On January 1, 1892, the immigration station at Ellis Island opened for the first time. The first ship to dock was the SS Nevada, carrying immigrants from Ireland, England, and Germany. The first person to pass through the new facility — to be processed, registered, and admitted to the United States of America — was a fifteen-year-old girl from County Cork.
Her name was Annie Moore.
She had travelled with her two younger brothers, Philip and Anthony. Their parents had emigrated years earlier and were waiting for them in New York. Annie had been appointed by the ship’s officers to lead the party, which may have been kindness, may have been protocol, or may have been because she was the oldest and seemed the most capable.
The superintendent of the immigration station gave her a ten-dollar gold coin to mark the occasion. Annie Moore became the first of more than twelve million people who would pass through Ellis Island over the following thirty years.
What happened to her afterwards is a story that took historians a long time to get right. For decades, the official account confused her with another Annie Moore who had lived a very different life in Texas. The real Annie Moore married a bakery worker named Joseph Schayer in New York City. She had eleven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. She died in 1924, never wealthy, never famous, her significance to American history apparently unknown even to herself.
Statues of her now stand at both Ellis Island and at Cobh in County Cork, where she boarded the ship. They face each other across the Atlantic.
