In thinking about this topic, I turned to my favorite life-story writing teacher, Lois Daniel, who wrote How To Write Your Own Life Story.

In it Lois talks about writing about our ancestors. I believe it is true what she says in the book about Americans in general not knowing too much about their grandparents and great-grandparents. We are a here-and-now society and our immediate families and companions compel our attention.

But there may be a time, when, for whatever reason, our thoughts or those of our families turn to questions about our heritage. At that time, we may want to know and explore more about the world in which our ancestors lived. Lois advises that one way to begin this is to ask older family members to write one story and then perhaps more, so that we can begin to build a picture. I have written about my grandmother. But I know very little about her mother, whom we called Busia (pronounced busha), which means grandmother in Polish. There was a picture of Busia in the Milwaukee Journal, standing in a celery field in the late 1800’s. The field was probably where city streets are today. No one in the family knows where that picture went.

I wondered about how Busia came to America, what kind of ship she came on, and where they went when they first got here.

A couple of years ago, I visited Ellis Island and got the tour with the headset. It was an experience I will never forget. They included the voices and sounds of crowds of people so that when I was listening, I really got a taste of what it might have sounded like and felt like, to the degree that I could imagine it at all. There were all these people crowded into a large hall, the city of New York they could see out the window.

That was their goal.

Yet they were in this room standing in vast lines after their long journey by sea, waiting to be told, “yes,” or “no” that they could proceed to meet their sponsor, or that they could not proceed because of illness or for some other reason and that they would have to make the long journey back to where they came from. In some cases a parent would have to leave young children with the sponsor and return back across the sea.