From England to America with the Isaacs Family

According to Robert Woolf Isaacs, his family made the trip from England to America in 1870. I hadn't wanted to spend the extra hundred or more dollars to check the immigration records at Ancestry.com on the off-chance I could find anything, but recently Ancestry has opened its immigration records for a free preview, good until the end of December 2006. After quite a bit of searching, I found a family group that is incontrovertibly ours.

Martha and all the children arrived in New York aboard the Inman Line's Steamship City of Washington on July 20th 1871. Notice that Robert and Morris's ages are given as 8 and 7, respectively, when they would have been about three years older in actuality. Ellen, who was born in 1857 or '58, would have been older than 12, the cutoff age for a child's half-fare, so there is some reason to have understated her age slightly. But why the two sons were also listed as younger, who knows? This is also the last record I have for Maria, who was born in Australia in 1868 but disappeared from the family by the 1880 US Census. She probably died in Cincinnati.

SS City of Brooklyn

Samuel apparently made the trip from Liverpool to London earlier, as he had done when they went to Australia. A Samuel Isaacs of about the right age and station (he, like his family, traveled in steerage) made the trip on Inman's SS City of Brooklyn in March 1871. He gave as his profession "miner." I would have expected him to claim to be a dealer, but perhaps his experience in the Australian goldmines combined with a lack of goods to deal led him to call himself a miner. He does not seem to have pursued mining in America, in any event.