My great-grandfather left Oslo with one last name and entered America with another. (From his patronym to his father’s patronym. He travelled with his parents but some of his brothers had immigrated earlier and kept theirs. So you have brothers with different last names.) Over the years he anglicised the first part of the patronym and eventually the last part as well.
Name changes at or around arrival are common.
I know someone with a Scandinavian name based on “Brown” coming from the mistaken notion that “brun” in a farm name was a color when it was from a man’s name.
A lot of ex-slave last names come from the last names of the masters.
Thinking of the cold climate in Finland, perhaps the Finns traditionally bundled up and squinted so much that eye and hair color were generally not on display?
Most Finns have a hair of non-color (me and my relatives are prime examples): a non-descript light-brownish-greyish-blondish mop. Same goes for eye color, with the majority having eyes somewhere in the grey-blue continuum.
Nowadays dyeing hair is so common among females that I can think maybe one or two under 50 who haven’t had multiple hair dyes. Very few black-haired people here, but lots of (metalhead etc.) people who want it. Not that many true blondes, either, but lots of…not many redheads but many who want…you get the drift.
I’ve read that there is not a single documented case of immigration officials at Ellis island changing a name. In fact, the claim is that there was not even an opportunity to do so at any point in the process even if they had wanted to do so.
I just read this in the past two weeks, but I can’t come up with the source. I’ll poke around in my reading piles and see if anything jogs my memory.
I have ancestors on one side who came from Ireland with the surname 'Brown". Years ago my Mom did geneology research and discovered that they were given this name centuries ago because they were brown haired, brown eyed people (they came from County Claire which apparently had mostly fair eyed/fair haired people at that time.
American slaves were given the name of their masters so most African Americans today with English surnames didn’t have much choice in the matter. IOW they didn’t consciously adopt the name, it was given to them.
I visited Ellis Island several years ago and what I learned was that there were often spelling errors in the names because most of the immigrants were illiterate. So for example, if someone from Ireland arrived with the surname “Bradaigh”, the Ellis Island official may have spelled it “Brady” since the immigrants themselves couldn’t spell. There were lots of other examples like that, esp with immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe.
I probably read the same thing. According to whomever, the officials at Ellis Island merely checked names off manifests supplied by the ships. So if names were garbled it was someone else’s fault.
What’s more, names were really quite fluid in the old days in America. You could (and people did) generally go by whatever name you chose, and that would be your name for all purposes. There were far fewer official forms to fill out and they were rarely cross-checked. My great-grandmother went by the name Glickse (Yiddish for lucky) all her life, and it was not till after she died that we found out her name was Ida.
I would imagine that in times gone by a awful lot of the people who arrived in America through Ellis Island were were functionally illiterate and could not spell their own name anyway.
As one example, take the surname Riley in America. It’s not the spelling you see in Ireland. So where did it come from?
People who live in Ireland today whose name sounds like that spell it differently - O’Reilly, Reilly or Ó Raghallaigh.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine that names being recorded by an official at Ellis Island who spoke a different language to the immigrants he was processing would write down the name as he thought it was spelt, based on how it sounded to him. If the immigrant is illiterate, he won’t know it’s spelt differently. And even if he’s not, if he was so depserate to get into the new country and escape persecution and avoid a return sea voyage back to the old country, arguing with the first line of American officialdom he meets might not be all that prudent.
And once the immigrant has a piece of American identification, then that’s his name, surely?
I don’t see why Johnson would be a mystery in the first place. A lot of last names take the form <first name>son, and John is the most common first name, so naturally Johnson would be a common last name.
What’s a little more surprising is how Anderson is still such a common American last name, even though Anders is almost unheard of in America nowadays. I’m guessing that dates from when New York was a Dutch colony.
As a couple of us have said, name were never recorded, written down, or in any way processed in a procedure in which a change could have been made at Ellis Island. Pre-existing names were checked off lists. It’s more than a stretch. It’s been pronounced impossible by every historian at Ellis Island.
Those names may not have been right to begin with, but that’s actually more unlikely than people seem to think. By the time Ellis Island opened in 1892, all the countries in Europe that immigrants were coming from had official education, censuses, identification forms, and everything else we think of as modern. Unless you were a very young child, you knew exactly how to spell your name, because you’d have already used it on as many forms as we use our names.
Leaving the country wasn’t a casual business. People did not stroll across borders or onto ships. They had to go through a multitude of formal procedures long before they got their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.
This is an ineradicable myth, perpetuated even by the children of immigrants, presumably handing down tales from their relatives. It persists because it’s apparently exactly how people want to think of the past, or of the rightfully terrifying experience of leaving your whole way of life behind. It just doesn’t happen to be true.
I suspect a more likely explanation is that a smaller history of immigrations, compared to Britain’s mix of Saxons, Celts, Normans, Vikings and all sorts, resulted in less variety of these features, making them rarely useful as identifying characteristics.
(BTW, on the ‘check your phone book’ test, I found one Blue and a dozen Pinks.)
I think that’s the key point. Names were indeed changed along way from the old country to the new one, but not necessarily at the hands of an immigration clerk at Ellis Island. But somewhere along the way from point A to point B, many surnames were changed either intentionally or accidentally.
Yes, it’s worth remembering how much they changed by migration within Europe - Russian names would be Germanised or Anglicised, Jewish ones would be disguised or emphasised, and so on.
I think it’s just that names often get changed somewhere in the process of immigration, and “Ellis Island” is used as shorthand for the entire process of immigration into the US.
Exapno, “Anders” isn’t a phonetic corruption of “Andrew”; it’s the Dutch form of the name. The part that surprises me is that a Dutch-based patronymic became so common in the US, despite the fact that Dutch influence in the US has dwindled to the point that the original first name is so rare now.
Hm. I don’t think the Anderson origin is Dutch though. To my knowledge, Anders is not a common name. It could have been in a distant past, but now I don’t think that I know of anyone, old or young, or any famous people in history that were named that way. It sounds much more Scandinavian to me.
Could be a regional thing, but growing up in central Ohio, I knew several people with the last name Anders. Including one teacher at my school, a classmate (no direct relation to the teacher), and I even had a brief summer fling in university with a guy of the last name Anders, again, when asked, no relation to the teacher, although he was a teacher himself.
Hmmmm, the Anders clan seems to be overly represented in the field of education… Of course, looking only at my pared down sample, they are also 33% homosexual.
ETA: You were probably looking for first name Anders, now that I reread the posts. Sorry, please move along, nothing to see here. At least, nothing of importance.
