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US Immigration

Grandfather: Maurice Wanamaker

Zoë wanted to find out more about the life of Sam's father Maurice. She believed that Sam had inherited many of his political beliefs, and wanted to know more about the circumstances that brought him from eastern Europe to America. The first step was to go to Chicago, where Maurice and his wife Molly had lived for many years.

Step 1

She headed for Chicago's Newberry Library, the city's centre of genealogical research. In the early 1900s, around the time when Maurice would have arrived, Chicago was an exploding industrial city attracting immigrants from across Europe. Zoë looked at the 1920 US Census for any trace of Maurice, searching under the family's original name, Wattenmaker. They found Maurice listed as a married man with a young family. The census stated that he had come from Russia in 1910, aged 15. Zoë wanted to find out more details about his arrival.

Step 2

Zoë had discovered the names of her great-grandparents, and that her grandfather's original name was Manes. The record also revealed that the family was bound for Chicago, the home of Manes's brother Nathan, who had also paid for their passage. Zoë found out that the Wattenmakers were tailors, and that they had come from a town called Nikolaev, formerly in Russia, now in Ukraine.

Step 3

Zoë wanted to know more about the family's experience of travelling from one continent to another. She met specialist expert Dominic Pacyga at the Hull-House Museum. Dominic described how the family would have travelled in a horse drawn wagon from their home town to a railway. They continued by train and by foot through the Austro-Hungarian empire to the port of Antwerp.

After an arduous Atlantic crossing, the family would have faced a medical examination at the quayside. If they were deemed unfit for entry to north America, they would be put back on the boat. Dominic had found records of the family on arrival in St John showing that they had all been hospitalised there for a while, but had not been sent back to Europe.

Step 4

Zoë then received a package from her cousin Marc Wanamaker, who had found something in his family archive. It was a typed account of Maurice's early life that Maurice had written in middle age.

The garment workers had no specific union to represent them, and although the wider labour movement initially supported them with food vouchers, it soon deserted them. Eventually the garment workers had to return to work without their demands being met, but in the long term, their protest contributed to the regulation of manufacturing and the formation of their own union. Zoë had discovered the roots of her own father's socialism in Maurice's activism back in 1910.

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