This webinar was given on 8 July 2020 as part of a lecture series for JewishGen. There was such a crowd, that many people were not able to see the presentation. Therefore I start my YouTube presentation with what they missed, as JewishGen has also put on YouTube the talk with video of my introduction and ending questions, but both of us lack a component of the live talk. That is, I ran a narrated self running powerpoint presentation, with my presenter window used for showing live, a number of exhibits. I show a list of those exhibits, many of them shown as static slides on the narrated presentation. This webinar is a combination of two of my interests: how to find difficult immigrants on degraded manifests, and the Ellis Island Name Change Myth. Topics I cover here include the immigration history of this New York Harbor Station; the name change belief, three shipping line documents which are the manifest, inspection card, and the landing tag; and then Book Indexes and WPA cards and how to use them. I pay attention to surnames on these documents, when and where they were created, and the nature of changes we see. I argue that most manifest changes were made by the shipping company after the manifest was created, and before the Inspectors at Ellis Island took possession of the document. Viewers can read more about these topics by finding my InfoFiles on the subjects at Jewishgen.org in the Immigration/Emigration section and the Names section. Errata: Barbara Vitkiene’s Landing Tag’s last instruction line on the back is Yiddish, not Hebrew.

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