Ellis Island Immigrant Portraits by Augustus Sherman

Augustus Sherman was the chief registry clerk at Ellis Island and a keen amateur photographer. His job put him among the people waiting on the island, and he persuaded many of them to pose in the clothes they had carried across the ocean: sheepskin coats, starched Dutch caps, Cossack cartridge coats, Sami tunics and Bavarian lederhosen. Some of his portraits appeared in National Geographic in 1907, and these prints now belong to the New York Public Library. This gallery keeps to Sherman's own portraits and leaves out later Ellis Island pictures by other photographers. Each caption opens with the print's title in the library's records, in quotation marks because it keeps the wording of its time, and its approximate date. Most sitters were never named. Where later research put a name or hometown to a face, the caption says so, and nothing is added beyond what the record holds. For anyone tracing an immigrant ancestor, these are some of the clearest pictures there are of what people from a particular village or region wore on the day they reached America.