Looks like Steve Morse has done it again. I just visited his Ellis Island
Jewish-Passenger website and discovered that he has incorporated the ability
to sort the text version of the manifest by line numbers.
The Ellis Island folks used to sort it that way initially (that
certainly makes the most sense) but many months ago they made a change
and the passengers are now displayed in a random order. For the life of
me, I can't understand why they did that.

What Steve has done (the work was actually done by a computer genius in
Switzerland -- Yves Goulnik) is to intercept the text manifest that the
Ellis Island site sends back and re-sort it so that the passengers are
in the right order.

To see this in action, go to Steve's Jewish-passenger search form:

http://home.pacbell.net/spmorse/ellis/ellisjw.html

and do a search. When you get the results you'll see a link that says
"text manifest" and another that says "text manifest (sorted)".
Clicking on the first link gives the text manifest that the Ellis Island
site created and the second link gives Yves' rearrangement of the
manifest.

So far this only works if you access the text manifest starting from
Steve's blue (Jewish Passenger) search form. But when I asked about
that, Steve said that Yves is currently looking into extending that to
work with the white (all passenger) search form as well.

If you have any questions regarding this new feature, please send your
inquiries directly to Steve Morse as I have no expertise or any information
about it.

Good luck!

Diane Jacobs
New York