Ellis Island documents now online

04/17/2001

Newsday

NEW YORK – In the past, finding immigration records for people who came through Ellis Island could require years of research. But starting Tuesday, that information can be found within minutes.

A database housing about 22 million records of immigrant arrivals through New York Harbor from 1892 to 1924 will be made available to the public at Ellis Island and on the Internet.

More than 12,000 volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have worked about 5.6 million hours since 1993 to extract the records from nearly 3,700 rolls of microfilm and enter them into the database, according to officials with the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc.

"It's a marvelous way of helping people in this nation of immigrants to establish a tie," said Richard Turley Jr., managing director of the Family and Church History Department at the church.

The database will be accessible through 41 computer workstations at the Ellis Island American Family Immigration History Center. Access can also be obtained free on the Internet at Elis Island Records

Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2001

Answers

Link does not work. Neither does their URL of www.ellisiland.org. They must be having some start up problems.

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2001

Good grief, you're both having brain cramps. The real URL is...

http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/

but still under construction.

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2001