Even though it didn't open until 1892, forty percent of all Americans (150 million) have at least one ancestor who came through Ellis Island. This gateway to the New World has always been equated with the immigrant spirit in our minds, but in recent years, the launch of the Wall of Honor, the revamping of the facilities, and the efforts of the American Family Immigration Center have made Ellis Island an even more compelling site - both physically and online - for genealogists:

• Ellis Island home page:
  http://www.ellisisland.org/



• Ellis Island's Wall of Honor. See if one of your immigrant ancestors has perhaps been listed by a distant cousin:
  http://www.wallofhonor.com/



• Selected Images of Ellis Island and Immigration, ca. 1880-1920, from the Collections of the Library of Congress:
  http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/070_immi.html



• Images of Ellis Island from the UCR/California Museum of Photography:
  http://cmp1.ucr.edu/exhibitions/immigration_id.html



• Student and educator-prepared site with an overview of immigration and particularly of Ellis Island:
  http://library.thinkquest.org/20619/Eihist.html



• Cyndi's List of Ellis Island-related sites:
  http://www.CyndisList.com/immigrat.htm#Ellis



• For insight into the immigrant experience, visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum:
  http://www.tenement.org/



• American Family Immigration Center - an ambitious project gathering information on the more than 17 million people who immigrated through New York from 1892-1924, the peak years of Ellis Island processing. These port records documents are, for the first time, being digitized and entered into an electronic database for easy access. For a nominal fee, visitors to the Center will have the opportunity to receive a printout of their family's data as well as a scanned reproduction of the original ship's manifest on which their ancestor's entry appears, and a picture of the ship on which they arrived. The first phase of the Center is planned to be completed in 2001. Future plans call for making the Immigrant Arrival Records accessible via the Internet, and expanding the database to include additional years and ports of entry:
  http://www.ellisisland.org/