What Happened to Annie Moore?
She was the First Person to Immigrate Through Ellis Island
The story of Annie Moore is a long and somewhat complicated one. Folklore history gave her one life story, but research proved something else entirely.
Though there were several ports where immigrants were processed in the USA, Ellis Island in New York harbor is the best known. Between 1892 and 1954, more than 12 million people came to America through Ellis Island.
And the very first person to walk through the doors was Annie Moore, a 15-year-old girl from Ireland. She and her two younger brothers spent 12 days travelling from County Cork as steerage passengers. They were arriving to be reunited with their parents, already in the US and living in New York.
As the very first person through the new facility, she received a $10 gold coin and has been memorialized with a statue at Ellis Island. After Annie, another 700 people came to America that day.
For the longest time, she was then described to have grown up, moved West to settle in the new frontier, and became a symbol of the American Dream. She embodied that pioneer spirit that Americans are so proud of, and that the country was built upon. She supposedly ended up in Texas, where she died in 1924 in a streetcar accident.
Unfortunately, that's not actually what happened. Over the years, her life story became entangled with another Annie Moore and the details became blurred and incorrect.
But in 2006, one genealogist set the record straight. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (no, her name is not a typo) held a press conference to announce that research had uncovered the true story of Annie Moore. She and fellow researchers, Brian Andersson (New York Commission of Records), Patricia Sommerstein (Annie's grand-niece) and the folks at ProGenealogists.com finally found out what had really happened to her.
The "real" Annie Moore, who passed first through Ellis Island, never left New York and lived out her life in the Lower East Side. She married a baker named Joseph Schayer, and had 11 children (though only five of them survived). Many of her descendants have families of their own and are still living in the area.
Ironically, the researchers discovered that Annie was actually buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery, only a few miles away from Ellis Island. The Annie Moore Memorial Project is raising money to place an appropriate gravestone on this site, to honour Annie Moore and her rightful place in American history.
Here is Smolenyak Smolenyak's own blog entry, describing her own feelings about her discovery and giving some more details on the current state of Annie Moore's descendant family.
This is just one example of how story and history can be altered over time to give a false impression of how events took place. Never take any tales for granted, until you do some of your own research.
