[3C] The Morgue / Immigration Analysis
Click on miniatures to view full-size photo in a new window.
"Triangle Fire" and "Viewing Victims At The Morgue" shows members of the public looking for the bodies of their loved ones. Forty-three victims were identified in the first night; by the end of the week all but seven had been named. The victims of the Triangle Fire were almost all young unmarried women still living at home, and the people that came forward to identify them would most likely to have been parents and siblings, as the couple in "After Identifying A Body" were likely to have been.
The families of the dead girls were almost all Russian Jews and Italians. The "New Migrants" of the late 1890s and early 1900s came from southern and eastern Europe, in an exodus spurred on by economic and social changes. 2 million Jews left Europe for America after 1880 and three-quarters were Russian; a similar proportion of that total settled in New York City, and by 1910, Russian Jews were New York's largest immigrant group. Like the Germans before them, the Jews and Italians would at first occupy working class positions, such as in the garment industry, but within a few decades and generations they would move into the middle class as a new wave of migrants took their places in the workshops.