors used buttonhooks to check eyes for trachoma!. New arrivals feared this painful examination, whose notoriety had traveled back to the homeland. The line doctor had to turn up both eyelids of every immigrant. Grover A. KEMPF, a U. S. Public Health Service doctor on Ellis Island from 1912 to 1916, said that the preferred instrument for examining eyes was "the good old buttoner, a little loop to button shoes, the most efficient way of turning the eyes ever devised." Those suspected of having an eye disease at Ellis Island were chalk-marked with an "E" for Eyes, "CT" for trachoma, or a "C" for conjunctivitis. "My sister developed warts on the back of her hand so they put a chalk "X" on the back of her coat. The Xs were put aside to see whether they had to be reexamined or deported. If they deported my sister we couldn't let her go. Where would she go if they deported her? Some kind man, I don't know who he was, told my sister to turn her coat around. She had a nice plush coat with a silk lining, and they turned her coat around. .... The whole experience was very frightening. They brought me up to a room. They put a pegboard before me with little sticks of different shapes and little holes. I had to put them in place, and I did it perfectly. They said, 'Oh, we must have made a mistake. This little girl, naturally she doesn't know English, but she's very bright, intelligent.' So they took the cross (chalk mark) off me so we were cleared." -- Victoria Sarfatti FERNANDEZ, a Macedonian immigrant in 1916. A "steamship" puzzle was used to test immigrants at Ellis Island by Dr. Howard A. KNOX, circa 1916. "The coal mines are one of the worst places to work. You say a prayer while your husband or your son goes to work in the morning. You say another one when he comes home at night." -- Elizabeth Smith NIMMO, an English immigrant in 1920. "I arrived in New York in 1921 -- all my belongings consisted of an additional change of underwear and two books." -- Abraham BURSTEIN, a Russian Jewish immigrant. "People who had come to this country in the earlier years had told me, you'll be sorry when you get to Ellis Island. But I wasn't really sorry, I was just maybe upset a little bit. What upset me the most was having to go through so many people's hands and take such a long time." -- Mary DUNN, a Scottish immigrant in 1923. "So, we all went down and got on the ferryboat. And the ferryboat ran to the Battery. And then, we just walked off, just like letting birds out of the cage." -- Donald ROBERTS, a Welsh immigrant in 1925. In the book mentioned below is a copy of the marriage certificate of Mary Anne BONES and Thomas HORKAN, who were married at St. Mary of the Angels Church in Batley, Yorkshire, England in 1896. (Witnesses John HORKAN and Bridget BONES). Mary Anne and Thomas had met years before at a dance in Ireland, their birthplace. By chance they met again in England, where they had both gone to earn enough money to buy passage to America. A dozen years and six children later, they finally made the journey. In 1908, they landed in Philadelphia, and Thomas, who was a miner in England, found employment in a West Virginia coal mine. They had another child, bringing their family to seven brothers and sisters. The name HORKAN was eventually changed to HARKINS, a phonetic concession to the West Virginia drawl. -- Excerpts, "Ellis Island, An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience," Chermayeff, Wasserman and Shapiro, Macmillan Publishing Co. NY (1991).