On this page I share what I've learned about my great-grandfather Ludwig Kurlandsky, also known as Louis R. Kurlandski and the husband of my great-grandmother, Sophia M. Kurlandski, née Sophia Preis. For how I came upon this information, see the separate page, "On the Trail of Sophia & Louis Kurlandski."

The Ellis Island Records

The Ellis Island records show Ludwig as having entered the country in 1901. Here's a copy of the passenger record which the Ellis Island Foundation would like to sell me.

Though the certificate says he was Russian, it also says he came from Przasnitz, which is both a region and a town in present-day Poland. At that time Poland did not exist as an official country. Here's the location of Przasnitz, lifted from the Wikipedia entry.

When I found the Ellis Island records for Ludwig, I couldn't at first be sure that it was my great-grandfather. But a close look at the ship's manifest reveals some information that removes most of our initial skepticism. Columns 11 through 16 of the manifest tell us his final destination was to meet his brother in St. Louis, and that his brother had paid for his passage. Other information tells us that he was a laborer, he could read and write, and that he was neither crippled nor a polygamist. (Whew!)

Here's the information I've gleaned from the manifest, as well as Ludwig's part of the page of the manifest itself.

Question	Answer	My Notes
Name in full	Ludwig Kurlandsky
Age	25
Sex	M
Married or Single	Single
Calling or Occupation	Laborer
Able to Read/Write	Yes/Yes	This is my reading of the double quotes in these columns. I'm not sure how to interpret the slash in the Read column.
Nationality	Russian
Last residence	(illegible)	I can't read the answer, but "Przasnitz" or "Przasnytz" is possible.
Seaport for landing in the U.S.	New York
Final destination	St. Louis, Mo (?)
Whether having a ticket to such final destination	Yes
By whom was passage paid	Brother
Whether in possession of money. If so, whether more than $20 and how much if $20 or less	$60
Whether ever before in the U.S.	No
Whether going to join a relative and if so, what relative (illegible) name and address	brother (illegible) St. Louis
Ever in prison or (illegible) or supervised by charity, if yes, state which	No
Whether a polygamist	No
Whether under contract, (illegible) in the United States	No
Condition of Health, Mental and Physical	Good
Deformed or crippled, nature and cause	No

Pennland manifest containing Ludwig Kurlandsky on line 7

As luck would have it, the most interesting information in this manifest is the least legible: the bit about his brother. If any reader would like to have a shot at making out that part of the manifest, be my guest.

The Ellis Island records show he arrived on the Pennland, and they give the following information about the ship.

Built by J. & G. Thomson Limited, Clydebank, Scotland, 1870. 3,760 gross tons; 361 (bp) feet long; 41 feet wide. Compound engine, single screw. Service speed 13 knots. 1,200 passengers (200 first class, 1,000 third class).

Built for Cunard Line, British flag, in 1870 and named Algeria. British service. Sold to Red Star Line, British flag, in 1882 and renamed Pennland. Antwerp-New York service. Scrapped in 1903.

So the ship Great-Grandfather Ludwig took to this country was scrapped just two years after his arrival.

A side note on Ludwig's ship: A second Pennland was built several years later, for the Wikipedia entry on the Red Star Line describes a Pennland which was sold to the line in 1935, and later served as an allied troop ship.

Wikipedia entry on the Red Star Line

Antwerp and The Red Star Line

The Ellis Island records say that the Pennland was built for the Cunard Line. Coincidentally, I started a new job in downtown Manhattan not too long ago. One of the older buildings at the very bottom of Broadway—overlooking the harbor with its Statue of Liberty and the more-distant Ellis Island, is a building with the words "Cunard Line" ostentatiously engraved just above the door.

Other photos of the Cunard Line Building

I thought it had once been the entrance to an old subway line, until one day—doubting that even in its early days the subway system had that much wherewithal—I googled the phrase.

It turns out that the Cunard Line was one of the leading operators of passenger ships—some of the company's more famous vessels were the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and, more historically resonant, the Lusitania.

All of which would be a digression if it were not for the following. Ludwig's ship the Pennland was sold to the Red Star Line almost 20 years before he boarded it, and scrapped just two years later. This probably means it was not much of a ship—certainly not by 1901.

The Red Star Line operated out of Antwerp, Beligium. Unlike the Cunard Line, the company did not survive the depression. The Wikipedia entry for the line has the following (for "Warschau" read "Warsaw").

In the city of Antwerp, the former warehouses of the Red Star Line were recently landmarked and reopened as a museum on September 28, 2013 by the City of Antwerp. The main focus of the museum are the travel stories that could be retrieved through relatives of Red Star Line passengers. In the exhibition the visitor follows the land movers' tracks from the travel agency in Warschau until their arrival in New York. The works of art of the Red Star Line emigrants made by the Antwerp artist Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875-1930) will be exhibited there, next to Red Star Line memorabilia of the collection of Robert Vervoort.

The Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp

It seems as though parts of the exhibition described above made its way to the U.S. in 2006. A New York Times review of the exhibition by Grace Glueck, entitled "Antwerp = America: Eugeen Van Mieghem and the Emigrants of the Red Star Line" describes the artist's works thus:

Van Mieghem caught it all: mothers with babies, children, bent old women, bearded men, as well as the people of the port: stevedores, sailors, ship captains, prostitutes, women who stitched bags for grain. Sometimes he froze his subjects in rapid sketches: a frightened old man clutching his umbrella; a scowling loner prowling the street, hands in pockets. A Kollwitz-like chalk drawing in black and red shows the gaunt head of a blind man as he gropes his way along a street of forbidding buildings. “Emigrants Waiting Near the River Scheldt,” a bleak view of two men and a child hanging out at a parapet over the river, depicts the trying vigil of those waiting for a ship.

Grace Glueck's review

More on emigration to America from Antwerp

More on the Red Star Line

Ludwig Kurlansky: A Short and Tentative pre-1910 Biography

Based on what we've learned on this page, we can sketch out the first three decades of Ludwig Kurlandsky's life. He was born about 1875 in the region of Przasnitz in what was then part of Russia. Perhaps he was born in the town of Przasnitz itself. In either case, the ship's manifest says he could read and write, but presumably he was not very well educated, or his job would not have been merely that of a laborer.

At some point a brother, presumably older, emigrated to the U.S. and somehow found his way to St. Louis, which had a substantial Polish immigrant community, but not one as significant as New York City's, Chicago's or even Milwaukee's or Cleveland's. (Source: Rosemary A. Chorzempa: Korzenie Polskie: Polish Roots, p. 25)

As is typical in the American immigrant story, a few years after his arrival, Ludwig's brother arranged for the passage of Ludwig himself, paying for his brother's fare not just across half the continental U.S., but possibly also across the Atlantic from Antwerp, and possibly to Antwerp itself, about 900 miles distant from Przasnitz.

e-distance.com, Przasnitz to Antwerp

We don't yet know whether Ludwig arrived in Antwerp by land or by sea. In either case, he arrived at a time and a place that served as a major stepping-stone in the journey of (mostly poor) Europeans on their way to the U.S. However he came, this is probably what he saw as his ship departed for New York, for what emigrant wouldn't stand on deck to take his last look at the Old World?

Wikimedia Commons photo of Antwerp circa 1900

The top of the Pennland manifest reads "sailing from Antwerp, May 4th, 1901. Arriving at Port of 222, (date field left blank)." This tells us that the manifest was filled out shipboard well before the arrival date, perhaps at or just after the departure. The passenger record marks Ludwig's date of arrival as May 17—meaning a 13-day crossing.

At the end of the fortnight's voyage, probably Ludwig stood on the deck with the other travelers as the ship entered New York Harbor with its Statue of Liberty. Less than a quarter mile away the ship would have pulled up to Ellis Island.

source: Rootsweb Ancestry in Belgium

Stepping off the boat, across the walkway and into the cavernous entrance of the government building, Ludwig was probably nervous. Surely he had heard stories of immigrants being turned away. But he had a lot going for him—his health, the physical strength of a 26-year-old man, a U.S. resident who was sponsoring him, and more than twice the $25 which the government estimated an newly-arriving immigrant should have. Sixty dollars wasn't a lot, but back then it meant he would probably have time enough to find work before he went hungry.

Here are a few of my own photos of the main part of the building, taken long after Ellis Island closed as an immigration center and, decades later, began its new life as a museum. Although probably much cleaner, not to mention less crowded, the architecture itself probably differs little from what Ludwig saw—the building opened on December 17, 1900, exactly five months before his arrival.

Wikipedia entry for Ellis Island

Recently I rewatched The Godfather, Part II. The film begins with a deep flashback which explains how Vito Corleone came to America in 1900. There is a poingnant scene in which he, a child of ten or so, arrives at Ellis Island. I bring this up here not to plug the movie but to point out that the scene was, clearly, filmed at Ellis Island (you'll recognize the main lobby from my photographs above, and I recognize the dark hallways from my own visits there), and just as clearly, the filmmakers paid attention to historical detail when they planned and shot the scene. I provide a link to this snippet of the film below, but if the link goes bad you could easily find it by googling "Godfather Ellis Island scene." Of course, Ludwig was at least two decades older than the young Vito Corleone shown here, but if you ignore the child and focus on the background, maybe you'll get a good sense of what our Ludwig saw when he arrived in 1901—and with a little imagination, perhaps you'll be able to imagine what he was going through.

Ellis Island scene from The Godfather, Part II

From New York, or perhaps Jersey City on the other side of the Hudson River, Ludwig no doubt took a train to St. Louis and probably arrived at Union Station, opened in 1894.

source: Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia entry on St. Louis's Union Station

Finally Ludwig could join his brother. Within just a few years he would meet and marry Sophia Wroblewski. See the separate page on this couple's early years together.

Fast-Breaking News

This website prompted a distant cousin, previously unknown, Stan Piekarski, to contact me. I've been slow to respond to his offer of new information, but what he has told me is very useful. I'll present pieces of his emails until I have the chance to fully ingest his news into this website.

His first email is dated April 5, 2016. (Since it is July that I write this, you see that the title "fast-breaking news" is a bit of a misnomer in this case.)

I've read, with interest, your genealogical research into your/our family. You mentioned that Ludwig had a brother. He also had sister, Helena Piekarski (nee) Kurlnadska, my grandmother. Ludwig, (Louis R) is my great uncle as was Ignatz, his brother. We are cousins.

Helena married Waterman Piekarski, 24 Sept 1901, Louis was the best man. Ignatz legally changed his name to Louis Pacewicz.

I've done in depth research on Sophia and Ludwig between 1895 and 1910 and I thing I can supply answers to some of your questions. I would prefer, if possible, to communicate by letter or phone or both. I have not mastered the computer.

His second email was a reply to a couple of questions my father and I posed. My dad wanted to know about "Father Al," someone I had never heard of. I wanted to know about Katie, my distant, and disowned, aunt.

We had two priests in the family, Father (Uncle) Al, ordained in 1940 in Switzerland and Father (Cousin) Laurence, ordained in 1942.

Fr Al was my uncle, my father's youngest brother, nephew to Ludwik (Louis Roy). Helena (Louis Roy's sister) and Walerjan had four children: Edward (b. 1903), Stanislaw Ludwig (b. 1904), Klara (b.1909), and Alfons (b.1913). Fr Al died in 1974 while he was stationed and teaching at Vianney High School in St Louis County.

Information on Katie is limited. She was the daughter of Ludwik and Katharzina Jasinska ( married in 1903). Katie was born 14 October 1906 and baptized "Cath. Helena (Teresian) Kurlandzka. My Piekarski grandparents were her godparents. She is listed in her father's obit in 1944 as Catherine Rath. That's all I've found on her.

Sophia's first husband was Mike (Michal) Wroblewski, not John. They married 4June 1895, he died in 1907. Ludwik and "Zofia" married in 1908. I have copies of marriage licenses and St Stanislaus Kostka marriage registers.

All of this is very useful, and I hope to find out more—eventually.