Grandma Lillie Was Born in Liverpool, England – that’s
pretty much all that I knew about my paternal grandmother’s childhood, and that fact always
struck me as interesting as I grew up in the Beatles era. But how did she come
to be born there instead of Austria or Hungary like most of my grand- and great
grandparents?
From her birth record
I discovered that Grandma Lillie was born May 10, 1902 as Laura Bund to parents
Moritz Bund and Tony Schneider.
Her parents had stopped in England for a few years on
their way to the United States. I learned this was not an uncommon practice, most
likely to earn money for their passage to the U.S. Most of the Jewish
immigrants from the United Kingdom were not actually British but “transmigrants”
who made England their temporary home before they continued their migration to
the United States.1 Lillie’s parents traveled
as Moses and Toni Bund from the port of Hamburg to London in August 1901. The Hamburg
passenger list allowed me to learn the family originated from the town of
Lemberg which at the time was part of the Galicia area of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and is currently known as L’viv in Ukraine.
I found out the street where they were living at the
time of Laura’s birth, Sun Street, no longer exists. But here’s an overlay showing where the
street used to be, before getting swallowed up by the University of Liverpool:
Later on they lived on Pleasant Street, where Laura’s
brother Jacob was born in 1904.
Morris immigrated to the U.S. in 1904 and 3 year old
"Leah" arrived with her mother and baby brother Jacob in August 1905. I wonder if
little Leah spoke with a British accent! Though I imagine she didn’t interact
with the Brits much and was home with her mother speaking mostly Yiddish. The
1910 U.S. Federal Census shows they all spoke Yiddish.
 |
| S.S. Noordland, c Ancestry.com |
Here is Leah’s
actual inspection card which indicated she was vaccinated and that she passed daily
health inspections during the voyage.
Morris, Tillie and children all immigrated via
Philadelphia. I wonder why they didn’t go through Ellis Island since New York
City was their ultimate destination. Maybe the ticket was less expensive or
maybe they thought it would be less crowded. It was actually a longer trip: the
voyage from Europe to Philadelphia is 200 miles longer than the journey to New
York.2 (And then they still had to make their way to NYC).
Upon arriving at the
Philadelphia port, immigrants first disembarked at a quarantine facility that
checked for contagious diseases. This is where that health inspection card likely
came in handy. The immigrants then continued up the Delaware River to Pier 53’s
Washington Avenue Immigration Station, which was the final destination to enter
the U.S.3
I realized I didn’t have an electronic copy of Leah’s
ship manifest, so I searched on ancestry.com. I not only found the manifest,
but was surprised to see a record from a collection called “Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, Immigration Records, Special Boards of Inquiry, 1893-1909.” I
went back to the manifest and noticed the initials “SI” in the margin next to the family’s
names.
The SI indicates they were being held for Special
Inquiry which required a hearing. It seems this hearing was held because the
mother was traveling alone and had no apparent means of supporting herself and
her children. Text of the hearing transcript:
I’m guessing “Has ticket” means she had a train ticket
for her and the children to travel to NYC. The immigration station was built and
owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which would have made it easy for
immigrants to board nearby trains for destinations throughout the U.S. 4
So Sonny (Toni/Tillie) and her children were granted entry to the U.S. and they
joined Morris in NYC.
This was a roundabout but hopefully interesting way of
saying that even though my paternal grandmother Lillian Bund was born in
Liverpool, I do not have any British ancestry!
1 Joseph, Samuel. 1914 Jewish Immigration to the United
States, from 1881 to 1910, Volume 59, Issue 4. Books.google.com, accessed
2/16/2018.
2 http://www2.hsp.org/exhibits/Balch%20resources/phila_ellis_island.html 3 https://philly.curbed.com/2017/1/30/14437958/washington-avenue-green-pier-53-immigration-history
