This post is personal. It is about my grandmother, a school trip I took when I was twelve, and a statewide tragedy. It is also about who we are as people, products of our genetics and our environment. Ruth Bruss was born in Ohio in 1927, married Beniamino Aristides Fondi (the first of his family not born in Naples) in 1948, and gave birth to my mom Mary, the second of seven kids, in 1950. My mom moved to South Jersey in the 1970s, married my dad Steven Richard Fox (whose grandfather had immigrated from the Pale of Settlement in Poland as a child in the 1890s only to return to Europe as a soldier during WWI), and I was born a few years later in the small bayside town of Somers Point that I still call home In the early 1990s Somers Point sent all its seventh graders on a field trip to North Jersey to visit Ellis Island as part of a Social Studies genealogy lesson, as well as the nearby Liberty Science Center to learn about the natural world hands-on. For many including myself this was a chance to search for the name of a relative who had entered the nation at Ellis Island, though I have my doubts if any of the Sam Foxes I saw were really my Great-Grandfather. Until I went again last week, I had not been to Ellis Island in over twenty years. In that time I studied immigration history in college and grad school, became interested in patterns of settlement in American cities, and eventually taught Urban Public Policy courses dealing with ethnic neighborhoods in Atlantic City. The impact of Hurricane Sandy (I’ll never call it a ‘Superstorm’) in 2012 forever changed these neighborhood dynamics, causing families to move from enclaves up and down the coast of New Jersey and Long Island. As I recently learned, Sandy also affected Ellis Island.
I went back to Ellis Island because of a Christmas present from my girlfriend, an Ancestry.com DNA test that part of me secretly hoped would show that I was a distant descendant of Genghis Khan. After following the fairly simple directions and sending my saliva sample away to be centrifuged, a few weeks later I received my results and while I am not related to any infamous historical conquerors, I was intrigued enough by the data to want to learn more about my family heritage by visiting Ellis Island, and by calling my Grandma. A mere half-hour on the phone provided me answers to what had seemed like anomalous results: while I’d anticipated testing out as about half Eastern European Jewish and about a quarter Southern Italian, I’d been surprised not only by my approximately 14% Western European blood (explained away by the fact that my Great-Great-Grandfather Ferdinand Bruss met and married a Dutch woman who had come from a village but a short distance from the northeastern German city of his own birth) but by the rest of the breakdown. For example, while I had known that I am part Gypsy, I had not realized that my Great-Great-Grandfather Novak was also Slovakian, which checks out with the ‘genetic math’ my DNA test revealed. The biggest mystery, which may forever remain unresolved, is why I seem to have approximately the same percentage of DNA from a Scandinavian background (which came as a complete shock) as from an Irish background (given that my Great-Great-Grandmother Kean was proud to hail from County Mayo). One possible explanation is that Swedish raiders a millennium ago settled in that area of Ireland and married into the local population, a narrative not all that far removed from the current season arc of the History Channel series The Vikings, yet absent a time machine I’ll never know. Hoping to possibly reconstruct a part of my immigrant ancestors’ stories, I recently revisited Ellis Island.
When I first visited Ellis Island in the early 1990s my guide was my seventh grade Social Studies teacher, one of my favorite instructors who also coached my middle-school Think Day Team, and my main goal was to make a rubbing of the inscribed name of Sam Fox (or Sam Fuchs Fox or Samuel Fox as all are equally possible). While I was then more focused on the many walls of immigrant names, I recall being fascinated by numerous colorful maps and graphs charting the narrative of American immigration history, while it seemed school groups completing projects continue to constitute a large percentage of visitors. Moreover, when I recently revisited the site I was taken by the degree to which newer exhibits sought to problematize optimistic narratives by highlighting some of the medical, educational, economic and other hurdles that could stand in the way of a would-be immigrant successfully entering the United States. Indeed, the focus on those who crossed an ocean only to be denied entry because of their being deemed somehow undesirable, as well as the recent unearthing and preservation of century old graffiti that reveals much about the mindset of those waiting to learn their fate, reminded me of interpretation at Angel Island in San Francisco, where they work hard to educate visitors that it was not at all an Ellis Island of the West. Another new addition that stood out to me (especially given its location immediately adjacent to ‘the kissing post’) is the the American Family Immigration History Center, which offers to aid visitors (either in person or online) in finding out more about their personal heritage, albeit for a price. The young, tattooed genealogist I spoke with informed me that the center has been there since the late 1990s and is affiliated with the non-profit Ellis Island Foundation rather than the National Park Service.
Most visitors must actually work with yet another NPS partner in order to tour Ellis Island, as the only way to get to the museum is by ferry. Indeed, Liberty Cruises also offers a ‘Hard Hat Tour’ of Ellis Island that is (according to the Park Ranger I spoke with) the only way to get to visit those parts of the island (such as the hospital buildings and laundry) that technically belong to New Jersey rather than New York because they were built on landfill rather than the smaller original footprint of the island that can be easily seen in an upstairs exhibit. Nearby that exhibit on the growth of the island over two centuries is another that discusses the changing nature of landscapes along the coast, a temporary photo display that examines the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the shores of New York and New Jersey as well as Ellis Island itself. Indeed, more than two years after the storm many photos and artifacts remain in storage because they cannot be safely relocated back to their display cases due to the continuing climate control issues that are easily noticeable to visitors, as some rooms seemed sweltering while others were chilly. It is to the credit of the NPS that they embraced this crisis head on as an opportunity to both explore the relationships among environmental issues and public history concerns AND to provide a possible model for ways that historic sites can better integrate immediately socially relevant but nontraditional exhibits. And, since I lost my car and watched my neighbors turned into refugees by Sandy after piling their salt-soaked belongings onto our lawn, its one NPS exhibit I won’t soon forget. As I said, this post is personal.