Knickerbocker Village: Who's Almost Who In Knickerbocker Village History: Annie Moore Schayer

The celebrated Annie Moore, the first immigrant of Ellis Island, lived at 99 Cherry Street and 32 Monroe Streets. This information was recently unearthed, disproving a myth as to her whereabouts after she passed through Ellis Island.
from the nytimes of 9/16/06

Four generations of descendants of Annie Moore Schayer, the first immigrant to be processed on Ellis Island, gathered yesterday in New York for the first time to celebrate her rediscovery — and their own — and to raise money for a headstone for her unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
The first contributions, of $500 each, came from Brian G. Andersson, the city’s commissioner of records, and Patricia Somerstein of Long Beach, N.Y., Annie’s great-niece. They donated their share of a $1,000 reward they received from a professional genealogist. The genealogist had been seeking clues to support her suspicion that a woman who died in Texas in 1923 and had been embraced by history as the Ellis Island Annie Moore was somebody else entirely. It turns out the Texan Annie Moore was not an immigrant at all.
In fact, the Annie Moore who was 15 in 1892 when she came to the United States from County Cork, Ireland, never moved west. She lived the rest of her life within a few square blocks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and died at 99 Cherry Street. One of her granddaughters lived in a public housing project in the neighborhood until her death in 2001.
The genealogist, Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, was joined at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society by about a dozen Moore descendants as well as the Irish consul general and representatives of the Tenement Museum, the National Park Service, the National Archives and the County Cork Association. Among the descendants who attended were Mrs. Somerstein’s brother, Michael Shulman, 49, of Chevy Chase, Md., an investment analyst; a great-granddaughter of Annie’s, Maureen Peterson, 61, of Ocean Grove, N.J.; Dr. Julia L. Devous, 41, another great-granddaughter, of Phoenix; and Dylan Donovan Krauss, 9 months old, of Derby, Conn., Annie’s great-great-great-great-grandson. “We knew it was the truth, but we couldn’t prove it,” Mrs. Peterson said. Annie married the son of a German-born baker at St. James Church on James Street in 1895. Her husband was identified as an engineer and salesman at the Fulton Fish Market. They had at least 11 children, 5 of whom survived to adulthood. Annie died of heart failure in 1924 at 47 and is buried with six of her children at the cemetery in Woodside, Queens, flanked by markers for a Maxwell and a Jimenez.

the information below comes mostly from genealogist's Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak web site

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