Re: Poland to the united states
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In reply to:
Re: Poland to the united states
Hugh Ornduff 12/08/07
The ship manifest makes no reference him being German!All the manifest indicates is that his native country was Germany.And in those days Germany included part of the old Polish Empire (now western Poland)In fact NO ship manifest uses the word ethnicity, but the transcribers for some reason chose this term, which has led to some confusion.Early manifests, such as this one in question used a column for "country of citizenship" and "native country", later manifests had one column labeled "Nationality" which by the definition found at the bottom of many manifests was simply the "country of citizenship" then later manifests added another column denoting the immigrants "Race or People", which by definition was "language spoken of people from which the immigrant sprang" (gotta love this old terminology!) This latter term is what we would call ethnicity today.
Robert Jerin
Croatian Heritage Museum
Cleveland Ohio