I have no recollection of coming to America. Instead, I listen to my mother’s description of the long, and painstaking process of immigrating. Was I nervous? Was I even aware (being only two years old) that I was going half way across the world?
Probably not.
That’s why when I came across this article on the NY Times, I was kind of jealous. Starting Thursday, a collection of over 1,700 oral histories from immigrants who traveled through Ellis Island will be online at www.ancestry.com/immigration. They capture very specific and timeless moments of the immigrating process, such as seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. Previously, these tapes were played at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum for its visitors, but now they are open to the public. Also, if you have relatives who’ve been through Ellis Island, you might be able to search their history in the 170 million records at Ancestry.com’s huge database. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find your great great great aunt on there.
And on second thought, maybe I’m better off not having an oral history. I was two. I probably thought more about needing to pee than immigrating.
Here’s the link to the article:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/immigrants-oral-histories-going-online/?ref=arts
There is a fascinating new book about the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the deep South to the North in search of relief from Jim Crow laws. The book is “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. Here is an article from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/books/31book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=great%20migration&st=cse
I read another article about this book in the New Yorker which raised the issue of the method used to explore the history of ordinary people. Which is better: An oral history which compiles hundreds or thousands of stories to tell the story of an era, or a detailed story of just a few ordinary people, whose experience then comes to represent the experience of the masses? Wilkerson’s version is the latter, and thus allows the reader to focus on the details of a small number of lives to see what is revealed about the era. This is a powerful method.
Recreating your own story in detail (with the help of your parents and older relatives) would create a vivid portrait of the experience of migration that you share with many other people.