Snapshot to savor: Jamestown woman sees father's photo on trip to Ellis Island

Augustus Sherman was a clerk at New York's Ellis Island, the United States' primary immigration station from 1892 to 1954.

Sherman also was an amateur photographer who was fascinated by the people coming to this Land of Opportunity, so he began photographing them in the early 1900s: Cossacks, Romanian shepherds, rabbis, Hungarian children ... and a German-Russian family moving from the steppes of Russia to the plains of North Dakota.

That picture was of Jakob Mittelstadt, his wife and their eight children. It was taken May 9, 1905, just after the family arrived in New York.

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Now jump to 1991, when Eldora Klose and her husband Elmer, Jamestown, N.D., visited their son in New York.

It was a bit of a struggle for Eldora; she'd broken her ankle and was forced to get around in a wheelchair.

But that didn't stop her and Elmer from visiting Ellis Island, where she knew her ancestors had come through.

They were looking at various exhibits when Elmer exclaimed, "Eldora! Here's your father!"

There it was: an exhibit of Augustus Sherman's photographs, including the Mittelstadt family photo.

The second youngest - the little guy second from the left - was Benjamin, Eldora's father.

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That picture now is in a book titled "Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits 1905 - 1920," published by the Aperture Foundation, New York.

The picture also was part of a summer-long display at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

The description accompanying the photo says Jakob and his family were admitted to the United States to go to "Kullen, N.D."

Actually, the town was Kulm. Or, to be more precise, Eldora says, the family settled on a farm closer to Forbes.

Young Benjamin grew up there and married Marie Presler in 1929. They moved to Jud in 1936, then to Edgeley, to LaMoure, and finally retired in Jamestown in 1963, where he died that year.

Marie, 93, still lives in Jamestown.

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The exhibit of Sherman's photographs at Ellis Island ended earlier this month. But it's about to go international.

It will be shown starting March 9, 2006, in Bremerhaven, Germany, and, starting March 31, 2007, in Liverpool, England. Then, beginning Oct. 11, 2008, it will be back in the United States when it opens in Lexington, Mass.

That exhibit, of course, includes the photo of the German-Russian family which came to North Dakota.

It's a photograph which, when Eldora first saw it in the Ellis Island exhibit in 1991, reduced her to tears.

It had been taken, she saw, just five days after her father's 5th birthday.

And it was the first time she'd ever seen a picture of her father as a little boy.

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