Saturday, May 2, 2009

Importing A Husband

My G-Aunts, Maria (9yrs old) and Barbara Kollain(6yrs) immigrated to the United States with their Uncle Martin Kollain from Brod, Austria, arriving in New York at Ellis Island on 24 October 1910 aboard the Vaderland.



I had a few minutes of free time before I needed to chop, dice and cook dinner so I thought I would try out a suggestion I read about recently on http://askolivetree.blogspot.com/ . The idea is to search the New York Times Article Archives for information pertaining to our ancestors passage to the U.S.
After trying different search terms, I found the best results by just typing in the ship's name. Doing this I had over 300 hits. I tried including the "&" sign and the year but that did not work.
I proceeded to scan through the articles searching for ones that were dated Oct or Nov 1910.
Doing this I found 4 articles pertaining to their specific voyage. Three discussed notable passengers arriving on this ship.

The fourth was an entertaining article titled "Importing A Husband" about a woman who wrote Ellis Island to notify them of a man arriving on this ship. She had paid for his ticket in exchange for him marrying her. She asked the Ellis Island officials to hold him for her "...by detaining him on his arrival and telegraph to me, and I will come, and you gentlemen shall unite us in the bonds of marriage at the island."

The names of the two people involved were not disclosed. Too bad - I think it is a great little piece of family history for some lucky descendants.


Link to archives search:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html

Hint - use the advanced search feature to narrow down the time frame - I did not discover this until after I perused the 300+ articles. ;-)

No comments:

Post a Comment