History Mystery

Goal: Continue to refine our research skills using primary documents

Opportunity to work towards our goal: Sort through  a stack of primary sources searching for connections, patterns and information that will help the third grade solve a history mystery. The documents include pictures, tickets, foreign money, a letter home, telegrams, ship manifests and passenger lists, menus etc. These documents all relate to a specific (but undisclosed) time in history and a specific location. Can they find enough information?

Using our cursive notebooks to help decipher the cursive on an immigration document.

Scouring through the fine print on the back of one document.

They need a magnifying glass to see what some of it says.

This advertisement for a steam ship is in Italian, making it a bit harder to understand.

What information do we recognize?





"There seems to be a lot about ships."

"Maybe there was a war because I see the names of two skips."

"All of the dates seems to be in the late 1800s and early 1900."

"That looks like the certificate my dad got when he became a citizen!"

"I think this list of names are passengers on a boat."

"Alien... ha! ... I keep seeing the word Alien"

We look it up in the dictionary to see if it means something besides little green people from Mars. Sure enough, it means someone foreign.

"These pictures look old. It doesn't look like today."

"It talks about New York a lot. Especially Brooklyn!"

"But lots of places, like Hungary and Italy and England and Ireland."

We look all of those places up on the map.

"[Gasp] They are all in Europe. There must be something going on in Europe that is making them leave."

"Maybe the thing in Europe had to do with money."

"And they are coming to America!"

"But why America?"