Going back down to the Great Hall's second floor, I took a seat in one of the benches which had originally sat in "the pens."  You can imagine the emotions that came over me when I sat there and  remembered how my grandparents said the immigration inspection was so scary since if anyone had something wrong with them, such as an eye condition, they would be sent back to the old country with no hope of ever entering the US. 

Considering how prevalent eye infections were in the Middle East in the late 1890s, this was a huge fear.  In one case, my great-grandfather Shediack, who guided multiple groups of relatives to the US, waited in Marseilles, France for six months while one of the family recovered from an eye infection.  It's no wonder the Lebanese will often refer to a child as "my eye" much as Americans use the phrase "Apple of my eye"!

While the immigration process shown above looks simple, it came with a lot of fears.  If you failed any of the questions or medical tests, you might be detained for a board hearing.  If everything went wrong, you would be "excluded" and sent back to wherever you came from, regardless of the consequences of your return.

Hopefully, you didn't have one of the medical problems shown on this list:

please click here to go to Ellis Island Page 3