In history books, we often read where people say they're walking in someone else's footsteps.  I now know what that means since I toured Ellis Island over Memorial Day Weekend 2002.  This page and the next follow the path of my ancestors, the Shediack, Nasser, Leamy and Boylan families through Ellis Island as they escaped religious persecution in Ireland and what we now call Lebanon.  To say this tour was emotional is an understatement as these pictures will show you.

The only way to get to Ellis Island is to take the Circle Line boat from Battery Park in Manhattan to the Statue of Liberty and then, after visiting the Statue of Liberty, re-board the boat to go to Ellis Island.

Lady Liberty smiles down today with the same dignity she displayed when immigrants passed by one hundred or more years ago...

...and then Ellis Island comes into view as your boat approaches the docking slip.

Walking into the main building, you enter the "Baggage Room" where most of the immigrant families left their suitcases and trunks while undergoing the immigration processing.

Today, there is a staircase to your right which replicates the 1924 staircase to the second floor.  My ancestors, who came through in the 1880s through 1900s, would have walked around the pillar to the right of the blue sign stand and ascended from right to left, up the original stairs to the second floor's Great Hall.

Arriving at the top of the stairs, you enter the Great Hall where the immigration inspections were held.  We are looking down from the third floor, where, if you had had some medical or other problem, you would have been housed in one of the rooms on the left side of the balcony.  When my ancestors arrived, the stairs came up between the two flags, ascending towards you.  The view of the Great Hall below shows how it looked in 1924.

Prior to 1924, when you ascended the stairs, you were seated on benches in the "pens".  This National Park Service collection photograph below shows how the scene above looked in the early 1900s.

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:

If you passed the medical inspection, then came the last part, the immigration inspector's questioning.

Your family and you would have been called forward to this desk and asked a series of questions about where you were from, where you were going, did you have a job, and did you have $25.00 for each person in your party.  The $25.00 number was an arbitrary number arrived at by the Federal government since it equaled an immigration inspector's weekly paycheck.  If you passed the inspection, you would have gone down the stairs over the inspector's left shoulder.

If you failed the inspection and needed to be detained for further examination, you would have gone to the rooms to the rear over the inspector's right shoulder.

If your case could not be resolved immediately, you would have gone upstairs to a sleeping room, with this view of the Statue of Liberty appearing as you turned on the staircase landing.

When your case was resolved or you passed the immigration inspector's questioning, you would have been told to go down the left, center or right channel of these stairs and through the doors.

The doors were called "The Doors of Separation" and for a very good reason.  When you passed through the doors, there were three ways to go:

• Left Channel of Stairs Through Left Door -- Go to doors on left and purchase railroad tickets to New Jersey and western cities.
• Center Channel of Stairs Through Center Door -- go straight to end of the hall for exclusion and return to your country of origin.
• Right Channel of Stairs Through Right Door -- Go to doors on right and purchase railroad tickets for travel into New York City's subway system or to cities north and east of NYC.  My relatives went through the right channel to buy their tickets to New England.

If headed to New York, you then boarded a ferry with this view as you left Ellis Island.

For my relatives, there probably wasn't a better sight than this, Battery Park and Castle Clinton where they came ashore in Manhattan and moved on to the trains to New England.