Her two younger brothers elbovad her ahead of a burly German. A longshoreman shouted, "Ladies first." As a result, Annie Moore was presented with a ten-dollar gold coin and immortalized as the first immigrant to set foot on Ellis Island, on her fifteenth birthday, January 1, 1892.The arrival was accurately reported, as was her gracious response to the gold piece presented by the nation's superintendent of immigration as the federal government assumed responsibility for supervising the influx of foreigners (before then, it was left largely to the states; New York welcomed them, more or less, at Castle Garden, in what is now Battery Park).The true story of Annie Moore was discovered by genealogist Megan Smolenyak. Smolenyak (a genealogist's dream, she married a previously unrelated Smolenyak) teamed up with Brian G. Anderson, the New York City commissioner of records, to discover the iconic Moore in 2006.Disembarking from steerage after twelve days on the steamship Nevada from Cobh, Ireland, Annie joined her parents, who had arrived several years earlier, in a five-story brick tenement at 32 Monroe Street in Manhattan. She later moved to a nearby apartment on the Bowery. Annie's father was a longshoreman. She married a bakery clerk. They had at least eleven children. Five survived to adulthood and three had children of their own. She died of heart failure in 1924 at forty seven. Her brother Anthony, who arrived with Annie, died in his twenties in the Bronx and was temporarily buried in a potter's field.Annie lived and died within a few square blocks on the Lower East Side, where some of her descendants resided until recently. She is buried alongside the famous and forgotten in a Queens cemetery. Though she lived a poor immigrant's life, many of her descendants, who include an investment counselor and a PhD, prospered. "She sacrificed herself for future generations," Smolenyak said, describing Moore's descendants as "poster children" for immigrant America, with Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Scandinavian surnames. "It's an all-American family," she said, "Annie would have been proud." As one guidebook says: "Annie Moore came to America bearing little more than her dreams; she stayed to help build a country enriched by diversity."TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
