Annie’s iconic immigrant tale rewritten

RESEARCHERS have reportedly discovered the true descendants of an Irish girl who was the first person to pass through New York’s historic Ellis Island immigration centre.

Annie Moore, who was celebrating her 15th birthday on the day she arrived from Co Cork in 1892, is immortalised in bronze statues in New York Harbour and Cobh.

The famous story goes that she was bustled ahead of a burly German by her two younger brothers and another Irishman who shouted “Ladies first” as they disembarked from the steamship Nevada on January 1, and ended up being the first of 12 million immigrants to set foot on the island.

For decades the rest of the frequently repeated tale has been that she went to Texas and she married a descendant of the Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell.

She was said to have died aged 46 in a tragic accident, when she fell under the wheels of a streetcar.

The story has gained such recognition that descendants of the Annie Moore who died in Texas have been invited to ceremonies on Ellis Island and in Ireland over the years.

But now a genealogist says history may have followed the wrong iconic Annie, because the real one actually stayed in Manhattan, the New York Times has reported.

Genealogist Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak claims the young woman settled in the Lower East Side, married a bakery clerk and had 11 children.

While she lived a poor immigrant’s life, many of her descendants prospered.

Annie is apparently buried with six of her children (five infants and one who survived to 21) in a Queens cemetery.

Her living descendants include great-grandchildren, a great-nephew and a great-niece, the New York Times said. One is an investment counsellor and another has a PhD.

Ms Smolenyak Smolenyak’s suspicions about where Annie really got to were aroused when she checked records and found that the woman who died instantly when struck by a streetcar near Fort Worth in 1923 had actually been born in Illinois.

She managed to trace that Moore family to Texas as early as 1880.

The genealogist offered a $1,000 reward on the internet for information about Annie, which yielded results from a “handful of history geeks”, and teamed up with New York’s commissioner of records Brian Andersson to carry out her detective work.

It was Mr Andersson who found Annie’s brother Phillip’s naturalisation certificate. He was listed in the 1930 census with a daughter Anna, who was in the social security death index.

Her son is Annie’s great-nephew, who Ms Smolenyak Smolenyak found in the phone book.

She said Edward Wood, a New Jersey plumbing contractor who is descended from the Texas Annie Moore, has said he was disappointed but not “heartbroken” to hear the news about his ancestry.

Ms Smolenyak Smolenyak said of the real Annie: “She sacrificed herself for future generations.”