I know that my great-great-grandfather left Norway with one name, but by the time he was settling a chunk of swampy Minnesota prairie, records showed him with a different name altogether. His new name meant “hillside farm” in Norwegian, and he most definitely came from a rocky, cold, barren hillside farm in Norway.
So it it looks like he underwent a Corleone kind of re-naming somewhere along the line.
Although I cannot prove this story true, I have no reason to doubt it. When I was growing up we had a dentist name Mezrow. We know his mother as Mrs. Goldstein. We asked him why (she was not remarried). What he told us was that at Ellis Island (or probably port of Philadelphia where my ancestors came though) the clerk could not spell Mezrow and assigned the family a Jewish name at random, namely Goldstein. But the family always knew that their name was really Mezrow and, so when went to college he changed his name to Mezrow. Sure he could have been lying, but why would he?
Nothing like that happened in my family (except my grandfather’s Klein got changed to Kline) but you cannot convince me it didn’t happen.
This is second hand information, and if it didn’t happen to his mother but to a previous generation it’s even further back. I know that several stories my grandmother passed on to us about our family history were totally incorrect, based on later research I did. She wasn’t lying, just the information got garbled in being passed down. The same thing could have happened here. Your dentist wasn’t there, and so doesn’t know the facts. Family folklore is just that, folklore.
The problem with family folklore is that nobody ever probes it with impertinent questions. Like, why the clerk would need to spell Mezrow when the name would already have been spelled out on all the family documents handed to him upon entry?
Steve Morse’s line “They had to match the Manifest name for the system to function properly to keep track of the immigrants through all steps of the process.” is key. As soon as you think about it, you realize that changing names randomly partway through the process is madness. No bureaucratic paperwork processors would think of doing this. And if somehow they tried doing it - bureaucracies sometimes do stupid things - they would immediately record the changed name. And that would leave traceable changes for tens of thousands of people. But only one of those has ever been found. (A woman tried to disguise herself as a man and they forced her to use … her real name.)
The complete and total absence of changes recorded by a giant bureaucracy is more certain proof that something never happened than any tales told generations later prove the opposite.
My great-great-grandfather’s name got changed at some point between his birth in Switzerland and his enlistment in the Union Cavalry in 1864. The final letter of a hard-to-spell name was dropped. But we have no idea at what point he lost the letter. It could have happened when the family moved to Germany, when he boarded a ship to cross the Atlantic, when he arrived in New York (long before Ellis Island existed), or when he enlisted. (Actually, his name got spelled at least at least five different ways in his regiment’s records. We’re lucky we’re not something else entirely.)
My Daddy’s family name is an obvious mispronunciation of a common Scots/Irish name. So it continued to be said incorrectly and subsequently spelled different. So at this late date it’s a completely different name and family.
As I said upthread, the spelling of my grandfather’s name on the immigration form does not match the spelling on the ship’s manifest. We didn’t end up with a completely different name, but it’s rather obvious that they weren’t matching the name to the ship’s manifest or the spelling wouldn’t be different.
You keep saying that it never happened, and yet, the spelling on my grandfather’s immigration form does not match the spelling on the ship’s manifest.
And neither spelling matches the current spelling, so as far as your comment about immigrants walking off and changing the spelling later, apparently my grandfather did that too.
I don’t think anyone has said there couldn’t have been *any *mistakes - but the legend has never been that people’s names were “changed” by a typo on the immigration form, or because the inspector misread the handwritten “Marian” on the manifest as “Marion”. It was that the names were changed deliberately by the inspectors at Ellis Island for the purpose of assimilation (which would include spelling and pronunciation) or because the inspector had to figure out how to spell a name using English spelling rules.
There are plenty of names that are different from the ship’s manifest years later- but many of them were by the nameholder’s choice and even some of the others were changed well after Ellis Island. For example, I have seen the manifest of the ship that my illiterate great-grandfather traveled on. His last name is spelled correctly on it, although it can’t be pronounced properly using English rules. Everything I ever saw written regarding him had his name spelled correctly- but one of his daughters incorrectly spelled her surname starting “SC” rather than “C”. Only one out of the ten children. If immigration had changed it, they all would have had the “new” name. I suspect that my great-aunt’s name got changed when she started school
Norwegian last names in the late 1800s usually came in two forms: a patronym (like “Rasmussen”) or a farm name (like “Åssidegard”), or both. Some families kept the patronym and some kept the farm name. Note that farm names were quite variable: low level “crofters” would move to another farm from time to time. Esp. women when they married or took a servant job elsewhere. Also, for women, the “dtr” suffix of a patronym would change to “son/sen” on arrival in the US.
So a ship’s manifest/emigration record might indicate the current farm name but the immigration record might indicate the “ancestral” farm name. Or other variations involving farm names/patronyms.
A small number of Norwegians would have fixed last names, those usually indicate an ancestor from somewhere like Germany.
Well, without actually spelling out my family name, that’s the point I’m trying to make. This wasn’t a typo or a misreading. The original Greek began with the letters Τσο- (tau sigma omicron). The name on the ship’s manifest reflects this, and begins with the letters Tso in English. The name on the immigration form is spelled phonetically, So- (although in Greek the T isn’t completely silent, some people pronounce ts more like ch).
Either they weren’t looking at the ship’s manifest at all, or they deliberately changed it to be phonetic. If they had even halfheartedly attempted to take the spelling from the manifest, my last name would begin with a T instead of an S.
The misspellings at the end of the name on the various forms we have could be attributed to typos or misreading, but not the beginning of the name.
The types of errors that ended up in my last name were to take the word tsunami and spell it as sunomi. You could write off parts of it as a typo/misread, but the missing leading T is difficult to explain if the person writing down the name was looking at the original.
And if they weren’t looking at the manifest at all in my grandfather’s case, how can anyone claim that they always looked at the manifest and tracked people through the system using that? It makes no sense. I seriously doubt that my grandfather was all that unique.
Cool. Send it in to one of the experts and when it’s authenticated your grandfather will be famous as the first authenticated example of a name change.
I am sure there are others. I think the point is that names were not often or commonly changed and it was by no means a practice for the Immigration officials to do so. Doubtless a few officials, being immigrants themselves made some suggestions.
Look at those cites given above, : *Nearly all … name change stories are false. …A search of historical newspapers using the ProQuest Historical Database produces only one story about name changes written during the time that Ellis Island was in operation…On making the application for final papers, you should spell your name as in the original application. You have the right to change the spelling without a court process. *
etc.
So yeah, it did happen, but it was rare.
My father’s family came from Scotland in the 1760s, with a simple, four-letter surname that’s only slightly less common than Smith or Jones. In the course of 250 years, it’s been spelled five different ways.
My mother’s five-great grandparents immigrated to Baltimore in 1826 with the Bohemian surname of Poskocil. Their descendents still bear it unaltered, with one exception: my grandfather adopted a more “American” name in the 1920s.
Make of that what you will.
My last name has only three letters. In doing genealogy research, I have come across at least six different spellings; often there were several different spelling attached to the same individual from different sources.
All of this was *after *my great-great grandfather came over from Germany.
I’m disinclined to believe the family legends that Ellis Island changed their family names. Lots of people have dubious family histories. For every person who actually descended from an “Indian princess,” I suspect there are dozens more whose misguided family tales wrongly say the same.
I have two questions: Did Ellis Island even give immigrants immigration papers? And is there evidence that immigrants were forced, by law or custom, to use those immigration papers as identification? The historical sources all make it clear that immigrants could use whatever name they wanted after they immigrated. What evidence do the family legend supporters have that says otherwise?
I think we’re used to a world of ubiquitous IDs nominally intended to prevent crime or support easy credit. The world wasn’t always structured that way. Even if immigrants got a document with the wrong name on it from Ellis Island, I don’t think it determined the course of the rest of their lives, or even the name they used in their day-to-day lives.
It’s one thing to believe “family legend”. It’s another thing to believe actual government forms at either end.
In fact, for a lot of people like me it’s these forms that inform us of the name change. No family lore whatsoever.
I think there’s a big difference between saying
— Our family name was changed some time after setting out for America
And
— Civil servants at Ellis Island routinely changed family names of immigrants out of callousness, carelessness, ignorance, arrogance, etc.
Can you provide citations or point to what point in your citations makes this stronger claim that there are absolutely no authenticated examples?
I do note that the first citation includes an example found at the time, and the second merely argues it was not a regular occurrence. I did not see anything in the third one way or the other, and then the fourth includes another example: “his typewritten name on the Record of Detained Aliens page is basically the same as the Manifest, ‘Emerik Fockt.’” (Essentially the same means not the same.)
I have no problem with the idea that the idea is much more common than the actual occurrence. I do have problems with two articles saying “No!” emphatically and then providing examples.
And that “example” is the same woman disguising herself as a man - who was merely told to use her real name and did not have her name changed at any time - that I’ve already cited as a non-change in post #24. :smack:
I’ll stand by my statements and by the cites I’ve given as evidence for them.
I already showed that by your cites, such changes were unusual but did happen on rare occasion.