08/11/2026
The very first person to pass through Ellis Island was a teenage girl from Cork, and for over a century America told her story wrong. 🗽 Annie Moore.
On 1 January 1892, the new immigration station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor opened its doors. The first passenger to step forward and be registered was Annie Moore, a seventeen-year-old from County Cork, travelling with her two younger brothers to join their parents, who had already emigrated to New York.
They had sailed from Queenstown, now Cobh, on the steamship Nevada, spending Christmas at sea. On that cold New Year's morning she was presented with a ten dollar gold piece to mark the occasion, more money than she had probably ever held.
Then, for over a hundred years, her story was mixed up with that of a different Annie Moore, who went west, married, and died in Texas. That version was repeated in books, newspapers and even official commemorations.
In 2006, genealogists finally tracked down the real Annie. She had never left New York. She lived her life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, married, raised a family, and died in 1924. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens. A proper headstone was finally placed there in 2008.
Today there are statues of Annie Moore at Cobh, where she left, and on Ellis Island, where she arrived. Millions of Americans have an ancestor who came through that same door after her.
First through the door, and lost for a century. 💚 Annie Moore of County Cork, the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island on 1 January 1892.
