Nostalgia - Living Archive
Exhibit No. 2Ellis Island: The Families Who Arrived
Between 1905 and 1914, the families passing through Ellis Island were photographed by the registry clerk in the clothes they arrived in: parish dress, bridal crowns, kilts, greatcoats. They had crossed an ocean toward family already in America, or with the family they could bring. Almost none of their names were written down. This wall shows sixteen of them, and asks the question their archive never answered.
Three women from Guadeloupe, circa 1905 to 1914, the main building rising behind them. Among the most reproduced portraits Augustus Sherman ever made; their names were never recorded. Public domain, via the New York Public Library.
The same app, pointed at the public record
This is not a mockup. It is a live archive in Nostalgia, built with the same scanning, restoring and exhibit tools every family gets, and it doubles as our own hardest product test.
Sixteen portraits from the public record
Augustus Sherman was the chief registry clerk at Ellis Island and photographed arriving and detained immigrants from 1905 to 1920. Every photograph here is public domain, from the New York Public Library's collection via Wikimedia Commons and DPLA, with photographer, date and licensing basis pinned per photo before anything was uploaded.
Plaques that only say what is known
Sherman's captions recorded costumes and countries, almost never names. We wrote each plaque from the archival record and stopped where it stops. Thirteen of these sixteen plaques ask the honest question instead: who is this? No record answers it.
Four names, recovered
Wilhelm Schleich, a miner from Hohenpeissenberg. Reverend Joseph Vasilon, a Greek Orthodox priest. Thumbu Sammy, aged seventeen, off the S.S. Adriatic on April 14, 1911, filed as 'Hindoo boy' for a century until a captioned duplicate print gave his name back. And one family, the Romes of Serbia, whose surname survived the same way. Recovered names get real plaques; the wall keeps score.
Shown as the archive survives
These scans are clean and the faces are strong, so the originals hang unrestored. The app's repair lane is for damaged photographs; a museum's first duty is to the photograph it actually has.
Every photograph, accounted for
All sixteen photographs are by Augustus Francis Sherman (1865–1925), public domain, from the New York Public Library's William Williams papers, sourced via Wikimedia Commons and the Digital Public Library of America. Named identifications follow the NYPL record and Peter Mesenhöller's catalogue Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905–1920. The full per-photo manifest, including licensing basis and archive references, is public in our repository.
Thirteen plaques on this wall are still asking. If your family passed through Ellis Island and kept its photographs, the faces in your shoebox looked like this once. If you recognise a costume, a village, a face, tell us on the exhibit itself.