Annie Moore : Short Biography

Annie Moore was the first person to pass through the newly opened immigration station, Ellis Island on the 1st of January 1892. At 14 years old, she left Cobh with 2 younger brothers, Anthony (11) and Philip (7) five days before Christmas on the 20th of December 1891. She sailed on the S.S Nevada along with 148 other steerage passengers. The trip took 12 days in total and they arrived in New York on the evening of December 31st. 

Ellis Island's first building

Journalist Jesse Green spent years researching Annie and what happened after she moved into her parents’ tenement apartment at 32 Monroe Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The building was a five-story brick building, built at the turn of the century to house the influx of immigrants settling in New York City. Genealogist, Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak began researching Annie in 2002 adding that  Annie married a German-born bakery clerk (or the son of a bakery clerk) named Joseph Augustus Shayer. He spent his entire career employed as an engineer and salesman at the Fulton Fish Market. They had at least 10 children, five of whom survived to adulthood. A famous picture of the wrong Annie and her first baby hangs in the National Archives Library of Congress.  Annie was age 50 when she died of heart failure at 99 Cherry Street, in 1924. She lived and died within a few blocks on the Lower East Side. She is buried with six of her children (five infants and one who survived to 21) in Calvery Cemetery, Queens. In 2008 the Annie Moore Memorial Project raised the funds to place a Celtic cross headstone on her unmarked grave, lost to history for eight decades.

Source The Truth About Annie Moore | Annie Moore Revisited

Rare Footage showing emmigrants arriving on Ellis Island.

This 3-minute video, from the LIbrary of Congress Archives, depicts scenes at the Immigration Depot and a nearby dock on Ellis Island. First we see a group of immigrants lined up to board a vessel leaving the island, then another group arriving and directed off the dock and into the Depot by a uniformed official.