Ellis Island sits in New York harbor as the gateway more than 100 million Americans can trace their family history through, and this Great Museums TV special, made for Public Television, walks through the building that processed them. The film moves through the restored Ellis Island Immigration Museum itself, showing the Great Hall where new arrivals were inspected and questioned, along with exhibits of the trunks, documents, and personal objects immigrants carried off the ships. Individual stories carry the film rather than statistics: accounts of families arriving with almost nothing, the medical checks that could turn someone back at the last step, and the mix of languages and backgrounds that passed through the same halls. The museum's own displays and artifacts do most of the talking, with the film using them to trace how Ellis Island shaped the country's immigrant population from the 1890s through the mid-twentieth century. It stays close to the building and its collection rather than ranging into broader immigration policy or politics.