Hello everybody! I am Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger and on today's vlog
i'll be discussing identifying people in the 1903 film "Immigrants Arriving at Ellis Island."
Earlier this year I made a video about identifying a family in the 1911 "Tour of New York City" film
and after that I had a lot of people saying that i should do that for other old films. Since the
1911 video was one that I had originally seen on Guy Jones' channel I decided to look through
all the different videos and see if there was one where I thought there might be enough information
to figure out who was in the film and after looking through I found this film, from 1903,
of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. And there seemed to be a whole lot of different pieces of
information that I could possibly use; we had a date for the film which was July 24th, 1903,
we knew that it was specifically at Ellis Island in New York city, and we even had the name of the
boat that they were coming in on. Now, when i did look into the name of the boat it turned out that
that was insignificant because that was just a ferry company, basically, and that wasn't gonna
help me really with the name of the ship. But even with the other information i figured, could i
actually identify some of the people in this film? So the first step was to identify the ships which
arrived on July 24, 1903 since that's the date of the film but luckily for me i decided to look
through the comment section after viewing the film and looking into it a bit and one of the comments
led me to figure out that July 24th, 1903 wasn't actually the date the film was made,
it was the date the film was registered. But being that this is just a youtube comment
i didn't want to rely on that alone, so i looked further into it and i ended up finding the film
located on the website for the library of congress. And right there it showed that July
24 1903 was the day it was registered but the day that it was filmed was actually July 9th, 1903.
Now this is really important because if we're trying to identify the ship,
knowing the day of arrival is a major part because we are going to get different ships on different
days. But now that we had the actual day July 9th, 1903 the next thing to do was to find out what
ships arrived on July 9th, 1903 and in looking at the lists on family search - you can actually
look through all of the manifests of all the ships arriving at Ellis Island - I was able to identify
four different ships which had arrived. The four ships were the S.S. Napolitan Prince from Naples,
the S.S. Calabria also from Naples, the S.S. Cita Di Napoli from Palermo, and the S.S. Patricia from
Hamburg. But now that we had four ships we had to figure out what ship was it and one thing that i
thought was - well if we have three ships from Italy and one from Hamburg maybe we could figure
out or at least rule out some of them using the clothing of the immigrants, so looking at the
clothing i personally felt like they seemed more along the lines of Italian clothing of the time.
A lot of people who came on the ship from Hamburg weren't necessarily from Germany so could possibly
be from that, so unfortunately this part was not very helpful for me. For the research i was
watching this film over and over and over and one of the things that really stuck out to me
was that there was this one guy who seemed to be really well dressed and he got off the boat first
before anyone else. He didn't seem like he was an ellis island official. If he was he didn't
wear a uniform and i thought that was a little odd but as i went through the manifests i also
noticed something very interesting - the first page of the manifest for the S.S. Cita Di Napoli
showed only one passenger and i wonder could that one passenger be that well to do man who got off
early? The lone passenger on that one page was Giuseppe Ricci - a 32 year old doctor from Italy
and it described him as being employed by the Italian government. Now for me this made
a lot of sense; it made sense why he would be getting off first, it also made sense why he was
very well dressed. If he was working for the Italian government and he was a doctor
i imagine he was very well to do so i decided that i would start looking into Giuseppe and i
found some information, mostly other manifests of him arriving. Some, where I could say that it was
definitely him because not only did the age match up but it also talked about him being a doctor
and employed by the Italian government and then other manifests which i assume were likely him but
i couldn't be for certain because the information just didn't correlate well enough. And i tried to
figure out something with records in italy for him. But unfortunately with such a common name
such as Giuseppe Ricci and only having an age i didn't really have much to go off, so my next plan
was contact the Italian government. If he worked for the Italian government maybe they had records
and even better maybe they had a photograph of him. Now Italy has obviously had a lot of
turmoil in the 20th century, as well as pretty much all of Europe but it's still possible that
there may be records available. So i contacted all sorts of Italian government agencies,
especially ones that had to do with health and medical because if he was a doctor then he would
have been dealing with that kind of stuff. But unfortunately for me it was right around this time
in the research where covid19 started to really ravage Italy and i did receive a few responses
from these agencies but most of it saying that while they appreciated the work that i was doing
they were understaffed and overwhelmed and unable to help me out, at least at this time. So the next
thing i thought was well if i'm looking into something about Ellis Island maybe i should
contact them. I heard back from a Barry Moreno who is an expert on Ellis Island and worked at the Bob
Hope Memorial Library at Ellis Island and in fact if you look into information about ellis island
it's very likely that you will find some of the books by Barry Moreno and the information he sent
me was immensely helpful. He explained to me at what point in the journey the immigrants were at,
and basically the journey had gone from where they went from Europe, to the U.S., and they
would then land at one of the piers in manhattan off of the Hudson river and it's from there that
they would then take that steamboat, the one that we see in the film - the 'W.M. Myers Excursion'
and they would have taken that there to the Ellis Island docks and that's the point that we
are seeing, is them arriving after being taken from the pier. But they still have yet to go
through that famous Ellis Island building that many have seen, especially if you've seen "The
Godfather" where they have all of those people in those long lines. He noted that most of the
passengers were likely steerage passengers but he also pointed out that the gentleman in the uniform
holding all those papers who was about the third person to get off the ship,
he was likely the immigrant inspector. Now this was huge for this because in every manifest there
will be at least one affidavit, many times an affidavit for every page, signed by the immigrant
inspector. He would have been the one who went through the ship taking down the names of every
single passenger and all of their information. So then it became, if we could name the immigrant
inspector then we can name what ship this was, but unfortunately the immigrant inspectors only
signed it. There was no place where they really printed their name and most of these inspectors
had fairly hard signatures to read, so i reached out to Barry Moreno again and i asked him if there
was any information about the workers at Ellis Island, if there was anything that i could look
into to possibly get names to try to correlate to the signatures. And he gave me the actual employee
list and being that these workers were technically government workers, working at Ellis Island,
there's an entire directory of all of the people who worked there.
Even better was the date for this list was July 1st, 1903 - just eight days before the making of
this film - so this made it very likely that all of the people in the directory were still working
at ellis island when this film was shot. So i went through the manifests checked the signatures
checked it against the personnel list which showed all of the immigrant inspectors and i was able to
identify each of the immigrant inspectors from each ship that landed on that day for the S.S.
Napolitan Prince from Naples it was Eugene W. Willard, for the S.S. Calabria from Naples it was
F. H. Ainsworth, for the S.S. Cita Di Napoli from Palermo it was Clarence Arthur Thomas,
and for the S.S. Patricia from Hamburg it was Creuzet Vance. So now that i had the names of
each immigrant inspector my next step was to find photos of them and to do that
i did genealogy research and i was hoping to find family members who might have those photos.
In that research i was able to get photographs of three of the four inspectors, the only one
i was not able to obtain was Eugene Willard. For F.H. Ainsworth, who turned out to be Frank
Harrison Ainsworth, i found a great photograph of him which was a little bit later in life
but even better was it was part of a document that included his signature. So we were able to
take that signature and compare it to the ones from the affidavit from the manifest
and it was a quick match, up it was definitely him. For Clarence Arthur Thomas he came from
a family which had a lot of history in an area of New York and there was a lot of information
about his family and there was a photograph of him which was supplied by one of his family members.
For Cruezet Vance i found a photograph of him on ancestry provided by a family
member. In looking at the photographs of the three men i felt that Frank Harrison Ainsworth
looked most like our immigrant inspector. It was very possible that Clarence Arthur Thomas could
also be the immigrant inspector but i felt that Frank Harrison Ainsworth's face shape was much
more in line with what we see of the inspector. Now when the inspector comes down the gang plank
there is also an old woman who walks in front of him and then you see him grab her by the arm
and my hope was that i might be able to find her listed as the first person on the list
of detainees of alien passengers, which is a list that often comes with every single manifest. It's
those that were detained for whatever reason but in looking at the list the woman who was listed
as the first in the detained passengers was way too young in my opinion to have been this old
woman. Now this has been extremely difficult to research and it's taken a lot of energy and there
have been a lot of dead ends that i didn't even talk about in this video but this research is
something that i will continue with but i am also opening it to others to help me out with i will
be putting on my patreon links to the personnel list of ellis island, links to the manifests,
as well as links to other information that will be helpful in solving this case. So if you would like
to be a part of this research and help identify people in this film be sure to join my patreon
to get in the know. Now you don't have to be a patron of mine to help me with the research
but i will be posting updates about this research on my patreon, so if you want to be in the know
of the latest information coming in and getting the links to help in that research then be sure to
join my patreon. Now there are a few other things i've been thinking of doing for this research
and one thing that i recently learned about in a conference that i think will be very helpful,
is using facial recognition software. Thank you so much for checking out this video. If
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which i'll be linking down below. I'm the GeneaVlogger! I'll see you in my next video!