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Walks of New York

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On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore stepped onto Ellis Island... and into history. She was the first of 12 million immigrants to arrive on the island, and instantly became a symbol of those coming to America in search of a better life.

Since becoming the first immigrant to Ellis Island, Annie's story has been celebrated in art, story, and song.

Annie Moore was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1877. On December 20, 1891, Annie and her brothers Anthony (11) and Phillip (7) boarded the S.S. Nevada bound for New York. The trio spent 12 days at sea amongst 148 passengers in steerage. After passing through Ellis Island on January 1st (Annie's 15th birthday), Annie and her brothers were reunited with their parents, who'd arrived the year before.

Annie even showed up in a New York Times article of Ellis Island's opening. As the article wrote, "there was much anxiety among the new-comers to be the first landed at the new station. The honor was reserved for a little rosy-cheeked Irish girl. She was Annie Moore, fifteen years of age... As soon as the gangplank was run ashore, Annie tripped across it and hurried into the big building... When the little voyager had been registered Col. Weber presented her with a ten-dollar gold piece and made a short address of congratulation and welcome. It was the first United States coin she had ever seen and the largest sum of money she ever possessed. She says she will never part with it."

Annie's story then reportedly took her west, where her family pursued the American dream. She eventually reached Texas, where she married a descendant of the Irish liberator Daniel O'Connell and started her own family.

Annie died tragically under the wheels of a streetcar at the age of 46. Proud of Annie's legacy, her descendants took part in ceremonies at Ellis Island and in Ireland. But in 2006, it was discovered to be a case of mistaken identity: The "real" Annie Moore never strayed far from Ellis Island.

Genealogist Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (yes, that's her name) traced Annie great-nephew, and learned that Annie lived and died on the Lower East Side. Her father, a longshoreman, housed the family in a tenement on Monroe Street (close to where the Manhattan Bridge soon rose).

Annie later married a bakery clerk, and had 11 children, only five of whom survived to adulthood. She died of heart failure in 1924 at 47, and was buried with 6 of her children in an unmarked plot at Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

"She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life," Smolenyak said. "She sacrificed herself for future generations."

Annie's descendants, some of whom remained on the Lower East Side until recently, multiplied and many prospered.

On October 11, 2008, a ceremony in honor of Annie Moore was held at her grave site, during which a gravestone was placed, finally identifying Annie and her children. President Obama (himself partially of Irish descent) sent a message of remembrance.

Statues commemorating Annie now stand in Ellis Island and County Cork, Ireland. The Irish American Cultural Institute presents an annual Annie Moore Award "to an individual who has made significant contributions to the Irish and/or Irish American community and legacy."

The song " Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears " tells Annie's story.

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Annie Moore, the First Ellis Island Immigrant - Walks of New York

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On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore stepped onto Ellis Island... and into history. She was the first of 12 million immigrants to arrive on the island, and instantly became a symbol of those coming to America in search of a better life.

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NY Times article

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The story of the immigrant girl who went west, however, became so commonly accepted that even descendants of the Annie Moore who died in Texas came to believe it. Over the years, several have been invited to participate at ceremonies on Ellis Island and in Ireland.

It took some genealogical detective work to find the proper Annie. After offering a $1,000 reward on the Internet a few months ago for information about Annie Moore, Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak teamed up with New York City's commissioner of records, Brian G. Andersson, and discovered the woman who they have concluded is, in fact, the iconic Annie Moore.

Joined by several of her descendants, they are scheduled to announce the results of their research tomorrow at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society in Manhattan.

Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak (a genealogist's dream: she's a Smolenyak married to a previously unrelated Smolenyak) became interested in Annie Moore four years ago while researching a documentary film on immigration. Pursuing the paper trail, she found that the Annie who died instantly when struck by a streetcar near Fort Worth in 1923 was not an immigrant at all but was apparently born in Illinois. Moreover, she traced that Moore family to Texas as early as 1880.

"I realized it was the wrong Annie," she recalled.

Then, what had happened to the Ellis Island Annie?

Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak made little progress for a few years, but her search was reinvigorated this year after she moved to southern New Jersey and visited a genealogical exhibition in Philadelphia featuring a 1910 photograph of the Texas Annie. (The photograph might also have been a model for Jeanne Rynhart's two bronze sculptures, one of which is at Ellis Island.)

She posted a challenge on her blog for information about the immigrant Annie Moore. She also mentioned it to Mr. Andersson, who she knew was very interested in genealogy.

"With the power of the Internet and a handful of history geeks we cracked this baby in six weeks," she said. "Brian found this one document, and we knew we had the right family. We had the smoking gun."

What Mr. Andersson found was the naturalization certificate belonging to Annie's brother Phillip, who arrived with her on the steamship. He was also listed in the 1930 census with a daughter, Anna. They found Anna in the Social Security death index. That identification led to her son, who is Annie Moore's great-nephew.

On her first try, Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak was lucky enough to find the great-nephew listed in a directory. "As soon as I said 'Annie Moore,' he knew instantly - 'That's us,' " she said. "They had been overlooked, but they had sort of resigned themselves. I think they're very happy to be found."

Her $1,000 reward is to be split between Mr. Andersson, who is donating it, and Annie's great-niece.

As for Edward P. Wood, a New Jersey plumbing contractor who is descended from the Texas Annie Moore and has been feted on Ellis Island, Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak said that when she told him of her findings, he said, "I'm disappointed, but I'm not heartbroken."

The Annie Moore who arrived in steerage and inaugurated Ellis Island initially joined her parents, who had arrived several years earlier, apparently in a five-story brick tenement at 32 Monroe Street in Manhattan. (One of many problems that complicated Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak's search, she said, is there is also a 32 Monroe Street in Brooklyn.)

Records indicate that Annie Moore later moved to, among other places, a nearby apartment on New Chambers Street - near the Newsboys' Lodging House and the Third Avenue El on the Bowery.

The area now includes the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a public project constructed in the early 1950's and named for the governor who grew up nearby, and the Knickerbocker Village complex of rental apartments built in the 1930's.

"She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life," Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak said. "She sacrificed herself for future generations."

According to her latest research, Annie's father was a longshoreman. She married a bakery clerk. They had at least 11 children. Five survived to adulthood and three had children of their own. She died of heart failure in 1924 at 47. Her brother Anthony, who arrived with Annie and Philip on the Nevada, died in his 20's in the Bronx and was temporarily buried in potter's field.

Annie lived and died within a few square blocks on the Lower East Side, where some of her descendants lived until just recently. She is buried with 6 of her 11 children (five infants and one who survived to 21) alongside the famous and forgotten in a Queens cemetery.

Her living descendants include great-grandchildren, the great-nephew and the great-niece. One of the descendants is an investment counselor and another a Ph.D.

Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak described them as "poster children" for immigrant America, with Irish, Jewish, Italian and Scandinavian surnames. "It's an all-American family," she said. "Annie would have been proud."

So far, this turns out to be one of the few cases in which historical revisionism may have enhanced a legacy instead of subverting it. As one guidebook says: "Annie Moore came to America bearing little more than her dreams; she stayed to help build a country enriched by diversity."

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Story of the First Through Ellis Island Is Rewritten

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The story of the immigrant girl who went west, however, became so commonly accepted that even descendants of the Annie Moore who died in Texas came to believe it. Over the years, several have been invited to participate at ceremonies on Ellis Island and in Ireland.

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Huffington Post article 125th Anniversary

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"It's good to remember that we are a nation of immigrants, of hopeful wanderers. And we cannot know who is coming across our borders today whose story will add a significant page to the American story, who will work hard, who will raise a family, whose new blood will strengthen the good fabric holding our nation together." - Bruce Springsteen

On January 1, 1892, 17-year-old Annie Moore from Cork, Ireland became the first immigrant to ever arrive at Ellis Island, so both Annie and Ellis Island celebrate their 125th anniversary on January 1, 2017. Of course, hopeful wanderers from other countries had been teeming to our shores by choice or force for centuries by then, but perhaps because 40% of Americans have at least one ancestor who arrived via Ellis Island, it has always been synonymous with immigration in a nation of immigrants.

As the first, Annie became the poster child for immigration, which is why there are statues of her in both New York and Cork, and songs, books, awards, and even pubs sport her name and tell her story.

Almost from arrival, Annie suffered a series of indignities. No doubt appreciating the $15 in coins she received that day (a small fortune to her family), she was also overwhelmed by all the attention and used as a PR prop with the invention of a tale that it was her 15th birthday (she was 17 and her birthday was in May). And then, after her Kim Kardashian moment, she vanished from the pages of history into what was to be a sadly common, but somewhat hellish immigrant experience in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Annie and her family bounced from tenement to tenement as so many foreign born did back then, often in search of lower rents. At 21, she married Joseph Augustus Schayer and soon had the first of at least ten children she would bear over the next quarter of a century. Her first child died before his second birthday, but the next four were fortunate enough to make it to adulthood. And then things took a turn. Due to the family's living conditions and likely to Annie's own weakening health, only one of her final five children made it past the age of three, and the lone survivor died at 21. Even with the infant mortality rate in New York City at that time hovering around 34 per 100, it's apparent that the Schayer family suffered more than most, and though we might want to convince ourselves that such high loss rates must have better equipped parents to cope, it's not true. Frequency and familiarity did not render the death of a child any less painful than it is today.

The causes of death from her children's records all point to the underlying culprit of poverty. Annie herself managed to make it to 50 and to Calvary Cemetery where my husband and I discovered that she had been buried without benefit of a tombstone in a plot with ten others. Still, her family was luckier than some as the child of a friend who couldn't afford a grave is mixed in with Annie's - a kindness immigrants often extended to others in need.

It's appropriate that Annie should have been the first at Ellis Island, as her story is so representative and American. In a precursor to what many of us wrestle with today, Annie numbed her sorrows with food - possibly at least in part with the macaroons her German-born father-in-law received a patent for - and struggled with her weight. Family lore has it that she was too large to be taken down the narrow tenement staircase when she passed, so was lowered out the window.

On a more positive note, as is so often the case with immigrants, her sacrifices led to greater opportunities for her descendants who have since flourished. At least one remained in the Lower East Side until this century, but most fanned out to New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Arizona, and elsewhere. They took on a variety of professions, worked their way up the economic ladder, and married others with diverse backgrounds so that Annie's Irish genes have now blended with Hispanic, Jewish, Scandinavian, and more.

This is the pattern we see again and again: the immigrant struggles, but ensuing generations reap the benefits. So Annie's tale is a fitting one for the poster child of the immigrant saga, but until I found them in 2006, most of her scattered descendants did not know about her because a usurper had taken her place, a discovery I tripped across while working on a documentary in 2002.

Descendants of another Annie Moore unwittingly asserted that their ancestor was Ellis Island's first (a forensic analysis of sorts revealed that a commemorative plate, of all things, triggered a chain of events that allowed this error to germinate and spread), and curiously, no one troubled to verify the claim for years, even though the few relatives of the real Annie who knew of her all along had tried to raise the issue. Most likely this is because the other Annie's story was a wild ride involving Western-migrating adventurers and revolutionary Irish kin - the way we like to see ourselves, I suppose - but it little reflected the harsh and selfless reality of most of our immigrant ancestors.

So the genuine Annie was a victim of historical identity theft by another Annie who wasn't even an immigrant (the giveaway being her Illinois birth). By the time I found her resting anonymously under a bit of grass in a Queens cemetery, 114 years had passed since her arrival at Ellis Island and 82 since her death, so January 1, 2017 is the first milestone anniversary since we've known who she truly was.

And the timing is, well, interesting. Just as we should be celebrating Annie and Ellis Island's 125th, we are instead in the midst of an anti-immigrant fervor. The attempt to otherize immigrants is gaining momentum and harkens back to the days of Know Nothings, exclusion acts, and internment camps.

All of this makes now an especially relevant time to reflect on the Annie Moores in our own family trees - those pioneers who made a leap that so drastically altered the trajectories of their descendants' lives for the better. In my own case, I think with gratitude of Ellen Nelligan, Peter Smolenyak, James Reynolds, Padonia Lukacz, and others whose choices and challenging lives have given me the opportunities I have.

Welcoming today's Annies - those hopeful wanderers that Springsteen speaks of - requires generosity of spirit that doesn't always come naturally, but it's our legacy, and centuries of American history make it clear that the return on investment from this particular form of speculation is exceptional. Then again, maybe we should do it simply because it's the right thing to do.

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125th Anniversary of Annie Moore and Ellis Island Reminds Us Why We Should Welcome Immigrants

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"It's good to remember that we are a nation of immigrants, of hopeful wanderers . And we cannot know who is coming across our borders today whose story will add a significant page to the American story, who will work hard, who will raise a family, whose new blood will strengthen the good fabric holding our nation together."

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While New York City ushered in the arrival of 1892 with the peals of church bells and the screeching of horns, American dreams danced in the head of a 17-year-old Irish girl anchored off the southern tip of Manhattan. Along with her two younger brothers, the teenager had departed Queenstown, Ireland, on December 20, 1891, aboard the steamship Nevada to start a new life in a new land. After spending 12 days, including Christmas, at sea, the girl from Ireland's County Cork was just hours away from reuniting with her parents and two older siblings after spending the past four years apart.

Nevada had arrived too late on New Year's Eve to be processed, which meant its third-class passengers would be the first to pass through the newly built federal immigration station on Ellis Island, which had previously been used as a gunpowder storage facility for the U.S. Navy.

At 10:30 a.m. on New Year's Day, a flag on Ellis Island was dipped three times as a signal to transport the first boatload of immigrants. A chorus of foghorns, clanging bells, steam whistles and cheers serenaded a barge adorned with red, white and blue bunting as it ferried Nevada's steerage passengers to the dock at Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

The brown-haired Irish teenager was the first to bound down the gangplank with her brothers in tow. She entered through the enormous double doors of the cavernous three-story wooden building, described as "little more than a big business shed" by the New York Tribune, and skipped two steps at a time up the main staircase. Turning to her left, the girl was ushered into one of 10 aisles and up to a tall lectern-like registry desk.

"What is your name, my girl?" asked Charles Hendley, a former Treasury Department official who had requested the honor of registering the new station's first immigrant.

"Annie Moore, sir," replied the Irish girl.

Wielding his pen over a fresh piece of paper, Hendley inked Moore's name and those of her brothers, Anthony and Philip, along with their ages, last place of residence and intended destination on the first page of the first registry book. Annie was then escorted into the next room where former congressman John B. Weber, federal superintendent of immigration for the port of New York, gave her a ten-dollar gold piece and wishes for a Happy New Year. A Catholic chaplain blessed her and gave her a silver coin, while another bystander slipped her a five-dollar gold piece before she passed into the waiting room and the arms of her parents. Over the course of the next 62 years, more than 12 million immigrants would follow in the teenager's footsteps through Ellis Island, and it's estimated that 40 percent of the country can trace its origins back to the immigration station in New York Harbor.

Why Moore was the first of the 107 immigrants in Nevada's steerage to be processed at Ellis Island is not known. In one story, an Italian gave up his place at the front of the line after seeing her in tears. In another, a large German man had one foot on the gangplank when a sailor held him back and called out "Ladies First!" while pushing Moore ahead.

America: Promised Land The 2-part special premieres Memorial Day at 9/8c on HISTORY.

As Tyler Anbinder notes in his new book, "City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York," Irish immigrants such as Moore composed just a small portion of the passengers aboard Nevada. Although there were twice as many immigrants from southern and eastern Europe-primarily Italian and Russian Jews-aboard the ship as those from western Europe, an English-speaking, "rosy-cheeked" Irish lass was a typecast poster child for immigration at a time when Irish immigrants had already risen to the heights of American political and cultural life. Always seeking a good story, newspapers reported that Moore's birthday was fortuitously on January 1. It wasn't, and she wasn't 15 as newspapers also reported-although Moore may have given that age herself to save money on the passage.

Following her brief moment of notoriety, Moore dissolved into oblivion. Not until decades after her death and the closure of Ellis Island was her memory resurrected as the immigration station underwent the largest historic restoration in U.S. history during the 1980s. Moore became the public face of the immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island, but it turned out that the face put forward was a case of mistaken identity.

For years it was thought that Moore had married a descendant of the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, moved to New Mexico and met a tragic end in a 1923 streetcar accident in Fort Worth, Texas, that left her five children orphaned. For years, the woman's descendants were invited to ceremonies at both Ellis Island and Ireland.

It was discovered in 2006, however, that the Annie Moore who died in the streetcar accident was born and raised in the United States. Genealogist Megan Smolenyak and New York City's commissioner of records, Brian Andersson, found that the Annie Moore who passed through Ellis Island lived her entire life in a few square blocks on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life," Smolenyak told the New York Times in 2006. Moore married Joseph Augustus Schayer, a German-American who worked at the Fulton Fish Market, and gave birth to at least 10 children, five of whom died before the age of three. The family had enough money for a family plot, but Moore's children were buried without headstones, as was she after her death from heart failure in 1924 at the age of 50. Moore was an enormous woman, and according to family lore her casket was too big to squeeze down the narrow apartment staircase, so it had to be transported out of a window.

The massive wooden immigration station that Moore passed through in 1892 was completely consumed by a fire on June 15, 1897. The blaze was not lethal, but it destroyed the collection of leather-bound registry books listing every immigrant who had landed in New York City since 1855, including the name of Annie Moore. Today, a pair of statues of Moore and her brothers stand at the Irish port of Cobh (the present-day name of Queenstown) and on Ellis Island, where their trans-Atlantic journey began and ended.

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Remembering Annie Moore, Ellis Island's First Immigrant

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While New York City ushered in the arrival of 1892 with the peals of church bells and the screeching of horns, American dreams danced in the head of a 17-year-old Irish girl anchored off the southern tip of Manhattan.

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Ellis Island website

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Annie Moore - The Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island