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From:
Subject: Re: [TSL] Did they swim to get here???
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 18:59:59 EDT


Greetings

Illegal immigration is the issue of the week in the USA as we speak and
write.

Certainly our relatives did not swim or walk across the water as immigrants
are allegedly walking in through our southern Mex - Tex border.

But...were there illegal and stowaways? What about a per cent of error on
the manifests?

A one percent error on a ship of 1000 people many of whom could not speak
English is 10 people. Are my relatives among those 10? (smile).

Murphy's law says if it can go wrong it usually does and O'Toole's Corollary
says that Murphy was an optimist. (smile)

Based upon the collective experience of the readers of this list what is the
margin of error without taking into consideration misspelling and our
inability to read the writing of the author of the manifest?

We have two relatives that we think were in the Hermann which docked at
Baltimore on April 2, 1888, that we cannot find and we are working off a very
good copy of the original American Port manifest. We find their very small
children (all under 5) but not the parents. (Unless they missed the boat and took
the next ship.) But we can't go to the German Manifest in Bremen because all
those documents have been destroyed some by design because of warehouse space
limitations and others because of W.W.II bombing raid.

Best to you

Cliff Bischoff

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