The SS Uruguay

About a month ago, I joined a genealogy service, Ancestry.com. They have photographed records of passenger lists from ships arriving in different ports in the US from sometime in the 1800’s up to 1957. When I searched for my record, I immediately found my name “daughter M” and clicked on it. Up came the two ledger pages with my father’s and my data. It absolutely amazed me how much information was packed into those two lines that our names occupied.

Dad was
“stateless”,
50 years old,
5’ 9” tall,had gray hair, blue eyes,
was a mechanical engineer,
spoke and wrote French, German and English,
was mentally and physically in good health and
was coming to the United States as a permanent resident.

I was
French,
seven years old,
a student,
4’3” tall, had blond hair(!?!) and blue eyes, and
could read and write in French only.

We arrived on a ship of the Moore McCormack line called the SS Uruguay. At that time the owner was the US War Shipping Administration. There were 563 total passengers, of whom 351 were aliens like us. The date of our leaving France was listed as well as the date of our arrival in the United States. To learn more about our ship, you can visit the following web site:

http://www.moore-mccormack.com/SS-Uruguay-1938/SS-Uruguay-Timeline.htm