Window opens into past; Ellis Island makes passenger manifests public on Web By Susan Sachs New York Times News Service Now, for the first time and online, Ellis Island brings you ... your ancestors. Beginning today, if all goes as planned, anyone with an Internet connection can search through passenger manifests from the ships that ferried 17 million immigrants into New York Harbor and the New World in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The database, extracted from microfilm of the original paper manifests, covers arrivals at Ellis Island from 1892 through 1924. Those were the peak years of immigration, when as many as 5,000 people a day shuffled through the inspection process. The information recorded on the manifests hints at their individual tales of grit, adventure and hope. To find records, the curious can go to www.ellisislandrecords.org Seen on a computer screen, the ship manifests are prosaic documents: page after page, column after column of names, ages and other dry particulars. Some were typed, the letters fat and slightly uneven. More are filled with the dense florid handwriting popular then and barely decipherable now. But the scraps of history contain an awesome power. Concentrated within them is the force of memory. And a trip through the records, either at home or at the Ellis Island museum, can be emotionally harrowing. Carol Curro and her husband, John Papandrea, took a preview spin through the computerized manifests last week, when the museum staff let a few visitors try out the system before its official opening. Curro had come with a quest: to find her favorite grandfather who had crossed the Atlantic several times from Calabria, Italy, before settling down in New York. "He used to talk about it all the time," she said. "I wish now I had listened more carefully." Papandrea was only along for the ride. Or so he said. But just listening to talk about ancestors brought to mind one of his own grandfathers. Maybe he would look. "It would be my mother's father," he explained. "His name was ... " And then he stopped. His eyes filled with tears. His wife looked alarmed. His two children looked embarrassed. "His name," Papandrea continued in a strong but shaky voice, "was Paolo Scarfone. He came from a small town called Scilla -- that's S-C-I-L-L-A. In Italy." The family sat at one of the large-screen computers in the family history center, in the Kissing Room, so-called because long ago bleary-eyed immigrants were reunited there with their American loved ones. After one hour, Curro hadn't found her grandfather, but Papandrea had found his. "Look, here it is," he crowed, pointing at the image of the ship's manifest on the screen, at a line where an officer of the ship Manilla, sailing out of Naples, had written "Paolo Scarfone," a single man, 22 years old. "And look, look," Papandrea said proudly, pointing again at the picture of the 100- year-old document as if it confirmed his own place in history. There, as last place of residence, the manifest showed "Scilla." Officials of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which runs the museum and the family history project, expect that millions of people will want to use the Internet site. As a guide, they looked to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which put up its own genealogy Web site, www.familysearch.org, two years ago. It was so popular that, in the beginning, it crashed almost every day. The Mormon Church, which has put about 600 million records from all over the world on its site, also provided the labor for the Ellis Island project. About 12,000 volunteer members spent much of the past eight years extracting data from microfilm. They dealt with 22 million passenger records, including immigrants as well as business passengers and tourists, and faced enormous challenges. The 60-year-old microfilm was of varying quality and the original manifests, sold for paper pulp by the government decades ago, were not available for double-checking. People's names were spelled in oddly inconsistent ways. So were the names of towns and villages, in part because the ship personnel wrote them phonetically. The volunteers sometimes spent hours trying to decipher a single entry, said Richard E. Turley Jr., managing director of the Mormons' family and church history department. But they may open a window for countless Americans. "The challenge every American faces, unless you're a Native American, is tracing their ancestors across the ocean," Turley said. "This data helps span that difficult gap. At least you have a starting point, like the port they left from." Visitors to Ellis Island who want to use the family history center will need to reserve their time at the computers by calling the foundation at (212) 883- 1986. Reservations may also be made online at the Web site for the family immigration history center at www.ellisislandrecords.org Anyone fortunate enough to score a match will be able to see the name of the ship their relative sailed on, its departure and arrival dates, the name of the relative's contact in the United States, and the names of anyone who shared the journey. ~~~~~~~*^i^*~~~~~~ HONL Congregated Genealogy Austria/Bohemia/Germany/Prussia http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~thehonls/ Cherie's Tree currently contains 610 individuals, in 224 family groups ~~~~~~~*^i^*~~~~~~