Ellis Island

The first person through the door, on New Year's Day 1892, was Annie Moore, seventeen, from County Cork. Over the next sixty-two years about twelve million people followed her — roughly one in three Americans alive today has an ancestor among them.

Most were processed in a few hours. About two per cent were sent back, usually for illness or for being thought likely to need public support, and the stairs up to the Great Hall were watched by doctors marking coats in chalk. The building stood derelict for thirty years and reopened as a museum in 1990.