My Grandma Cel died a few years ago in her early 90s. She was the gentle and artistic matriarch of our family-the moral core of our universe.

Cel was a classic flapper in the 1920s; a wife and mother in the ’30s and ’40s; a world traveler in the ’50s and ’60s, visiting remote regions of dozens of Third World countries; and a figure of uncommon grace and wisdom in the final decades of the 20th century.

When prompted, Cel would recall her early childhood as a Jew in Czarist Russia, including dark memories of the day the Russian Cossacks terrorized her town. She told us about sailing for the United States not to escape these pogroms, but to attend her older brother’s wedding in Chicago. The transit through Ellis Island, the decision to stay-all of this was vague. She was only a little girl at the time of her arrival.

ONE AMONG MILLIONS

So even after I heard about the new American Family Immigration History Center, which opened at Ellis Island on Tuesday with a ceremony including Lee Iacocca and Tom Brokaw, I didn’t imagine I could actually find her. She was among 22 million immigrants who came over between 1892 and 1924. Talk about a needle in a haystack.

But at the urging of Edwin Schlossberg, whose New York design company produced the project, I decided to try. Ed explained that the Mormon Church, which considers collecting names of the dead to be a blessing and duty, had spent hundreds of thousands of hours painstakingly deciphering the handwriting of the Ellis Island customs officials, then entered the passenger list information into a huge data base on a new Web site (Those arriving between 1882 and 1892 will have to wait awhile).

I began my search by narrowing the possible dates of Cel’s arrival to a 10-year period between 1905 and 1915. Then I typed in her maiden name, Celia Kagen. Nothing came up. I tried “Cel” and different spellings of “Kagen.” Still nothing. Finally, at Ed’s suggestion, I used just “C. Kagen.”

This couldn’t possibly work, I thought. Kagen was a common Jewish name.

Bingo. Suddenly, there she was: Cecelie Kagen, age 5, arriving on June 7, 1911, with her mother and older brother. Point of embarkation: “Grudno, Russ.” The Web site even produced a photograph of her ship, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.

A PERSONAL MOMENT ON THE INTERNET

As soon as I got home I called my mother: I found Grandma Cel at Ellis Island! It may sound strange, but this was as exciting a moment as I’ve ever experienced on the Internet. Technology was reaching deep inside my heart, bridging expanses of time and memory, binding me to family and to history.

The computer terminals I used at Ellis Island already have long waiting lists. But starting this week, with a $5 donation to the Ellis Island Foundation, it’s possible to search the passenger lists from anywhere using the new Web site. At the site, there’s also informative multimedia about the history of the immigrant experience, and a chance to create a digital “scrapbook” with scanned-in photographs, documents and even favorite songs. These family histories will be kept on file at Ellis Island.

I’m usually fairly immune to the bells and whistles of newfangled Web sites. But this one helped me fix my beloved grandmother in the quintessential American experience. If only she was here to see it.