Ellis Island

I decided to start with the Ellis Island information at http://www.ellisisland.org/ with a simple search by typing in Ivan Mamyshoff, with Ivan being the Russian name for John. Many last names came up with matches by sound, so I started with the top five. Amazingly, the first one looked to be a match, way to go Ellis Island search engine!

The name is Iwan Mamiszew. I read somewhere that the spellings reflected German phonetics, with the "w" being a "v". This Iwan is listed as arriving on December 29, 1910 on the ship Campanello from Rotterdam, Holland. Pulling up his record, he is listed as age 32 from Lechowiec, Russia. Looking on the ship's manifest, he is 5'8" with gray hair. His destination is listed as Massachusetts. His number on the manifest is line 28.

On his line, it says he has $225. That would be quite a bit of money.

The image of the manifest is difficult to read, it will take me some time to interpret the handwriting style. I will order the hard copies of pages 97 and 98.

Good news! The manifest requires who and where the passenger is going, as well as his father's name. More clues.

I noticed two other passengers from Lechowiec: Philip Bondar, 19, and Lawrenti Puczenczuk, 26 . He came over with friends?? Lots of Russians on board with many of them going to Boston. Must have been a community there; will check that out, too.

Now I have a conflict. The family story is that he came over on the Olympic, one of the 3 big ships of the White Star Line, with the doomed sister ship Titanic. However, Olympic's maiden voyage looks to be in 1911 from England and France. I looked at the passenger list and didn't see any Russians, while the Campanello had lots. Plus, I was told he was born in 1889, which would make him 21 or 22 in 1910 rather than 32. This Iwan had grey hair. Hmmmm.

Will make some family inquiries. All of the information seems to match except age and ship.