Angel Island is holding its Family History /Reunion Day on Saturday July 11,
2015 at the U.S. Immigration Station
( http://www.aiisf.org/about/events/1048-family-history-2015 ).

There will be researchers (both in person and by video) there for
a number of ethnic groups including Jewish, Chinese, Japanese,
Russian, Korean, Indian and Filipino.

The program begins at 11:30 AM but the open house starts at 11:00
AM. Genealogists including >from Ancestry.com will be there until 3:00 p.m.
One of the presenters will be the son of Rosa GINSBERG, an immigrant fleeing
Nazi-controlled Austria who entered through Angel Island. Her story may be
read at: http://tinyurl.com/o39rc5h
Original url:
http://aiisf.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&Itemid=132&id=830:Ginsberg%20%28Guensberg%29 .
There is a modest $5.00 entrance fee.

Angel Island is known as "Ellis Island" of the West. It was constructed in
1905 as a detention center designed to control the flow of Chinese into the
U.S. as they were not welcome to the country due to the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882. (This immigration quota system was abolished by the Immigration
Act of 1965, which brought every nationality onto the same immigration
system.)

But the Chinese were not the only immigrants who entered the U.S.
through Angel Island located in the San Francisco Bay (CA) area. It began
operating in 1910, processing 1 million immigrants >from 84 different
countries. The majority of immigrants processed on Angel Island were from
Asian countries, specifically China, Japan, Russia and South Asia (in that
order). Jewish immigrants were >from Russia escaping the Russian Revolution
and those escaping the holocaust in the 1930s-1940s.

Today it is a museum. It does not have immigration records unlike
Ellis Island. Those records are housed at the National Archives. The
Immigration Service departed the island in 1941 returning the property
to the U.S. Army. During WWII it became a prisoner of war processing
center for German and Japanese prisoners before they were sent to
permanent POW camps. To read more about Angel Island's history go to:
http://angelisland.org/history/united-states-immigration-station-usis/
[or http://tinyurl.com/lh6t9wg - MODERATOR]

Thank you to Janice Sellers and her Ancestral Discoveries blog for alerting
us to Family History /Reunion Day.

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee