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Ancestry Daily News
4/25/2002 - Archive
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An Ellis Island Experiment |
An Ellis Island Experiment
In April 2001, the American Family Immigration History Center launched
the Ellis Island database (EIDB), making some 22 million immigration records
from 1892-1924 available for free searching at: www.ellisislandrecords.org
Some time after, frustrated at not being able to locate a particular ancestor
in the EIDB, Stephen P. Morse developed a search form for his own use. This
form enabled him to search the EIDB in more ways than were possible through
the Ellis Island site itself. He told a few others about it and word began to
spread. Before you knew it, he was being interviewed by journalists from around
the world, and more and more researchers were finding their way to his One-Step
search form at: home.pacbell.net/spmorse/ellis/ellis.html
With the introduction of Steve Morse's search tool, genealogists now have
three options for finding their Ellis Island immigrants:
1) Traditional microfilm research
2) The EIDB
3) Morse's search form
Curious which one would be the most effective for my own research, I decided
to conduct a little experiment. As I explained in a previous
article about another experiment concerning the accuracy of the recent transcription
of the EIDB, my own surname -- Smolenyak -- works well as a case study because
it has that foreign sound of many Ellis Island immigrants, can be misspelled
in countless ways, and provides a population large enough to examine but not
so large as to be overwhelming. Also, all Smolenyaks trace their origins to
a single village, making it useful for exploring a town search feature available
in Morse's form. For all these reasons, I used Smolenyak for my experiment.
The experiment itself was simple enough. I searched for Smolenyaks using each
of the three methodologies independently, as if it were my only option. For
each approach, I noted how many Smolenyaks I found and how many spellings they
were found under. Once I was done with all three, I went though the results
to count the total number of unique Smolenyak entries that had occurred through
Ellis Island. In all, I found twenty-one, so this was the maximum number of
records I could have possibly found using any method.
Here's what my experiment revealed:
Using National Archives microfilm only, I found fifteen Smolenyaks under
seven spellings
Using the EIDB only, I found fifteen Smolenyaks under nine spellings
Using Morse's search form, I found twenty Smolenyaks under fifteen spellings
As you might suspect, the fifteen found through microfilm research and the fifteen
found through the EIDB overlap, but are not the same fifteen. The six not found
by microfilm are those who came during the unindexed years of 1892-97, while
the six not found by the EIDB were ones disguised by odd spellings.
Assuming my surname is at least somewhat typical of Ellis Island immigrants,
this suggests that roughly 71 percent (15/21) of instances of a surname can
be found using traditional research techniques only. Research through just the
EIDB website apparently produces about the same results. Finally, working solely
with the Morse search tools uncovers an impressive 95 percent (20/21).
One of the most powerful aspects of the Morse search form is the flexibility
it gives you to dig out all the possible spellings. As the results above show,
a single name was spelled a total of fifteen different ways in only twenty-one
observations. In fact, of the twenty-one entries, only two were listed as Szmolenyak,
the correct spelling at the time. To give a flavor for what the user can expect,
the nine versions found using the EIDB were Szmolenak (3), Smoleniak (3), Szmolenyak
(2), Szmolinyak (2), Szmolinak (1), Szmolenyik (1), Smolenjak (1), Smolenick
(1), and Smolina (1). After decades of sporting this name, most of these aren't
very surprising to me, but I'm not so sure I would have discovered the five
additional variations revealed by the Morse tools: one each of Smolyniak, Szmolmak,
Smolensk, Szmslenak, and Szuwlyenak.
It's important to note that no one method would have surfaced all twenty-one
Smolenyak entries. And before you excuse yourself from any further microfilm
research, I have to point out that the elusive one – the one that blocked the
Morse tools from a perfect performance – could only be found on microfilm. Working
backwards from a hard copy of a manifest I located in the National Archives,
I determined that it had been entered into the EIDB as "C . . . oleniak," making
it all but impossible to extract regardless how creative the researcher might
have been. 95 percent might sound good enough to a lot of us, but not if you
happen to be descended from No.21!
I'm delighted to have access to a resource as incredible as the EIDB and definitely
plan to make extensive use of Morse's powerful search form to help me excavate
those ancestors playing hide-and-seek in the database. But like it or not, I
can't help but remark that good, old- fashioned research techniques never seem
to lose their value!
Megan Smolenyak, author of In Search of Our Ancestors, companion book
to the 2000 PBS Ancestors series, and the forthcoming Honoring Our Ancestors:
Inspiring Stories of the Quest for Our Roots, can be reached through www.honoringourancestors.com
Copyright 2002, MyFamily.com. All rights reserved.
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