Jacket's Island

Tracing your family tree is fun. I remember back in 2001 when Ellis Island first came online, and the many fun hours of sitting up at 2 in the morning on the West coast, hoping in vain that the schmucks in New York hadn't woken up yet and those damn servers would finally let me in. In the years since I've probably found well over 50 relatives, and it's always a learning experience- like finding out that the reason I couldn't find g.g.aunt Yetta ("Yache") was that some moron in Southampton had written her name as "Jacket" (damn anti-semitic shipping clerks).

Anyway, I was trying to figure out what else I could do to justify my $30-monthly Ancestry.com subscription, and I discovered that Ancestry lets you look up pictures of the ships your relatives came in on (and save them to your hard drive along with the manifests, thereby giving a giant finger to the Ellis Island foundation, which makes you pay but whose website is free). Take that, Ellis Island! The ghosts of my illiterate, smallpox-ridden ancestors are finally taking revenge, and they're doing it in Yiddish. That'll teach you to detain all single women under suspicion of being prostitutes. (Poor Jacket.)

So I looked up the ship that my g.g.uncle Lev used to go from Liverpool to New York. And this is what they came up with.


Wow, and that was first class. It's times like this you really appreciate all those sacrifices and stuff. Thanks for coming to the grand-ol' melting pot, 16 great-grandparents. Without you, there'd be no me, and that would really affect my posting schedule.