Ellis Island
Between 1905 and 1914, an average of one million immigrants per year arrived in the United States. Immigration officials reviewed about 5,000 immigrants per day during peak times at Ellis Island. Two-thirds of those individuals emigrated from eastern, southern and central Europe. The peak year for immigration at Ellis Island was 1907, with 1,004,756 immigrants processed. The all-time daily high occurred on April 17, 1907, when 11,747 immigrants arrived. After the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which greatly restricted immigration and allowed processing at overseas embassies, the only immigrants to pass through the station were those who had problems with their immigration paperwork, displaced persons, and war refugees. Today, over 100 million Americans—about one-third to 40% of the population of the United States—can trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in America at Ellis Island before dispersing to points all over the country.
Edwin E. Ellis
Edwin Earl Ellis (born August 28, 1924) was an American inventor and photographer. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1949 as a photographer. During this time he participated in the landings at the Battle of Okinawa. Most notably, he was a photographer on Operation Highjump, becoming one of the first people to visually document Antarctica. The Ellis Fjord and the Ellis Glacier are named after him. After the South Pole, he went to Norfolk, and was part of the crew that commissioned the USS Coral Sea (CV-43). He was also the founder of the Ellis Trailer Park in Paducah. The land it sat on is now owned by Cardinal Lanes.