GENEALOGISTS INUNDATE ELLIS ISLAND WEB SITE by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG [email protected] The Mississippi River is not the only flooded area in the United States right now. So is the recently opened Ellis Island Web site http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/. It sank under an estimated 10 million hits per day since it was opened to the public on April 17. Many ROOTSWEB REVIEW and MISSING LINKS readers visited the site only to see the message: "Thank you for your interest in the American Family Immigration History Center. Due to an extraordinary number of visitors, we must limit access to the site. Please keep trying, or check back later." Seasoned genealogists are not surprised about the popularity of the site; after all, it is estimated that 40 percent of the U.S. population today can trace back to one or more ancestors who came through the Port of New York. The site is a joint effort by the U.S. Park Service, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It offers a searchable records database with 22 million names, covering 71 percent of the immigrants who came through Ellis Island between 1 January 1892, when Ellis Island opened, and December 1924. However, the Web-hosting firm that handles the site's hardware was astounded at the tidal wave. Its 50-person Hostcentric team worked like levee sandbaggers around the clock to add more servers in order to meet the demand. The system was designed originally to limit the site's usage to 20,000 concurrent users. The process of extracting these records started in 1993 when the church began the volunteer effort of digitizing them. The process was completed in late 2000. It took 12,000 volunteer church members from 2,700 congregations in the U.S. and Canada approximately 5.6 million hours to complete the entries. The church also devoted 100 full-time volunteers to work on the project. They compared the original microfilms to extracted data and made corrections as needed. The names were taken from the microfilm of New York passenger arrival manifests. They include aliens, U.S. citizens, crew members, nonimmigrant aliens, deportees, and those who literally missed the boat. Information usually includes: traveler names, name of vessel, ports of departure, ports of arrival, and dates of arrival. Other recorded information pertains to age, sex, marital status, nationality, name of relative or friend outside the United States, name of relative inside the U.S., exact birth date, and place of birth. An average of 15 information columns were used in the early years of Ellis Island, while up to 36 columns of facts were collected in the later years. The painstaking work performed by the church's volunteers included deciphering almost impossible-to-read microfilms and photocopies. They scrutinized century-old handwriting, and hand- copied and typed isolated pieces of information that were originally recorded by multiple scribes, who took it down from people of different nationalities speaking different languages. "This was a fairly sizeable project," says Wayne J. Metcalfe, director of the Field Services and Support Division of the Family and Church History Department. Sizeable is right. If stacked flat, the 3,678 boxes of microfilms examined by these volunteers would exceed three times the height of the Statue of Liberty, from the hem of her robe to the top of her torch. The church originally purchased microfilm copies of the passenger lists from the National Archives. "This seven-year project tested the persistence and best extraction skills of our church-member volunteers but was most certainly worth the effort," says Metcalfe. "The end result is a database which will allow as many as 100 million living descendants of U.S. immigrants to find information about their ancestors or confirm their ancestors' first steps on the land of their hopes and dreams." Of course, first the technicians have to finish with the sandbagging so you can access the site. Use of FamilySearch.org, which was launched by the church on 24 May 1999, far exceeded predications also, with an average of approximately 9 million hits per day and more than 5 billion hits total. You can read stories about some who have been successful in accessing the Ellis Island site, and in the meanwhile, keep on trying, particularly in non-peak hours. Finding Grandma Cel http://www.msnbc.com/news/561331.asp Tracing Roots Online: Ellis Island's Arrivals List http://www.iht.com/articles/17194.html Surfing Ellis Island's Immigration Records http://www.ekathimerini.com/news/content.asp?aid=79050 Chrystie MYERS BROOKOVER, COWGER, KRABAL, MOYERS, MYRES, SWECKER --------------------------- # --------------------------- Rootsweb List Administrator - [email protected] Homestead for MYERS GENEALOGY.COM at: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~chrystiem/myersfam.html