By NiallO’Dowd

WHEN she stepped off the boat in Ellis Island on January 1, 1892, 15-year-old Annie Moore could hardly have figured that she would become the symbol of emigration to America.

The little Cork girl was the first of 12 million to disembark and received a gold coin for her trouble. She was also stepping into history, though that hardly occurred to her at the time.

It must have been a joyous landing. Annie, after all, was rejoining her parents who had come over from Cork a few years previously. We can only imagine the excitement and anticipation of the moment when she first sailed into New York Harbor and knew her parents were waiting.

Back then people sailed into oblivion when they left Ireland. It was as if they sailed off the edge of the world and disappeared.

We can only imagine the heartbreak as families separated forever. Not for nothing was the farewell known as the American wake. The children and parents would never see each other again as only a handful ever returned.

To see her parents again after being separated by what was then a very wide ocean must have been sheer delight for young Annie and her brother.

One wonders about her life back home, who she stayed with when her parents left, how often she must have wished to see them again. The news that they would be reunited must have thrilled her to the bone. Little wonder that she was at the very front of the ship when she disembarked, dying no doubt to see her parents.

America was called An T-Oilean Ur, or the Fresh Land back then by the Irish, and New York was known as Bright City. Those terms embodied the hopes and dreams of generations of a fresh start in a bright and brave new world.

Rather like emigrants today who come from the Third World, coming from Ireland in 1892 to America was a step across a global gulf. Economic opportunity awaited where none existed at home.

Dreams could be fashioned and made and lives lived in an atmosphere of hope and progression. Ireland, still reeling from the Famine, was a poor home for such dreams. Only America, with its boundless lands of opportunity, could hold such a dream.

So Annie was reunited with her family and her dreams. What matter that the dreams were undoubtedly quite modest by today’s standards?

We know now that she settled lived and died all within a stone’s throw of where she disembarked. Thanks to the new research revealed last week, we can trace Annie’s footsteps as surely as if she was one of our own relatives.

It was not an easy life she came into. Her husband was a baker and they had 11 kids, only five of whom reached adulthood.

Annie died young, just 47, probably partly from the hard life she led. Like millions of emigrants she lived and worked so that her kids and grandchildren could have a better life than she would. In that respect, there is no question that they did and that they owe much to her.

At the press conference in New York last week the family descendants of Annie Moore were introduced. The people represented the mosaic of American life. Descendants of all fates and ethnicities came forward to tell of their life story.

In Annie’s progeny we saw the American dream in action, the belief that every generation does better than the one before. From Annie’s precarious existence in a Lower East Side of New York tenement to descendants who are doctors and bankers and many other top professions, Annie’s journey is an inspiration to us all.

She is buried in an unmarked grave now, not far from the harbor she sailed into so triumphantly. It is just a short distance from where she arrived to where she was buried, but in so many ways it was a journey across generations that ended last week when Annie and her rightful relatives were finally reunited.

Fittingly, it made the front of The New York Times, the most powerful newspaper on earth. Annie no doubt would have been proud.