Our Heritage

My grandfather, Joseph Zwaik, was 16 years old when he walked off the steamship plank onto Ellis Island.

It was 1911 and he was traveling alone, carrying everything he owned in a small suitcase. He came to a country that needed his labor and he faced an immigration bureaucracy that was more concerned with trachoma than with terrorists. Physicians checked for trachoma, a contagious eye infection, by turning the eyelid inside out with a buttonhook to look for inflammations on the inner eyelid. The process was quick and painful.

Today, the process of immigrating to the United States is often slow and painful. An American citizen seeking to reunite with brothers or sisters must navigate a complex system — and that is where we come in.