Two thousand index cards of Jewish immigrant families to Galveston, Texas, (1907–14) repose at the Central Zionist Archives (CZA) in Jerusalem. They are part of a collection of documents generated by the Galveston Plan, a project of the Jewish Territorialism Organization (ITO) to shift Jewish immigrants from cities on the eastern U.S. seaboard to less populated communities of the American Midwest. Israel Zangwill, president of ITO, and philanthropist Jacob Schiff spearheaded the project, which had emigrants sail from Bremen, Germany, to Galveston, Texas. Written in English, this is the only CZA record collection that does not relate to the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Each card has nine categories of information:

• Name of the immigrant, with age in parentheses
• Name of wife, with age in parentheses
• Trade
• Place of origin
• Date of sailing, with ship name in parentheses
• Where settled
• Number in Bremen manifest
• Names of children, with ages in parentheses
• Remarks by immigration agent

One example that illustrates the data on the cards is the immigration of Moische Mangut, a 35-year-old tailor. He had a wife, Chaje, age 35, and children: Ester Lea, age 9, Scheine Malka, age 6, and Perl Golde, age 3. His place of origin was Warsaw, and he set sail from Bremen on August 7, 1913, on the steamship Cassel. His departure for the U.S. was listed on Bremen manifest number 679, lines 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Unfortunately, a note on the “where settled” line indicates that this immigrant was deported, along with his family, on the grounds that he had poor physique, arteriosclerosis, flat chest and malnutrition.

A second example is the immigration card of Chaja Marguliss, age 40. Her place of origin was “Luck, Wolynia,” and her planned departure date was “29 Jan 14.” However, a line crossing out the date indicates that her departure was cancelled, and a note on the next line states “money returned March 1914.” The remarks line indicates that she planned to join her husband in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The amount of information on the cards is inconsistent. Of the seven index cards that I examined, only one (Chaja Marguliss) listed the immigrant’s specific town of origin. The other cards noted only the name of the province (e.g., Warsaw, Lublin, Witebsk). Some cards lacked the name of the ship; some included the ship but omitted the Bremen manifest number. Most of the cards noted where the immigrant settled. Occasionally, a card yielded a bonanza of data, including detailed remarks.

Most of the collection consists of correspondence about financial matters from the Galveston Plan information bureau. Gur Alroey (in an article for the American Jewish Archives Journal, Vol. LVI) summarizes the immigration process that is reflected in the ITO documents held at the CZA. He notes:

To carry out the Galveston Plan, three information bureaus were established—one in Kiev, in charge of recruiting emigrants and sending them to the port of departure; a second in Bremen, Germany, (the port of departure for Galveston) for which the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden (Relief organization of German Jews), under the supervision of Dr. Paul Nathan, was responsible; and the third at Galveston port itself, in charge of dispersing newcomers to other locations.

Each bureau handled one phase of the program, and Zangwill, from his residence in London, and Schiff, in the United States, supervised the process as a whole. Only the bureau in Kiev was under the direct supervision of the ITO. The other offices reported to their immediate supervisors—the Bremen bureau to Paul Nathan and the Galveston bureau to Jacob Schiff. The Kiev bureau (the Jewish Emigration Company) was headed by its president, Max Mandelstamm, and its secretary, David Jochelmann. They had agents—nearly one hundred in 1912—throughout the Pale of Settlement to persuade potential emigrants that west was better than east. Recruiting them was extremely difficult. Nevertheless, within about seven years, the ITO managed to enlist eight thousand people and send them to the port of Galveston, Texas.

Folder A36 95/B includes a list in Yiddish of immigrants, compiled by the Judische Emigrations—Gesellschaft (Jewish Emigration Company) in Kiev, for the month of September 1909. It contains six columns of information:

• Name and surname
• Place of origin
• Place of settlement in America
• Occupation in Russia
• Occupation in America
• Weekly earnings

Line number 6 shows that Gedalya Novogrodzky, from the town of “Vishkov, Varshaver guberniya” (Wyszków, Warsaw province), settled in Minneapolis. In Russia, he had no occupation; in America, he worked as a shoemaker earning six dollars per week.

I found only two pages of this type of list in the folders I examined, but other file folders may include additional lists. Further research should be done to see if duplicates of these files exist in contemporary American or Ukrainian archives. Because the place of origin given in these files generally is more specific than what appears on the index cards for immigrants, we can conclude that these lists probably were not the documents used as the basis for the card index collection.

Not directly relevant, but fascinating nevertheless—and potentially valuable—is a document I stumbled across in the A36 95/B folder. Issued on July 25, 1905, it is entitled “Instructions for Clerks Operating the Keyboard Punch Machines.” The opening paragraph states: “The information returned on the manifests (Forms 1500, 1500A and 1500B), so far as it relates to alien immigrants (including those in transit and tourists), is to be transferred to the keyboard punch card in accordance with the following classifications.”

The document then lists the information fields on each manifest and the abbreviations that should be used to identify them. One wonders. Could this have been a low-tech, early 20th-century predecessor to the computer database? What became of these keyboard punch cards? Where were they stored?

The CZA currently is scanning the card index of 2,000 immigrant families, a process that is expected to require several more months. When completed, the data will be made available to the public in two stages. In the first stage, the scanned information will be accessible in an onsite database that a visitor to the CZA may view without staff assistance. In the second stage, the information will be placed on the Internet and made accessible worldwide. Questions regarding the ITO project should be directed to the Deputy Director for Archival Affairs, Rochelle Rubinstein.                                                           (Telephone: 972–2-620-4816; e-mail: <rocheller@wzo.org. il>; fax: 972–2-620-4837) The archives are open Sunday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Randy Daitch is coauthor of AVOTAYNU’s “Ask the Experts” column. He collaborated with Gary Mokotoff to create the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex System. Daitch is a professional genealogist living in Israel. His e-mail address is reuvendaitch@yahoo.com.