Most people living in North America today, with the exception of indigenous peoples, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Many of us are familiar with the immigrant story: the push away from the old country as the result of economic pressures, social and political oppression or religious persecution and the trip across the Atlantic or Pacific fraught with dangers, discomfort, illness and sometimes death. In this myth, the huge step of leaving one's homeland then surviving the ordeal of an ocean crossing was rewarded by a tidy reception at some immigration depot like Ellis Island or perhaps Halifax's Pier 21. Then, once the individual was legitimized in the new country of choice, the heroic story culminated in the struggle to settle, raise a family, adapt and succeed. This is the successful North American dream.
Certainly this immigrant experience is usually painted as positive. But for some people, leaving home and facing the overwhelming challenges of a new country can become an intolerable situation from which they must escape. So what happens to those immigrants who do not succeed on the terms of the new country? What of the newcomers who just do not fit in, who reject the culture and mores of their new land? For them the dream has been rendered meaningless or has turned into a nightmare. They must either endure a life of misery in their adopted country or return home. Between 1908, when US immigration authorities began keeping records on departures, and 1920, three out of every eight immigrants returned home to their native lands. And by the Great Depression of the 1930s, more people were returning home than entering the country.
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From the few words Lillian Alling spoke on that subject, it appears that she had a hard time as an immigrant so she chose to return to Europe. Her drive to return home was not that unusual. It was the length and scope of her journey that were different than most. She chose to walk back to Europe and to minimize her ocean crossing to the 50 miles (80 kilometres) between Alaska and Siberia. Did she really walk from New York to Alaska through Canada and eventually end up in Siberia? Yes, she did. Her story, in fact, spans the globeâfrom Europe, across the Atlantic, across the whole North American continent and then across the Bering Strait to Asia.
Improvements in transportation and communication made her journey possible. The popularity of motor vehicle travel had necessitated the construction of highways and roads. Railways had been built from coast to coast, and even though she never travelled by train as far as is known, the rail lines provided pathways where roads did not exist. The telegraph, and the telegraph lines in particular, gave her a trail to follow through the wilderness of northern British Columbia. But although it is known that she sometimes accepted a ride and she used boats where necessary, for the most part history has recorded that she made the entire trip using the oldest mode of transport: walking.
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But the story of Lillian Alling's journey starts and ends with mysteriesâboth her origins and her fate are unknown. The woman known to history as Lillian Alling crossed from the state of New York into Canada at Niagara Falls, Ontario, on Christmas Eve 1926. She was alone. It was raining that day but mild, the temperature just a little below zero. When the Customs official asked her the routine entry questions, she answered politely in English with an eastern European accent.
“Last place of residence?”
“Rochester, New York.”
“What is your religion?”
“Catholic.”
“Where were you born?”
“Poland.”
According to the border crossing documentation, Lillian also stated that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921. She said she was thirty years old, married, and a housewife and that she planned to continue being a housewife upon arrival in Canada. Lillian may have meant “housekeeper,” as she was travelling without a husband and had performed domestic work in New York. She said she could speak English and gave her destination as Niagara Falls, Ontario. (She didn't bother to mention that Niagara Falls was just the first stop on a journey across northern North America that would take her more than 6,000 miles (9,650 kilometres) and last almost three years.) She said she had no known relative or friend as her contact person in Canada. She also gave “none” as the answer to the name of her nearest relative. She was carrying twenty dollars with her.
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Although sometimes on her trek across the continent, Lillian Alling was referred to as Russian, she made it quite clear in her response to the Customs officer at Niagara Falls that she had been born in Poland. Some of the later confusion may have been due to the inability of Canadians to distinguish between a Polish and a Russian accent. However, this confusion also arose because from 1815 to 1919, Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary, which resulted in Polish immigrants to Canada being categorized by early census takers as Russians, Germans or Austrians.
Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, most of Poland was partitioned and placed under the rule of Russia, Austria and Prussia, the exception being the city of Cracow, which became an independent republic. Eastern Poland became a sovereign state, called the Kingdom of Poland, but it was united with the Russian throne. Although this arrangement was the most liberal of all the partitions, by the end of the century repressive measures by the Russian monarchy had reduced it to nothing more than a puppet kingdom ruled by a governor general who maintained strict control of all military forces and judicial systems. The northwestern portion of Poland, which was awarded to Prussia, fared little better. Constitutional rights guaranteed to the Polish people by the treaty were gradually eroded. German laws were introduced, the Polish language was no longer used by administrative bodies, and schools were taught by German teachers. Southern Poland, which included the kingdoms of Galicia and Lodomeria and New Galicia, was placed under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (In 1846 Austria also absorbed the independent republic of Cracow.) Although by the end of the century this area had gained more autonomy than those regions controlled by Russia and Prussia, it had few industries so it was the most economically challenged and had a 60 percent illiteracy rate.
The combination of political and social repression and poverty resulted in massive emigration from all three areas. Although those who came to Canada in the first migration wave were classified as Russians, Germans or Austrians, by 1901 they were being counted as Poles in the Canadian census, and their numbers rose from 6,285 in the 1901 census to 33,652 in 1911 to 53,403 in 1921; most were farmers and rural labourers who formed numerous small communities across the prairie provinces. After Poland was officially recognized as an independentrepublic by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, thenational and ethnic identities of the Polish immigrants were more clearly defined, and while some of them still went to the prairie provinces, a greater number migrated to urban areas, especially Toronto.
Poland became an independent republic in 1919, but the Red Army of the new Soviet government of Russia continued an attempt to dominate the new republic, fighting its way almost to the outskirts of Warsaw. They were finally defeated by a Polish army under Marshal Jozef Pilsudski and an armistice was signed in October 1920. The country remained in economic and political disarray until 1926 when Pilsudski staged a military coup and became dictator of Poland, remaining in that role until his death in 1935. In 1939 the country was occupied by the armies of Nazi Germany.
Prior to 1890 most of the Polish immigrants came from the Kashub region in north central Poland, and they settled in Renfrew County, Ontario, but Poles from Galicia, in the South of Poland, arrived in far greater numbers between 1907 and 1914. As a result, most immigrants from eastern or central Europe were referred to as Galicians.
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Many immigrants in this group found urban life more appealing than agricultural labour and moved their whole families to the towns. Thus, if Lillian came from the Kashub region, she might have immigrated with her parents as early as 1896 when she was an infant. However, since she spoke with a Polish accent and she said that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921 and she had no known relative or friend in Canada, she probably came by herself as a young adult in the later wave of immigration from Galicia.
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Canadian government kept no official records of people arriving in Canada from Europe. In fact, immigrants were not even required to apply to enter the country. Mary Munk of the Canadian Genealogy Centre, Client Services Division, Library and Archives Canada, explains:
Immigrants from Europe would buy a ticket for a ship sailing to Canada. They would be seen by a medical examiner to make sure they didn't have any medical conditions such as blindness or tuberculosis. They did not require a visa. If they had a passport, they would have shown it upon boarding, but the Canadian government did not keep their passports.
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And according to the Library and Archives Canada website:
Passenger lists (RG 76) were the official record of immigration during this period ⦠The [ship's passenger] lists contain information such as name, age, country of origin, occupation and intended destination. They are arranged by port and date of arrival, with the exception of some years between 1919 and 1924, when an individual Form 30A was used ⦠Many immigrants to Canada came from the United States or sailed from Europe to American ports on their way to Canada. Prior to April 1908, people were able to move freely across the border from the United States into Canada; no record of immigration exists for those individuals.
Not all immigrants crossing the border were registered. Some crossed when the ports were closed or where no port existed. Many families were not registered because one or both parents had been born in Canada or they had lived there before, and they were considered “returning Canadians” rather than immigrants.
No record of a Lillian Alling, born in Poland, has been found on any available passenger list for ships coming from Europe and landing in either Canada or the US between 1896, her birth year, and 1926 when she turned up at the Niagara Falls Customs office. However, passengers from mainland Europe usually made their way to Great Britain where they boarded transatlantic ships at ports such as Liverpool, London and Glasgow to land in New York, Halifax or Quebec City. My searches of various online databases that have passenger lists for ships that left the UK in the appropriate time period reveal some names close to Lillian Alling's but none are exactly the same.
Alling is not an unusual name. There are Allings in Estonia, England, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. But it is certainly possible that Alling was not the name by which she was known in Poland; her name may have been anglicized to become Alling, either by her or by someone else, once she was in North America. In Poland her name may have been Oling, Aling, Eling, Ohling, Ehling or Ailing. Alling could also be a derivative of a Jewish name such as Olejnik, Olejnikov, Olejnikovskij, Olejskij, Olekhnovich, Olen, Olender, Olnderov and Olenov.
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It is also possible that it was her married name or it was not her name at all, and she simply “borrowed” it to hide her real identity.
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Lillian told the Customs officer at Niagara Falls that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921, but a search of Ontario records revealed nothing conclusive. There were no Allings in the Toronto City directory for 1921 though there is one Lillian E. Allinâwith no “g”âliving at 1418 Gerard East. The name Lillian Gua appears on the 1911 Canadian census; the handwriting, however, is difficult to read, and although the first name is definitely Lillian, the last name is less certain. She was fourteen years of age, born in September 1896 in either Germany or Poland. She was a lodger and a factory worker. She is listed as a Polish Catholic living on King Street in Beamsville in the Niagara area, close to the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Could this be Lillian Alling? The age and place of birth are right and the town of Beamsville did have woollen mills, fruit-packing plants and a factory for making bushel baskets and trugs for the fruit-packing industryâall of them places where a young non-English-speaking girl could have found work.
When asked for her religion by the Customs officer, Lillian said that she was Catholic, so I thought it was possible she attended a church of that denomination while living in Toronto; St. Stanislaus, the main Polish Catholic Church in Toronto during that time, has no record of anyone named Lillian or a variation thereof for the period between 1914 and 1924.
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As she also told the Customs officer that she was married, I searched Ontario's marriage records, but turned up nothing. “The Catholic Church in Ontario was the official record keeper for vital statistics, and they took that responsibility very seriously,” said Marc Lerman, director of archives for the Archdiocese of Toronto.
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No record of anyone with the first name Lillian marrying anyone with the last name Alling could be found. I double-checked by using the genealogical database, Ancestry.com, to search for a record of residence or marriage in Ontario, but had no success.
Lillian must have crossed the border into the United States some time between 1921 and 1926, but the government of Canada did not keep records of people leaving the country, including those moving to the United States. In fact, there was a continuous undocumented movement of new immigrants between the United States and Canada as late as 1924.
Lillian told the Customs officer that her last place of residence before returning to Canada was the city of Rochester, which in the early twentieth century was an important centre for the garment industry, especially for the manufacture of men's clothing. I made a search of the available online databases and contacted various government agenciesâboth state and federalâfor archival information. No records for Lillian were found at the US National Archives and Records Administration.
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Her name did not come up in State Department records because she was not an American citizen. I also checked the US naturalization records and the United States Social Security Indexes
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because in 1922 Congress passed the Married Women's Act, also known as the Cable Act, which gave each woman a nationality of her own. Thus, whether Lillian was married or not, she could have applied for citizenship. But there is nothing in their records. No listings for an Alling groom and a Lillian bride were found in the New York City records or in those of the city of Rochester.
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I sent a request to the State of New York Department of Health, which is responsible for the vital records in that state, to look for any woman with the first name Lillian marrying any man with the last name Alling for the years 1920-1926. No record was found.
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Searching the US census records for New York State in both 1920 and 1930, I found a number of women named Lillian Alling, but all were born in the United States. Although the Rochester Directories for 1921 through 1926 have a number of Allings, none of these people has the first name Lillian. (The Allings were a prominent family who had a successful paper company in Rochester.) The records from the Church of the Latter Day Saints have nothing on Lillian. I can only hope that in the future more records will be available, and some traces of Lillian will be found in the State of New York.