Paul Schreiner and Julia Takács
From Hungary to South Bend
Finding the Ellis Island Records
Searching for My Grandfather
Paul Schreiner in about 1920, age 43
When the Ellis Island immigration records became available on the Internet (thanks to the Ellis Island Foundation --EIF) in 2001, I eagerly searched for the record of my paternal grandfather, Paul Schreiner (1877-1960), who immigrated to South Bend from Hungary. I didn't know that he had come via Ellis Island, but many did, and this location was likely. I waded through about 900 Schreiners, and many more names with variant spellings, but I never found his record.
The records come from ship manifests, records collected by the ship’s management on behalf of the US Bureau of Immigration. The manifest log was filled out at the port of embarkation, and it contained the immigrant's name and his/her answers to several questions.
This document was used by the legal inspectors at Ellis Island to cross examine the immigrant during the legal (or primary) inspection. The two agencies responsible for processing immigrants at Ellis Island were the United States Public Health Service and the Bureau of Immigration (later known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service - INS (source)
The manifests are hand-written and at best difficult to read. Immigrant names were often misheard by the recorders, or misspelled or both. Yet more error is introduced in the deciphering of the hand-written texts. This was done in order to digitize the records, and was necessarily done by hand, not machine. The inaccuracy of the name index is probably the biggest barrier to finding records for a particular individual.
Clues in the Diary
Paul Schreiner kept a diary (PDF), in Hungarian, and I have a copy of a few pages of it and an English translation. In 1908 he wrote his name as Paly or Pal Sreiner. Later he used Schreiner. I don’t know why.
The diary has the critical clues that led to the manifest. Part of the translation says “I left my home on April 7, 1901. And arrived in South Bend on April 29. I came on the ship named Graf Valdez in 13 days.”
I searched Google for “Graf Valdez” with no results. I remembered that at least one New York City newspaper has been digitized for a period in the 19th Century. Ellis Island is part of NYC, and newspapers print information about ship arrivals and departures. I found that the New York Times has been digitized from 1851 through the present. This means that not only are images of all the pages of all the issues available, but the whole aggregation of pages is word-searchable. This is a fee-based database available online. But access--from home via the Internet--is provided to patrons of my public library at no cost.
I again searched in vain for Graf Valdez. Then I searched on Valdez, and found a lot of people, and Graf, and found a lot of ships and other hits. But no Graf Valdez. I finally looked at the original Hungarian in the diary. The ship reference seems to be “Graf valderse.” I recalled coming across the ship name Graf Waldersee. Could this be it?
I searched the Times for “Graf Waldersee,” narrowing the search to April 1901. I came up a promising reference on page 6 of the April 27, 1901 issue. Below is the relevant fragment of the page.
The departure date was April 14 and the April 27 arrival left time to get to South Bend on April 29. Railroad service was very good in this period before the car and airplane eroded it. The travel period is also 13 days as stated in the diary.
I returned to the Elllis Island Foundation web site. Normally, this site permits entry of a name and a couple of other qualifiers. The result, if there is one, is an image of the manifest page with that name. But I found a way, via an advanced search, to get to a manifest page without knowing a person’s name. Once at a page, there is a mechanism to leaf though the entire manifest a page at a time. I did this, magnified the pages, and read them.
