Like my grandmother Ruth, we are all immigrants.

I posted this on Facebook today, on October 15, 2020.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO!..my grandmother Ruth (15 years old), sisters Lillie (18), and Bertha (20) arrived on Ellis Island, ready for their new lives. I came across this landmark fact when talking to a cousin yesterday. Now a century later, the Indig family home for almost a half century has a new family originally from India, and those Jewish immigrant sisters have dozens of descendants now part of our nation. WE ARE ALL IMMIGRANTS!...except of course for the Native Americans who deserved and deserve better. In any case, I'm sure all in my circle share my sentiment to remember our own immigrant roots, and to welcome newer immigrants to our society. No immigrants from any country, or any time period, or any better than others - in this way, we're all the same.

The picture here is from 4 years later, 1924, at Bertha's wedding. 

More on the sisters from an oral family history:

Their father Morris Ezra Ehrreich (Rich) left their Jewish shtetl Dukla, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for the U.S. in 1913, with plans for his children to follow, but when war broke out, they could not travel. Lillie went to Hungary, and the other children remained in Dukla. Bertha and her friend, Chara, made whiskey illegally to stay alive. When they were about to be discovered they got rid of everything. Ruth went to another town as a househelper near the end of the war. After the war the family reassembled. A man named Block from Dukla gathered all the families that wanted to emigrate and financed the cost to come to the U.S. The girls first journeyed to Vienna and stayed in a hotel because of a transportation strike, then to Switzerland where they took showers for the first time, and then to Paris, France. In Paris they stayed with wealthy families and were well treated. They left Southhampton, England for the U.S. on the ship SS Philadelphia. At the time Ruth was 15, Lilly 18, and Bertha 20 years of age. They arrived at Ellis Island on May 10, 1920.