The car is yoked before the door,
And time will let us dance no more.
Come, fiddler, now, and play for me
'Farewell to barn and stack and tree.'

To-day the fields looked wet and cold,
The mearings gapped, the cattle old.
Things are not what they used to be -
'Farewell to barn and stack and tree.'

I go, without the heart to go,
To kindred that I hardly know.
Drink, neighbour, drink a health with me -
'Farewell to barn and stack and tree.'

Five hours will see me stowed aboard,
The gang-plank up, the ship unmoored.
Christ grant no tempest shakes the sea -
'Farewell to barn and stack and tree.'

Four years ago I promised to dedicate my abilities to the service and welfare of the people of Ireland. Even then I was acutely aware of how broad that term the people of Ireland is and how it resisted any fixed or narrow definition. One of my purposes here today is to suggest that, far from seeking to categorise or define it, we widen it still further to make it as broad and inclusive as possible.

At my inauguration I spoke of the seventy million people worldwide who can claim Irish descent. I also committed my Presidency to cherishing them - even though at the time I was thinking of doing so in a purely symbolic way. Nevertheless the simple emblem of a light in the window, for me, and I hope for them, signifies the inextinguishable nature of our love and remembrance on this island those who leave it behind.

But in the intervening four years something has occurred in my life which I share with many deputies and senators here and with most Irish families. In that time I have put faces and names to many of those individuals.

In places as far apart as Calcutta and Toronto, on a number of visits to Britain and the United States, in cities in Tanzania and Hungary and Australia, I have met young people from throughout the island of Ireland who felt they had no choice but to emigrate. I have also met men and women who may never have seen this island but whose identity with it is part of their own self-definition. Last summer, in the city of Cracow, I was greeted in Irish by a Polish student, a member of the Polish-Irish Society. In Zimbabwe I learned that the Mashonaland Irish Association had recently celebrated its centenary. In each country visited I have met Irish communities, often in far-flung places, and listened to stories of men and women whose pride and affection for Ireland has neither deserted them nor deterred them from dedicating their loyalty and energies to other countries and cultures. None are a greater source of pride than the missionaries and aid workers who bring such dedication, humour and practical commomsense to often very demanding work. Through this office, I have been a witness to the stories these people and places have to tell.

The more I know of these stories the more it seems to me an added richness of our heritage that Irishness is not simply territorial. In fact Irishness as a concept seems to me at its strongest when it reaches out to everyone on this island and shows itself capable of honouring and listening to those whose sense of identity, and whose cultural values, may be more British than Irish. It can be strengthened again if we turn with open minds and hearts to the array of people outside Ireland for whom this island is a place of origin. After all, emigration is not just a chronicle of sorrow and regret. It is also a powerful story of contribution and adaptation. In fact, I have become more convinced each year that this great narrative of dispossession and belonging, which so often had its origins in sorrow and leave-taking, has become - with a certain amount of historic irony - one of the treasures of our society. If that is so then our relation with the diaspora beyond our shores is one which can instruct our society in the values of diversity, tolerance and fair-mindedness.

To speak of our society in these terms is itself a reference in shorthand to the vast distances we have travelled as a people. This island has been inhabited for more than five thousand years. It has been shaped by pre-Celtic wanderers, by Celts, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Scottish and English settlers. Whatever the rights or wrongs of history, all those people marked this island: down to the small detail of the distinctive ship-building of the Vikings, the linen-making of the Huguenots, the words of Planter balladeers. How could we remove any one of these things from what we call our Irishness? Far from wanting to do so, we need to recover them so as to deepen our understanding.

Nobody knows this more than the local communities throughout the island of Ireland who are retrieving the history of their own areas. Through the rediscovery of that local history, young people are being drawn into their past in ways that help their future. These projects not only generate employment; they also regenerate our sense of who we were. I think of projects like the Ceide Fields in Mayo, where the intriguing agricultural structures of settlers from thousands of years ago are being explored through scholarship and field work. Or Castletown House in Kildare where the grace of our Anglo-Irish architectural heritage is being restored with scrupulous respect for detail. The important excavations at Navan Fort in Armagh are providing us with vital information about early settlers whose proved existence illuminates both legend and history. In Ballance House in Antrim the Ulster-New Zealand Society have restored the birthplace of John Ballance, who became Prime Minister of New Zealand and led that country to be the first in the world to give the vote to women.

Varied as these projects may seem to be, the reports they bring us are consistently challenging in that they may not suit any one version of ourselves. I for one welcome that challenge. Indeed, when we consider the Irish migrations of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries our preconceptions are challenged again. There is a growing literature which details the fortunes of the Irish in Europe and later in Canada, America, Australia, Argentina. These important important studies of migration have the power to surprise us. They also demand from us honesty and self-awareness in return. If we expect that the mirror held up to us by Irish communities abroad will show us a single familiar identity, or a pure strain of Irishness, we will be disappointed. We will overlook the fascinating diversity of culture and choice which looks back at us. Above all we will miss the chance to have that dialogue with our own diversity which this reflection offers us.

This year we begin to commemorate the Irish famine which started 150 years ago. All parts of this island - north and south, east and west - will see their losses noted and remembered, both locally and internationally. This year we will see those local and global connections made obvious in the most poignant ways. But they have always been there.

Last year, for example, I went to Grosse Ile, an island on the St. Lawrence river near Quebec city. I arrived in heavy rain and as I looked at the mounds which, together with white crosses, are all that mark the mass graves of the five thousand or more Irish people who died there, I was struck by the sheer power of commemoration. I was also aware that, even across time and distance, tragedy must be seen as human and not historic, and that to think of it in national terms alone can obscure that fact. And as I stood looking at Irish graves, I was also listening to the story of the French-Canadian families who braved fever and shared their food, who took the Irish into their homes and into their heritage.

Agus is �n dul i dt�r ar Grosse Ile ar a dtugtar freisin Oile�n na nGael a sh�olraigh an bhean a d'inis an sc�al sin dom. Labhair s� liom as Fraincis agus is le br�d ar leith a labhair s� Gaeilge liom a bh� t�gtha aici ona muintir roimpi. D� mh�ad taistil a rinne m� sea is m� a chuaigh s� i bhfeidhm orm gur th�inig an Ghaeilge sl�n � aimsir an ghorta agus go bhfuil s� le cloiste�il i gcan�int� New York agus Toronto agus Sydney, gan tr�cht ar Camden Town. T� sc�al ann f�in sa Ghaeilge den teacht sl�n agus den chur in oiri�int.

Ach ar nd�igh bh� seasamh aici i bhfad roimhe seo mar theanga l�inn san Eoraip. T� stair na hEorpa ar bharr a teanga ag an Ghaeilge. T� cuntas tugtha ina cuid litr�ochta nach bhfuil in aon �it eile ar chult�r na hEorpa roimh theacht na R�mh�nach. N� ionadh ar bith mar sin go bhfuil staid�ar � dh�anamh uirthi in ollscoileanna � Ghlasc� go Mosc� agus � Seattle go Indiana. Agus c�n f�th go deimhin go mbeadh ionadh ar bith orm gur as Gaeilge a chuir an macl�inn �n bPolainn f�ilte romham go Cracow.

Is le pl�isi�r agus le br�d a �istim le Gaeilge � labhairt i dt�ortha eile agus tugann s� pl�isi�r dom freisin nuair a chloisim rithim� �r n-amhr�n agus �r bhfil�ochta � nglacadh chucu f�in ag teangacha agus traidisi�in eile. Crutha�onn s� seo rud at� ar eolas cheana ag no m�lte �ireannach thar lear, gur f�idir gr� agus �m�s d'�irinn agus don Ghaeilge agus do chult�r na h�ireann a chur in i�l ina l�n beala� agus ina l�n teangacha.

(Indeed, the woman who told me that story had her own origins in the arrival at Grosse Ile. She spoke to me in her native French and, with considerable pride, in her inherited Irish. The more I have travelled the more I have seen that the Irish language since the famine has endured in the accents of New York and Toronto and Sydney, not to mention Camden Town. As such it is an interesting record of survival and adaptation. But long before that, it had standing as a scholarly European language. The Irish language has the history of Europe off by heart. It contains a valuable record of European culture from before the Roman conquest there. It is not surprising therefore that is is studied today in universities from Glasgow to Moscow and from Seattle to Indiana. And why indeed should I have been surprised to have been welcomed in Cracow in Irish by a Polish student? I take pleasure and pride in hearing Irish spoken in other countries just as I am moved to hear the rhythms of our songs and our poetry finding a home in other tongues and other traditions. It proves to me what so many Irish abroad already know: that Ireland can be loved in any language.)

The weight of the past, the researches of our local interpreters and the start of the remembrance of the famine all, in my view, point us towards a single reality: that commemoration is a moral act, just as our relation in this country to those who have left it is a moral relationship. We have too much at stake in both not to be rigorous.

We cannot have it both ways. We cannot want a complex present and still yearn for a simple past. I was very aware of that when I visited the refugee camps in Somalia and more recently in Tanzania and Zaire. The thousands of men and women and children who came to those camps were, as the Irish of the 1840s were, defenceless in the face of catastrophe. Knowing our own history, I saw the tragedy of their hunger as a human disaster. We, of all people, know it is vital that it be carefully analysed so that their children and their children's children be spared that ordeal. We realize that while a great part of our concern for their situation, as Irish men and women who have a past which includes famine, must be at practical levels of help, another part of it must consist of a humanitarian perspective which springs directly from our self-knowledge as a people. Famine is not only humanly destructive, it is culturally disfiguring. The Irish who died at Grosse Ile were men and women with plans and dreams of future achievements. It takes from their humanity and individuality to consider them merely as victims.

Therefore it seemed to me vital, even as I watched the current tragedy in Africa, that we should uphold the dignity of the men and women who suffer there by insisting there are no inevitable victims. It is important that in our own commemoration of famine, such reflections have a place. As Tom Murphy has eloquently said in an introduction to his play FAMINE: "a hungry and demoralised people becomes silent". We cannot undo the silence of our own past, but we can lend our voice to those who now suffer. To do so we must look at our history, in the light of this commemoration, with a clear insight which exchanges the view that we were inevitable victims in it, for an active involvement in the present application of its meaning. We can examine in detail humanitarian relief then and relate it to humanitarian relief now and assess the inadequacies of both. And this is not just a task for historians. I have met children in schools and men and women all over Ireland who make an effortless and sympathetic connection between our past suffering and the present tragedies of hunger in the world. One of the common bonds between us and our diaspora can be to share this imaginative way of re-interpreting the past. I am certain that they, too, will feel that the best possible commemoration of the men and women who died in that famine, who were cast up on other shores because of it, is to take their dispossession into the present with us, to help others who now suffer in a similar way.

Therefore I welcome all initiatives being taken during this period of commemoration, many of which can be linked with those abroad, to contribute to the study and understanding of economic vulnerability. I include in that all the illustrations of the past which help us understand the present. In the Famine Museum in Strokestown there is a vivid and careful retelling of what happened during the Famine. Wen we stand in front of those images I believe we have a responsibility to understand them in human terms now, not just in Irish terms then. They should inspire us to be a strong voice in the analysis of the cause and the cure of conditions that predispose to world hunger, whether that involves us in the current debate about access to adequate water supplies or the protection of economic migrants. We need to remember that our own diaspora was once vulnerable on both those counts. We should bear in mind that an analysis of sustainable development, had it existed in the past, might well have saved some of our people from the tragedy we are starting to commemorate.

I chose the title of this speech - cherishing the Irish diaspora - with care. Diaspora, in its meaning of dispersal or scattering, includes the many ways, not always chosen, that people have left this island. To cherish is to value and to nurture and support. If we are honest we will acknowledge that those who leave do not always feel cherished. As Eavan Boland reminds us in her poem "The Emigrant Irish":

"Like oil lamps we put them out the back, Of our houses, of our minds."

To cherish also means that we are ready to accept new dimensions of the diaspora. Many of us over the years - and I as President - have direct experience of the warmth and richness of the Irish-American contribution and tradition, and its context in the hospitality of that country. I am also aware of the creative energies of those born on this island who are now making their lives in the United States and in so many other countries. We need to accept that in their new perspectives may well be a critique of our old ones. But if cherishing the diaspora is to be more than a sentimental regard for those who leave our shores, we should not only listen to their voice and their viewpoint. We have a responsibility to respond warmly to their expressed desire for appropriate fora for dialogue and interaction with us by examining in an open and generous way the possible linkages. We should accept that such a challenge is an education in diversity which can only benefit our society.

Indeed there are a variety of opportunities for co-operation on this island which will allow us new ways to cherish the diaspora. Many of those opportunities can be fruitfully explored by this Oireachtas. Many will be taken further by local communities. Some are already in operation. Let me mention just one example here. One of the most understandable and poignant concerns of any diaspora is to break the silence: to find out the names and places of origin. If we are to cherish them, we have to assist in that utterly understandable human longing. The Irish Genealogical Project, which is supported by both governments, is transferring handwritten records from local registers of births, deaths and marriages, on to computer. It uses modern technology to allow men and women, whose origins are written down in records from Kerry to Antrim, to gain access to them. In the process it provides employment and training for young people in both technology and history. And the recent establishment of a council of genealogical organisations, again involving both parts of this island, shows the potential for voluntary co-operation.

I turn now to those records which are still only being written. No family on this island can be untouched by the fact that so many of our young people leave it. The reality is that we have lost, and continue every day to lose, their presence and their brightness. These young people leave Ireland to make new lives in demanding urban environments. As well as having to search for jobs, they may well find themselves lonely, homesick, unable to speak the language of those around them; and, if things do not work out, unwilling to accept the loss of face of returning home. It hardly matters at that point whether they are graduate or unskilled. What matters is that they should have access to the support and advice they need. It seems to me therefore that one of the best ways to cherish the diaspora is to begin at home. We need to integrate into our educational and social and counselling services an array of skills of adaptation and a depth of support which will prepare them for this first gruelling challenge of adulthood.

The urgency of this preparation, and its outcome, allows me an opportunity to pay tribute to the voluntary agencies who respond with such practical compassion and imagination to the Irish recently arrived in other countries. I have welcomed many of their representatives to Aras an Uachtarain and I have also seen their work in cities such as New York and Melbourne and Manchester, where their response on a day-to-day basis may be vital to someone who has newly arrived. It is hard to overestimate the difference which personal warmth and wise advice, as well as practical support, can make in these situations.

I pay a particular tribute to those agencies in Britain - both British and Irish - whose generous support and services, across a whole range of needs have been recognised by successive Irish governments through the Dion project. These services extend across employment, housing and welfare and make a practical link between Irish people and the future they are constructing in a new environment. Compassionate assistance is given, not simply to the young and newly arrived, but to the elderly, the sick including those isolated by HIV or AIDS, and those suffering hardship through alcohol or drug dependency or who are in prison. Although I think of myself as trying to keep up with this subject, I must say I was struck by the sheer scale of the effort which has been detailed in recent reports published under the auspices of the Federation of Irish Societies. These show a level of concern and understanding which finds practical expression every day through these agencies and gives true depth to the meaning of the word cherish.

When I was a student, away from home, and homesick for my family and my friends and my country, I walked out one evening and happened to go into a Boston newsagent's shop. There, just at the back of the news stand, almost to my disbelief, was The Western People. I will never forget the joy with which I bought it and took it back with me and found, of course, that the river Moy was still there and the Cathedral was still standing. I remember the hunger with which I read the news from home. I know that story has a thousand versions. But I also know it has a single meaning. Part of cherishing must be communication. The journey which an Irish newspaper once made to any point outside Ireland was circumscribed by the limits of human travel. In fact, it replicated the slow human journey through ports and on ships and airplanes. Now that journey can be transformed, through modern on-line communications, into one of almost instantaneous arrival.

We are at the centre of an adventure in human information and communication greater than any other since the invention of the printing press. We will see our lives changed by that. We still have time to influence the process and I am glad to see that we in Ireland are doing this. In some cases this may merely involve drawing attention to what already exists. The entire Radio 1 service of RTE is now transmitted live over most of Europe on the Astra satellite. in North America we have a presence through the Galaxy satellite. There are several internet providers in Ireland and bulletin boards with community databases throughout the island. The magic of E-mail surmounts time and distance and cost. And the splendid and relatively recent technology of the World Wide Web means that local energies and powerful opportunities of access are being made available on the information highway.

The shadow of departure will never be lifted. The grief of seeing a child or other family member leave Ireland will always remain sharp and the absence will never be easy to bear. But we can make their lives easier if we use this new technology to bring the news from home. As a people, we are proud of our story-telling, our literature, our theatre, our ability to improvise with words. And there is a temptation to think that we put that at risk if we espouse these new forms of communication. In fact we can profoundly enrich the method of contact by the means of expression, and we can and should - as a people who have a painful historic experience of silence and absence - welcome and use the noise, the excitement, the speed of contact and the sheer exuberance of these new forms.

This is the second time I have addressed the two Houses of the Oireachtas as provided under the Constitution. I welcome the opportunity it has given me to highlight this important issue at a very relevant moment for us all. The men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story. They have come, either now or in the past, from Derry and Dublin and Cork and Belfast. They know the names of our townlands and villages. They remember our landscape or they have heard of it. They look to us anxiously to include them in our sense of ourselves and not to forget their contribution while we make our own. The debate about how best to engage their contribution with our own has many aspects and offers opportunities for new structures and increased contact.

If I have been able to add something to this process of reflection and to encourage a more practical expression of the concerns we share about our sense of ourselves at home and abroad then I am grateful to have had your attention here today. Finally, I know this Oireachtas will agree with me that the truest way of cherishing our diaspora is to offer them, at all times, the reality of this island as a place of peace where the many diverse traditions in which so many of them have their origins, their memories, their hopes are bound together in tolerance and understanding.

These figures do not include Irishmen entering the United States from Great Britain who were normally counted as "British", nor does it count those who entered (legally or illegally) via Canada.

Related Resources

Finding Your Ancestor's Irish Home
What Does Irish Mean?
So Far From Home
Jeremiah Grady - Unlikely Emigrant

From Other Guides
Helen Selina Sheridan - Poetry
Far From Paddy's Green Shamrock Shore
Capt. Charles Boycott and the Irish Land Question

Elsewhere on the Web
Cobh - The Queenstown Store
Belfast Telegraph on Emigration
Cherishing the Irish Diaspora

Buy This Book
Emigrants and Exile
The Great Shame

"In a speech Mary Robinson delivered to the Oireachtas in 1995 she spoke of the seventy million people of Irish descent throughout the world. Other sources tell us that over six million people emigrated from Ireland from 1848-1950. While there was a five- percent population growth from 1831 to 1841, the growth stopped and there was a steady decline in population into the 20th century. What happened?

It makes sense to look at Irish emigration in at least two distinct groups. Many of the earliest emigrants were Presbyterian Scots-Irish, largely from Ulster. They were often farmers or tradesmen who were looking for a better future, generally with the means to establish themselves in the New World. Among these emigrants were the western Pennsylvania settlers that took part in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Other descendants of these hard-working Scots-Irish would go on to become Presidents of the United States.

In contrast, the Irish Catholic population was so emotionally tied to their families and communities that they did not leave in large numbers until the Potato Famine struck Ireland in the 1840s. Though there had been other regional famines none was as pervasive or dramatic as the blight the one cause by the blight that hit the 1845 potato crop. That famine became the impetus for the start of massive, continuous emigration.

Still, the emigrants did not go gladly. Realizing the departing family members would not likely not be seen again, "American Wakes" were held to send off the emigrants, much as the dead were waked before their burials. In his book, Emigrants and Exiles, Kerby Miller explains the history and exposes the emotions. The vast majority of emigrants left largely not just because they were looking for a better life for themselves and their families, but because they did not see a way to build that better life in the Ireland that was the first British colony. Discriminated against because of their native heritage and religion, restricted in their access to education and economic success, they left Ireland but they did not stop looking back. The emigrants and their descendants held onto an image of what was good on the Irish island. Those pictures live today, even in the souls of those who have never set foot on the island. They are part of the answer to the question "What Does Irish Mean?"

Even after Ireland was independent from Great Britain, the Irish economy wasn't strong and many young Irish men and women left in search of a better life. Happily for Ireland the tide has turned and there is an economic prosperity, known as the "Celtic Tiger" that is not only keeping the Irish at home but drawing many back to live and work.

I would like to use this site as a way for those of us who are descendants of those many Irish emigrants to share their stories. I've started the collection by describing the story of Jeremiah Grady ("O'Grady"). Would you add yours?"

Submitted by: Pat Friend

They are going, going, going from the valleys and the hills
They are leaving far behind them heathery moor and mountain rills,
All the wealth of hawthorn hedges where the brown thrush sways and thrills
They are going, shy-eyed cailins, and lads so straight and tall
From the purple peaks of Kerry, from the crags of wild Imaal,
From the greening plains of Mayo, and the glens of Dangle

They are leaving pleasant places,shores with snowy sands outspread;
Blue and lonely lakes a-stirring when the wind stirs overhead;
Tender living hearts that love them, and the graves of kindred dead
. They shall carry to the distant land a tear-drop in the eye
And some shall go uncomforted, their days an endless sigh
For Kathalen No Houlihan's sad face until they die.

Oh,Kathaleen No Houlihan, your road's a thorny way,
And 'tis a faithful soul would walk on the flints with you for aye,
Would walk the sharp and cruel flints until his locks grew grey,
So some must wander to the East, and some must wander West;
Some seek the white wastes of the North and some a Southern nest;
Yet never shall they sleep so sweet as on your mother breast.

Within the city streets, hot hurried full of care
A sudden dream shall bring them a whiff of Irish air --
A cool air, faintly-scented, blown soft from otherwhere
Oh, the cabins long-deserted! Olden memories awake.
Oh, the pleasant, pleasant places! Hush! the blackbird in the brake!
Oh, the dear and kindly voices! Now their hearts are fain to ache.

And no foreign skies hold beauty like the rainy skies they knew;
Nor any night-wind cool the brow as did the foggy dew.
They are going, going, going and we cannot bid them stay:
Their fields are now the stranger's,where the stranger's cattle stray,
Oh! Kathaleen No Houlihan, your way's a thorny way!

From 1848 - 1950 over 6 million adults and children emigrated from Ireland - over 2.5 million departed from Cobh, making it the single most important port of emigration.

Read about it at the Emigration and Famine Web Site.

The Mississippi River is not the only flooded area in the United States right now. So is the recently opened Ellis Island Web site http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/. It sank under an estimated 10 million hits per day since it was opened to the public on April 17.

Many ROOTSWEB REVIEW and MISSING LINKS readers visited the site only to see the message: "Thank you for your interest in the American Family Immigration History Center. Due to an extraordinary number of visitors, we must limit access to the site. Please keep trying, or check back later."

Seasoned genealogists are not surprised about the popularity of the site; after all, it is estimated that 40 percent of the U.S. population today can trace back to one or more ancestors who came through the Port of New York. The site is a joint effort by the U.S. Park Service, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It offers a searchable records database with 22 million names, covering 71 percent of the immigrants who came through Ellis Island between 1 January 1892, when Ellis Island opened, and December 1924.

However, the Web-hosting firm that handles the site's hardware was astounded at the tidal wave. Its 50-person Hostcentric team worked like levee sandbaggers around the clock to add more servers in order to meet the demand. The system was designed originally to limit the site's usage to 20,000 concurrent users.

The process of extracting these records started in 1993 when the church began the volunteer effort of digitizing them. The process was completed in late 2000. It took 12,000 volunteer church members from 2,700 congregations in the U.S. and Canada approximately 5.6 million hours to complete the entries. The church also devoted 100 full-time volunteers to work on the project. They compared the original microfilms to extracted data and made corrections as needed.

The names were taken from the microfilm of New York passenger arrival manifests. They include aliens, U.S. citizens, crew members, nonimmigrant aliens, deportees, and those who literally missed the boat. Information usually includes: traveler names, name of vessel, ports of departure, ports of arrival, and dates of arrival. Other recorded information pertains to age, sex, marital status, nationality, name of relative or friend outside the United States, name of relative inside the U.S., exact birth date, and place of birth. An average of 15 information columns were used in the early years of Ellis Island, while up to 36 columns of facts were collected in the later years.

The painstaking work performed by the church's volunteers included deciphering almost impossible-to-read microfilms and photocopies. They scrutinized century-old handwriting, and hand-copied and typed isolated pieces of information that were originally recorded by multiple scribes, who took it down from people of different nationalities speaking different languages.

"This was a fairly sizeable project," says Wayne J. Metcalfe, director of the Field Services and Support Division of the Family and Church History Department. Sizeable is right. If stacked flat, the 3,678 boxes of microfilms examined by these volunteers would exceed three times the height of the Statue of Liberty, from the hem of her robe to the top of her torch.

The church originally purchased microfilm copies of the passenger lists from the National Archives. "This seven-year project tested the persistence and best extraction skills of our church-member volunteers but was most certainly worth the effort," says Metcalfe.

"The end result is a database which will allow as many as 100 million living descendants of U.S. immigrants to find information about their ancestors or confirm their ancestors' first steps on the land of their hopes and dreams."

Of course, first the technicians have to finish with the sandbagging so you can access the site. Use of FamilySearch.org, which was launched by the church on 24 May 1999, far exceeded predications also, with an average of approximately 9 million hits per day and more than 5 billion hits total.

You can read stories about some who have been successful in accessing the Ellis Island site, and in the meanwhile, keep on trying, particularly in non-peak hours.

Finding Grandma Cel

Tracing Roots Online: Ellis Island's Arrivals List

Surfing Ellis Island's Immigration Records

Written by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG [email protected].. Previously published by Julia M. Case and Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG, Missing Links, Vol. 6, No. 17, 25 April 2001. RootsWeb: https://sites.rootsweb.com/