For millions of people around the world, Ellis Island was the last great hurdle before a brave new world. The United States was, by the early 20th century, the land of opportunity, the home of the brave, and the place where everyone wanted to get their slice of the Big Apple.
New York’s Public Library has recently released a huge collection of images that were taken at America’s first immigration stop, Ellis Island in New York. The sepia-toned imaged show how the city became the melting pot of the world’s communities, with so many diverse ethnicities and cultures entering the country through the island – a bureaucratic stop featured in the new film Brooklyn, about an Irish emigrant in the 1950s.
First opened in 1892, Ellis Island was the first port of call for newly arriving migrants. While most of them passed through the bureaucratic system with relative ease, others were detained for extended periods if they failed the health checks, or while waiting for an escort or money to arrive.
On a daily basis, up to 5,000 people were processed on the Island, and when it finally closed its doors in 1954, more than 12m new Americans had passed through the station.
Between 1902 and 193, the chief registry clerk on the island, Augustus Francis Sherman, who was an avid amateur photographer, asked many of the detainees to pose for him in the finest clothes or national dress.
The images were so well received by all who saw them, National Geographic published prints in its pages in 1907. But for decades they were forgotten, until the New York Public Library digitised the collection and posted them online.
Today, more than 100 million Americans, almost a third of the population, can track their roots to Ellis Island and beyond.
You can take a look at some of Augustus Francis Sherman’s images in the gallery below:
