My mother's tree - following the US trail

Two of my mother's uncles had left Austria and ended up in California. I believe that they left before my mother.
I knew that one uncle, Jack, had travelled west to the UK and then on to the United States.
I already knew that he had settled in California with his wife, a son and a daughter.
Following his first wife's death in 1969, he remarried and died in 1982.
His daughter married in 1962, had a son in 1967 and sadly died when he was only 10 in 1977.
His son married in 1975 and he in turn had a son in 1983, who was named after Jack.

I discovered that most Europeans arriving in the United States at that time came to New York by ship and entered through Ellis Island.
Ellis Island has been maintained as a museum with a lot of information available on the Ellis Island website. This site includes a free facility to search for passengers. For those just starting out there is also a genealogy section with some useful links.From this passenger search, I was able to find my great uncle. I could access an image of the actual passenger list that showed that he had sailed from Southampton to New York in 1939 aboard the Lancastria with his wife and two young children and proving that he entered the US through Ellis Island and New York.

Although not directly linked to my tree I discovered on Wikipedia that a few months later this Cunard liner was commandeered by the UK government for war use and renamed HMT Lancastria.After a short overhaul, she left Liverpool on 14 June 1940 under Captain Rudolph Sharp (born 27 October 1885) and arrived in the mouth of the Loire estuary on 16 June. She anchored 11 miles (18 km) south-west of St. Nazaire. By the mid-afternoon of 17 June, she had embarked an unknown number (estimates range from 4,000 up to 9,000), of civilian refugees (including embassy staff, employees of Fairey Aviation of Belgium), line-of-communication troops (such as Pioneer and RASC soldiers) and RAF personnel. The ship's official capacity was 2,200 including the 375 man crew. Captain Sharp had been instructed by the Royal Navy to "load as many men as possible without regard to the limits set down under international law".At 1350 hrs, during an air-raid, the nearby Oronsay a 20,000-ton Orient liner, was hit on the bridge by a German bomb. Lancastria was free to depart and the captain of the British destroyer HMS Havelock advised her to do so, but without a destroyer escort against possible submarine attack, Sharp decided to wait.
A fresh air raid began before 4 p.m. Lancastria was bombed at 1548 hrs by Junkers Ju 88 aircraft from II. Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 30. Three direct hits caused the ship to list first to starboard then to port; she rolled over and sank within twenty minutes. Over 1,400 tons of fuel oil leaked into the sea and was set partially on fire, possibly by strafing. Many drowned, were choked by the oil or were shot by the strafing German aircraft. Survivors were taken aboard other evacuation vessels, the trawler Cambridgeshire rescuing 900. There were 2,477 survivors, of whom about 100 were still alive in 2011. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); the death toll accounted for roughly a third of the total losses of the BEF in France. She sank around 5 nmi (9.3 km) south of Chémoulin Point in the Charpentier roads, around 9 nmi (17 km) from St. Nazaire. The Lancastria Association lists 1,738 deaths.