The students at Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), in Edgecomb have been studying immigration and the role it played in American history in the 19th and early 20th centuries as part of their  U.S. History curriculum this year.

On Jan. 23, Louise Miller, education coordinator for Lincoln County Historical Association, gave an hour-long presentation to the kindergarten, first and second grades. Dressed as a lower-class woman of the early 1900s, Miller arrived with a bundle of bedding and a basket of clothing and household goods.

Pinned to her shawl was a large tag; every immigrant adult or child who came off the ocean liners had to have one, giving pertinent information on the person. This information had to match the ship’s manifest. As many immigrants did not speak English, or their English was poor, the details on the tags were very important to those processing the people through Ellis Island and other ports of entry, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, New Orleans and San Francisco. New York continuously received the largest percentage.

The German immigrants who came in the 1750s to Waldoboro formed deep roots in Lincoln County. Many immigrants came to Maine in large numbers during the various waves that started around 1820 and continued into the 1900s. Lincoln County saw German, Irish and Finnish immigrants.

The students are studying first-hand accounts, as well as historical facts and figures. Photographs taken by Underwood and Underwood of New York during the first quarter of the 20th century, Augustus Frederick Sherman, a clerk at Ellis Island (1892-1925) who was fascinated by the traditional dress of the various countries, photographer Edwin Levick, and those found in the William Williams papers (immigration commissioner at Ellis Island 1902-1913) truly put a “face” on the historical statistics.