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American Morning

Peg Zitko of Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Discusses Finding Ancestors at Ellisislandrecords.org

Aired July 04, 2001 - 11:22   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: It is estimated that 40 percent of Americans living today have ancestors who passed through Ellis Island. It served as a gateway to the United States for some 22 million immigrants, between 1892 and 1924. It is easier now to research part of the past thanks to a $22 million database.

On the phone with us is Peg Zitko of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which created the database.

Good morning, and Happy Fourth of July to you.

PEG ZITKO, STATUE OF LIBERTY-ELLIS ISLAND FOUNDATION: Same to you.

KAGAN: I know this came online a few months ago, but when it did, the response was just overwhelming, wasn't it?

ZITKO: It was tremendous. We were prepared for popularity, but boy, the people came to the site in droves.

KAGAN: In fact, maybe a little too many people -- you had too much popularity. I don't know if it crashed, but I know it made it very difficult for people to get online.

ZITKO: We never crashed -- I want to be clear about that. When our servers filled to capacity, we had to turn people away. We rapidly added additional servers, and now just about everybody who tries to get on the site is successful.

KAGAN: Folks who might have tried when the site opened up a few months ago and were discouraged you would encourage to try again.

ZITKO: They should certainly try now. The likelihood of getting on on their first try is very good.

KAGAN: Any tips when people go online?

ZITKO: They certainly need a name. You have to start with a name, and you need the spelling of the name that they came over with. Many families changed their names over the years, maybe to make them more Americanized. You really need to have the original spelling, if at all possible. And if you know when they came or an era during which they came, that's helpful, because you can narrow your search that way.

KAGAN: The good news for me is I did have the name of an ancestor and a date, and we're going to bring in Allison Tom, our interactive correspondent.

Allison -- hello.

ALLISON TOM, CNN INTERACTIVE CORRESPONDENT: I have the name -- Peg, stay with us -- of my great-grandfather, my grandfather's father, who I knew came over from Russia in 1907. I gave Allison the information earlier. It was Eiser Cohen (ph). And I had the year: 1907. We're going to show you what Allison found on your Web site.

ZITKO: Terrific.

TOM: What we did was we just typed in the first and the last name just so it's very clear for our viewers to see how that works. It was very simple -- it was one search. And this, I believe is...

KAGAN: Eiser Kagan. We believe that this would have been my great-grandfather. It came up as 1904. He would have been 26 on the age of arrival. And you found some other interesting information.

TOM: With this comes a complete passenger record. This is all the information collected over the time. It gives you the full name as they came over and the date of arrival -- which is July 3, 1904.

KAGAN: Which is interesting.

(CROSSTALK)

ZITKO: How timely.

KAGAN: I didn't know that. I didn't have an exact date.

TOM: It also gives the marital status, the gender, all of that. And we also pulled here the ship manifest, which, Peg, I believe, this is the list of people who were also on the ship with them.

ZITKO: This is reproduction of the original manifest.

KAGAN: This was exciting. Allison found...

TOM: We have the actual ship and there's a picture of it. This is something Daryn had never seen before. Here you can show where it was built, in 1884, in Scotland. You can get a picture as to what the ship looked like. It gives you the history of that ship, which is probably some information you hadn't seen before.

KAGAN: I can get an idea, this is actual ship that my great- grandfather came over from Russia to the United States on.

This was thrilling, Peg. It really was an interesting thing to see.

ZITKO: That's terrific. It's a wonderful Fourth of July gift. I have to make the point: particularly the ships is very difficult to get your hands on pictures of ships. That was something that we really had to cull from the very few archives that are around. We have probably 95 percent of the ships that were extant at that time.

KAGAN: What would be some tips you would give me to go from here?

ZITKO: What is exciting on the manifest is that if you go onto the second page of the manifest, you can sometimes even see a field that indicates exactly where they went in this country, down to a street address.

KAGAN: Interestingly enough, I'm lucky enough to have -- I don't know why I bothered to send this -- I have my great-grandfathers naturalization papers. In 1915, the family became American citizens -- we took a picture of this earlier -- including my grandfather, who's listed as Isidor even though he went by Jack, being six years old. They ended up in the Milwaukee area.

ZITKO: Terrific.

KAGAN: Interesting. I learned this when we were trying to do the story a few months ago when the site opened up. He comes up, my great-grandfather, with you guys on Ellis Island as Eiser Kagan, which is the name that we he use, but on the naturalization, he comes up as Eiser Cohen (ph).

He probably had already changed his name. There is a common misconception that names were changed regularly at Ellis Island.

KAGAN: And that's true.

ZITKO: That is not the case. We believe most people changed their names maybe at the time of naturalization. They wanted something that maybe was more Americanized, although Kagan and Cohen (ph) are pretty similar.

KAGAN: Interestingly enough, if you look at the other descendants of this great-grandfather, we do have some cousins that go by Kagan and some that go by Cohen (ph).

ZITKO: Isn't that interesting. It's like the family split.

KAGAN: We're an American family, an American story.

ZITKO: You are, absolutely.

TOM: Peg, I see you can on the site eventually have a family scrapbook, which it seems as though, if you want to continue this, you can keep pictures, the ship, all the other different information, and scan pictures that you might get later on to include on the Internet.

ZITKO: You can do that at our center at Ellis, or if you're home and have a scanner at home, you can create your scrapbook online at home. Another thing you can do is if you scroll down on the home page, you can click over to our Wall of Honor and you can have that ancestor's name inscribed on our wall at Ellis Island.

KAGAN: We will have to do that.

ZITKO: As an additional gift.

KAGAN: Tell our folks at home, once again, the Web site.

ZITKO: It's ellisislandrecords.org.

KAGAN: It's fascinating, and this was just a brief glimpse.

Allison, thank you for helping me find some family history there.

TOM: You're welcome.

KAGAN: Thanks on behalf of all the Kagans.

And Peg Zitko, thanks for guiding us through and encouraging people to try again now that the site is not just up and running but running well and able to handle all the folks who are interested.

ZITKO: We can handle them all now. We want them all now. We want them all to come back, because about 100 million Americans have ancestral records in this database.

KAGAN: And some interesting stuff just waiting to be found.

Peg, thank you.

ZITKO: Thanks.

KAGAN: Allison, thanks.

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