I read a book many years ago titled The Fire and the Gold, by Phyllis A. Whitney. It tells the story of a child living through the disastrous San Francisco Earthquake of 18 April 1906 and her search for a golden statue of the goddess Kwan Yin. The images evoked in the book captured my imagination, and I have since collected a number of photographs, postcards, and stereographs that depict the ruins of the city.

Ancestry.com continues adding images of ship's passenger arrival records to its Immigration Collection, and the San Francisco, California, passenger lists are among the newest additions. With the introduction of these images, my imagination was piqued. I wanted to see how many ships arrived before and after the earthquake, and I wanted to know more about the fate of some of those new arrivals. And so, in this week let's look at two ships and two people...

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