Heather, Comments within.
jrs On May 13, 2014, at 2:42 PM, Heather Madrone wrote: > I wonder how many truly poor people ever emigrated to the Americas. Aside > from those who were imported to penal colonies (not a long-lived phenomenon) > or imported as slaves, people had to pay their passage to the New World. This > was an expensive enough proposition in the 17th century that some of my > ancestors indentured themselves for a decade or so to pay for the trip across > the ocean. I don't know much about my grandmother's circumstances other than that she was one of 14 children from County Roscommon, Ireland. Those who didn't die all came to America. My grandmother stopped school at 8th grade (at highest) and made her wages as a governess until she got married. > > People might arrive in the New World penniless (although the records I have > seen indicate that there were often means tests for immigrants -- the truly > penniless might find themselves on the return ship along with those who > failed the medical examinations). My grandfather, Pop, (whom I've mentioned here before in the context of his Near Death Experience) as a teenager was part of an underground anti-Russian Finnish-nationalist group. There was a spy in the group and one night Russians came to town, rounded up some of its members and shot them. My grandfather and a few others escaped, hid in a barn for few days, then fled across the frozen sea on cross-country skis for Sweden (he was a "Swede-Finn" who considered himself a Finn but who spoke Swedish in his home). Russians set after them the next day but couldn't catch them. My grandfather had the name of a contact in Sweden, and somehow found him. Funds were assembled to send Pop (who was about 17) to America. He spent 9 days on Ellis island, waiting to hear from a sponsor, who would vouch for him, guaranteeing that he had a job. Had the sponsorship not come through he would have been sent back -- or, indeed, he would have attempted to swim for it. So while pop may not have arrived with only the clothes on his back, that was how he left his homeland. His fare to America was presumably paid by sympathetic people in Finland or Sweden. He went back to Finland once, on the eve of WW2, when his mother was dying. The sponsorship that allowed him to get off Ellis came just in the nick of time from a man named Mr. Nelson, who secured for my grandfather a job as a custodian at Montclair Academy, a prep school. As a child, I did not know who Mr. Nelson might have been. All I knew was that starting about age 10, at my grandfather's insistence, I mowed the lawn of his widow, Mrs. Nelson, and that Pop shoveled her driveway when it snowed, and that "the Widow Nelson" was treated with the utmost deference. I learned the story from my father when I was old enough to understand it. My father went to Finland in the 1960's and met some of our relatives there. The story of my grandfather's departure was corroborated by people who had been alive at the time; indeed it was a well-known legend 50 years after the fact. Perhaps I'll write more about Pop's experiences on Ellis Island, and of his first years in America, which I heard about when I was a teenager. But I shan't forget first seeing the place as a child of 7 or 8, when Pop used to take me fishing on a party boat out of Hoboken (then a very dumpy place, not the trendy spot it is now). As the boat sailed past the ruins of Ellis Island, Pop would point out each of the buildings (in his Swede-Finn accent): "dat dere is the infirmary, where you go if you're sick; dat one over dere is the men's dormatory; dat's the jail. . ." I was too young to have any idea what Ellis Island was or what it meant to Pop or why I should care about some scary places with fallen-in roofs and broken windows. But I still get chills remembering him pointing to a spot and saying, "Dat part dere is the closest to New Jersey. It's half a mile across the strong river. And Yonny, don't that look like a long way to swim." I now understand that as a 17 year old kid he stood there and contemplated what his chances would be if he had to swim it. I have no doubt that he would have tried. jrs
