Many of Castle Garden's original immigrant passenger records were stored at Ellis Island, where they were destroyed in a fire in 1897. Sources cite 7.5 million or 8 million immigrants as having been processed at Castle Garden. These account for the vast majority of the nearly 10 million immigrants who passed through the Port of New York between 1847 and 1890. The majority of immigrants processed at Castle Garden were from European countries, namely Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Scotland, and Sweden. The structure was known as by German immigrants and by Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. The word became a generic term for any situation that was noisy, confusing or chaotic, or where a "babel" of languages was spoken (a reference to the multitude of languages heard spoken by the immigrants from many countries at the site). In 2005, The New York Times estimated that one-sixth of all Americans were descended from an immigrant who had passed through Castle Garden.
