How Can Geneologists Caregorically Say For Sure.[last names were not changed at Ellis Island]..?

Factual Questions
41

Did you? Let’s check.

Yep. One story. Which is not mentioned anywhere in the article.* We have no idea whether that story was accurate or wild fiction. Just because it was in a newspaper doesn’t make it at all reliable, a problem that I can attest from reading thousands of old newspapers. That there was only one story and no corroboration from other papers is not encouraging. In short, we still do not have a single verified instance of a name change.

So. What else you got?
*Even with your bizarre style of quoting you have no excuse for not bothering to mention which of my four cites you were referring to.

42

So, you’re not going to accept your own cites?

Cite 1: ** Nearly** all […] name change stories are false. bolding mine

Cite 2. *Name changes “could happen, but they are not as likely as people have been led to believe,”
*

http://www.onyschuk.com/wordpresstugg/?p=603

*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.

Leonard Lyons’ entertainment column Broadway Potpourri, in the Washington Post of April 10th, 1944, states that Harry Zarief, “the assistant concert master for Morton Gould,” and famously a father of quadruplets, had recently changed his name back from Friedman.

Friedman. His name originally was Zarief, but when his family arrived at Ellis Island the immigration inspector told him that Zarief was too complicated, and recorded his name as “Friedman.” Many years later the “Friedman” was changed back to the original Zarief. (p.9)*

There’s a huge gap between dispelling the myth that name changes by Ellis Island inspectors was commonplace to saying it* never *happened. Names that were hard to read might end up misspelled. A clery might transpose two letters or simply make a mistake in copying.

43

It looks like the immigration authorities never recorded names. I’ve seen many manifests, but can’t recall any government records of names and a quick look at one of the links confirms that they only checked the names against the manifest.

Which makes logistical sense. How much longer would it have taken if you had to write down the information on each person versus just checking against the manifest? When you’re processing hundreds of people each day, that extra time is huge.

In order to show names were Changed, you need to compare the manifest against records written by immigration officials. If those records exist, then link to them.

44

I did misread the article and didn’t realize that the Leonard Lyons column was the article referenced. Not that it matters in the slightest. Lyons was a gossip columnist. He filled column inches with good yarns and printed anecdotes by people who wanted to see their names in the paper. (I love irony.) An anecdote told to him that ran in the paper is meaningless as a cite. It has not been verified by anyone ever at any time.

I don’t understand what point you think you’re making by continuing to cite anecdotes. They are the definition of unverified. I’m asking for a verified name change. Verified means studied by experts, with the paperwork to back it up. A gossip columnist won’t cut it.

To repeat. There are no n-o verified changes to my knowledge. I will happily greet the presentation of a verified change with huzzahs. But I will not consider anecdotes as evidence. Right now, I am 100% positive that’s all you have.

Here’s another piece of actual evidence. The Ellis Island Foundations maintains a searchable database of names of immigrants that went through New York from 1820 to 1957. What do you search on? Ships’ manifests.

Wouldn’t you think that if the immigration officials changed names from the manifests they’d have that data as well? They don’t, though. Why? Because there are no such records.

45

All we can do here is provide anecdotes, since all that would be is a exception- which is a anecdote. That is data.

And your very own cites dont try and say what you are saying- *Nearly all […] name change stories are false.

Cite 2. Name changes “could happen, but they are not as likely as people have been led to believe,” *

Both of those cites are careful to not state the absolute you claim. Thus your very own cites disagree with you.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I worked as a bureaucrat for decades. I know different.

What you are trying to say is that no bureaucrat at Ellis island, *never *made a copyist mistake, they *never *accidentally transposed two letters, they never took some blurry poor writing and made a best guess, they *never *got lazy when trying to read some blurry handwriting.

Sure. Prove it. Your claim is beyond extraordinary. You are trying to say, in the face of your very own cites, that no clerk at Ellis island never, ever made a mistake.
*
Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. *

46

Call it a documented anecdote then. A story where there is a document showing the supposed name change and it being a thing that happened at Ellis island, instead of, as actually documented in thousands of instances, by an immigrant or government official at a later point choosing to use a different spelling or a completely different name.

And yet, there are no decent documented stories around, and the nature of US law and the immigration process makes the “officials changed it” or “officials misspelled it” story extremely unlikely.

No one is trying to say that, because it is irrelevant. Ellis island bureaucrats didn’t produce identification papers or government records overriding the papers immigrants already had.

The point isn’t that no name change ever resulted from a mistake made by an Ellis Island clerk, or from advice given by someone at Ellis island, whether the interpreter or a cousin “in the know”. The point is that the story of names being deliberately changed at Ellis island is false at the core. The vast majority of name changes that can be traced and documented are made in ways that makes sense knowing the nature of population records and ID papers at the time. And for the possible interpretation of “name was changed at Ellis island” that goes “well, actually grandpa’s health certificate had a typo, and he didn’t understand, or didn’t care, that this had no bearing on what spelling he could use from then on”, there appear to be no documented cases.

47

This makes all the rest of your alleged points moot. Neither Exapno, nor I, nor anyone else, has made that claim.

48

naita said what I would have said, only more temperately, so I’ll take a different tack.

Words have meaning. “Verification” has meaning. “Documentation” has meaning. “Data” has meaning. “The plural of anecdote is not data” is an absolute truth. (Who said that first? Probably Kenneth Kernaghan and P. K. Kuruvilla in the journal “Canadian Public Administration” in 1982. Earlier, Paul A. Samuelson captured the meaning in a 1967 *Newsweek *article when he wrote that “Anecdotes do not constitute social science.” How do I know this? The wonderful

[Quote Investigator]
(The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data – Quote Investigator®) site, run by a Doper, who demonstrates in every column what the definition of research is.)

An anecdote is meaningless noise. To have validity it must be researched in some way, checked, questioned, probed, verified, documented. Blindly accepting an anecdote is exactly how urban myths start. Urban myths may have some underlying insights as to what people want to naively believe about the world they live in - in this case that people want desperately to believe that some outside force changed ancestral names is obvious and powerful - but they are almost always easily debunked.

Debunkers of deeply held beliefs are never popular. Believers in mythology will go to great lengths to defend the validity of their myths. Perhaps the simplest is to move the goalposts. We’re seeing that here. The claim is that immigration officials at Ellis Island never deliberately changed names to “americanize” them or make them easier to spell or pronounce or for sheer whim or bile. Name changing was not part of the process; keeping an accurate check against the ship’s manifest at all points was bureaucratic necessity.

Well, then, change the definition. Throw out deliberate. Allow any change of any kind, however small, to count. Throw out Ellis Island. Allow any change made anywhere in the long process of immigration to count. Throw out records. Allow any anecdote of a change to count. Throw out verification. Allow accounts to go unchallenged and unresearched. Chip away at the claim so that the slightest deviation can be counted as a victory.

This isn’t science, or social science, or truth, or sense. It’s the creation of mythology - the oldest form of religion - anti-truth, tribalism, anti-intellectualism. Urban myths can be comforting, as this one purports to be. They can also be pernicious, as this one actually is. “My family is not to blame. The government did it. They didn’t care about us. They persecuted us. We’re the downtrodden little people, us, up against the elites, them. Them vs. Us.”

Anecdotes are not data. Urban myths are not reality. Stories are not more believable than documents. That Ellis Island officials changed names is the extraordinary claim here. Let’s see some extraordinary evidence of that.

49

[quote=“Exapno_Mapcase, post:48, topic:821148”]

“The plural of anecdote is not data” is an absolute truth. (Who said that first? Probably Kenneth Kernaghan and P. K. Kuruvilla in the journal “Canadian Public Administration” in 1982. Earlier, Paul A. Samuelson captured the meaning in a 1967 *Newsweek *article when he wrote that “Anecdotes do not constitute social science.” How do I know this? The wonderful

Nope, you know who said that? Raymond Wolfinger

and you know what he actually said? “the plural of anecdote is data”.

*The original aphorism, by the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was just the opposite: The plural of anecdote is data.

Wolfinger’s formulation makes sense: Data does not have a virgin birth. It comes to us from somewhere. Someone set up a procedure to collect and record it. Sometimes this person is a scientist, but she also could be a journalist.*

And you know a first hand anecdote is? *Eyewitness testimony, *which is admissible even before SCOTUS and can send a man to death.
Moving the goalposts? Here is the OP "How Can Geneologists Caregorically Say For Sure.[last names were not changed at Ellis Island]..? I heard a few genealogists say that last names were NOT changed at Ellis Island? "

So where does it say “deliberately”? He asked about changes.

So by YOU adding in 'deliberate" YOU moved the goalposts.

But I will give a better quote than your fake & misquoted one;Carl Sagan "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", aka the Sagan standard.

I can admit that “Ellis island worked routinely- and without immigrant approval- changed names” is rather extraordinary. And it has been debunked.

But “no bureaucrat at Ellis island, never made a copyist mistake, they never accidentally transposed two letters, they never took some blurry poor writing and made a best guess, they never got lazy when trying to read some blurry handwriting.” is a extraordinary claim. So where is your extraordinary evidence? *When your own cites disagree with you. *

50

I remember watching a documentary where a kid named Vito Andolini had his last name changed to the town he came from, Coreleone…

51

As I recently tried to research one arm of my family I think that most posters on here are greatly overestimating both how standardized spelling was back in the day and also ignoring how complex other factors are.

My family is from Finland, which was under Swedish control for centuries and the records from that time are from the church and the records were kept in swedish by individuals who worked in them.

This means although my Great-great grandfather was named Lauri all of the records from his homeland were under Lars and while he didn’t pass through Ellis Island his wife did a few years later and they have him down as Luis.

While we like to think of these early immigration inspections stations like Ellis Island as embracing the masses the federal government took over immigration in 1890 mostly due to concerns that Europeans that were not from the Anglo-Saxon branches would destroy American culture after steam-powered ships lowered the cost and more Italians, Greek, Slavic, Ugrian, and other peoples started coming over.

Only the steerage (poor) passengers had to go to Ellis Island for further processing as the more financially well off passengers were allowed to just leave from the docks in Manhattan where their ships actually arrived to. Remember that this is an era when eugenics and the desire for a “superior stock” was the norm among officials but the denial rate was also very low. Also there was no requirement for registration once you were in the country as an alien until well into the 1900’s if you weren’t from Asia.

The point being that Ellis Island was less about providing official papers until ~1920’s and later and more about filtering out “defective people” and even if it had been misspelled at ellis island it wouldn’t have impacted how someone spelled it when they got to their final destination.

But due to non-standardized spellings, and actually the fact that our family naming scheme is fairly recent mixed in with the fact that those who did pass through the immigration stations were poor and likely illiterate there are a dozen reasons the spellings could have changed.

Add in the language barrier and the fact that some inspectors were more interested in seeing if they could extract a bribe and the accuracy of the records is pretty amazing.

Some people came from areas where surnames were not common yet or they may not have liked the ones from the old country or possibly were assigned new names by immigration personnel who could not understand or spell the names given.

But without direct handed down information it would be hard to tell.

In my case on the Paternal line it was a mix with my g-g grandfather keeping his Finnish first name and my g-g grandmother using the English form and they used the Swedish form of their last name but using the Northern Swedish spelling. To complicate this census records also mix this up, often with state and county officials reverting to the Swedish church versions but sometime using English versions. As I think that my relatives remained functionally illiterate through the remainder of their lives I doubt that they noticed but it did become more consistent as their children aged and probably helped them.

The point is that any definitive answer on systemic differences is probably lost to time and any argument that claims differently would require specific proof. There was a lot of bribery and corruption in the system though so I guess that is a pretty good reason to believe that that other portions of the process were probably less than rigorous too.

52

I should clarify that after the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 which placed quotas on *“dysgenic” *groups, mainly Catholics and Jews, did impose literacy test.

My above post was referencing the period from federalization of immigration in 1890 to just before the eugenicists gained majority power in about 1920.

The Eugenics Record Office appointed Harry Laughlin to do research in 1911 and by individuals like the U.S. Surgeon General started to publicly embrace eugenics in around 1914. By 1917 Congress started to change laws to meet these definitions and in 1924 quotas and literacy tests were implemented.

Aliens weren’t required to register with the federal government until Aliens Registration Act 1939 and alien registrations started the following year.

It was not until this time that mandatory registration with the Federal government would have limited an individual’s ability to just correct a spelling error when interacting with a local, county or state government. Previous to that time many US born children didn’t even have official birth certificate and many had to get delayed issued versions to comply with various new laws.

53

One more bit of information, because this commonly trips people up with scandinavian ancestry.

Scandinavian handwriting is sometimes still in a gothic style or a mix/variant of it even into the early 1900s. I am not sure how this applies to other portions of Europe but this could have lead to a miss-correction in history or even a modern hyper correction if you are not aware of it.

The top of the A being closed and the lower case E, H, S are quite different and I/J and W/V are interchangeable. Some letters are connected and will look like other letters and B and* L* are often confused.

If you assume a Romanized font it will lead you astray.

54

The Quote Investigator column I cited had a link to an earlier column that discussed Wolfinger.

Now here’s a quote from me:

55

The interesting part here is all of these examples tend to focus on Anglo-Saxon or Western sources. I am not saying that this was wide spread but I am going to be sending some documentation to as for clarification from the NPS.

The differences may be isolated to edge cases like Finland but the claims here don’t match what I have seen from Kirkonkirjat records or the Finnish Steamship Company manifests which tended to use a farm name in place of a surname and often do not have a last residence or simply use the departure port for that.

Finn’s are likely to be an exception as they were typically recruited to work in mines and there were labor strikes of 1907. Which actually resulted attempts for Finns to be barred from citizenship under the Asian Exclusion Act.

Arguing that Finns were Asian Federal authorities tried to use the act to deny citizenship a group based on the Asian Exclusion act. In a 1909 a Duluth court decided that “Finns had white skins and thus could not be denied citizenship” but many immigrants walked across from Canada if they were poor and from north of the wolf line.

While a lot of the pages above are talking about the post 1920 rules and I don’t think that it was common to be changed I have the feeling that these researchers stuck to Indo-European language sourced shipping records which would have been far less likely to have this situation happen.

I am making no claim that the source of the name change is ambiguous, but their claims that alien registration station workers merely copied what was on the ships manifests is in direct conflict with the direct evidence I am familiar with.

As passports had been required for Finn’s to leave from the mid 1800’s on it is highly unlikely that they had made these changes in Finland.

In western Finland farm names typically end with –la/-lä often based on the first farm owners first name. But professionals, craftsmen, shopkeepers and soldiers would have typically Swedish names. Thus in a persons lifetime they may have many different family names.

Then the more fennoscandian parts some were still using patrilineal until family surnames were required by law post independence in 1920. But the point is that small number of people didn’t even have family names and would have had to make one up when arriving.

I see some entries from Hango with the last name Hill which doesn’t match with hiski records, or individuals who lived in Hango but that left from that poort and does match the swedish form of Peltomäki and mäki == hill in Finnish.

I am not related to them but there will only be to results that match there so if you want to pay the LDS church to view the records they are there.

This may still be a rare event and like I said before this may be specific to Finland but the claims of those posts seem to be either based in a romanticised view or they just didn’t research enough and/ suffered from selection bias based on their language experience. I may be guilty of the same bias but it is not as concrete as those cites claim.

If I had to guess they looked at manifests from origins with languages similar to English focused on laws that happened after the eugenicists rose to power. Immigration from that part of the world or at least from the poorer areas dropped off to almost nothing once those xenophobic quotas and restrictions were put in place.

56

So, I was right and you were wrong. *The plural of anecdote is data.
*

As to your second “quote” (“My post is my cite”)

I give you one by the famed philosopher:

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man.

57

Here is as much of a link to this example which I can offer due to the LDS church putting the Ellis Island data behind a paywall.

But this will show how this is not always true.

Here is the text from the NPS site.

Here is a link to the church records, and you can click on the links there to see images of the actual church documents but note it is in Alahärmä, and not Hanko (Hango) which is the port town they left.

http://hiski.genealogia.fi/hiski?en+t210307

Mattias Mäki, who would have had a passport with that name became Matti Hill at Ellis Island. Which is a combination of the familiar form of Finnish on the first name and the english form of the last name.

As many people were leaving Finland to avoid the Russification of Finland an official wouldn’t have presented a Finnish form of the name on a passport and the Swedish form would have been used for the first name. The last name would probably have been based on Kulle had it been translated to Swedish but it wouldn’t have been “Hill” on the passport or the manafest.

But I am open to learning how this change could happen if the officials were just copying other *required *documents and didn’t make changes. I can provide dozens of these per ship from Finland, and this one was just chosen at random.

58

I should also note that it looks like Matti Hill came across on the RMS Lucania which was a very famous Cunard line ship and that demonstrates that the later rules cited in the links claiming name changes didn’t happen at the island obviously were happening even on the premier shipping lines in the world at that time.

59

After emailing a few of the people originating this claim I think that one myth being dispelled, which is a complete myth but later was expanded to a incorrect absolute claim that there were zero name changes on Ellis Island.

What is absolutely a myth is that there were no secret “name changing rooms” in the Island.

What is a very big claim that is probably not true is that name changes didn’t happen on the Island.

Inspectors were paid poorly had poor retention and shipping companies were not as honest as the earlier claims stated. This is well documented in both court testimony and congressional investigations at the time.

A random page on a multi volume congressional report, this one link covering human trafficking.

News reports about how common bribes were.

“Wright and Crater’s Investigation” from 1901 that demonstrates active fraud and bribery by officials and false US citizenship claims.

https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/testimony-albert-wank

Perhaps some of these historians were misquoted or context was edited away and they were referencing these “name changing rooms” which there is zero evidence of but I am betting it was a game of telephone problem where the scope of what was known to be false grew to an overly inclusive size.

Ellis Island inspectors were human and suffer from the same faults we all do. The claim that they were never lazy or never took a bribe or made a mistake is pretty easy to dismiss.

As someone who had to trace known lineages I ran into challenges. As my connections were concrete and not some potential connection to a random with a similar name who’s data just happened to survive the years; I know you do need to consider changes in spelling at every phase.

There are lots of reasons names may have changed; from immigrants wanting to fit in to a worker having a bad day.

But these records are not digitized enough, some did not survive and some suffered from bad transcription and there was a lot of fraud from all parties. The data simply is not good enough to make an absolute claim that name changes didn’t happen on the Island.

Once again the belief that there were secret name changing rooms is pretty reliably debunked.

60

Secret name changing rooms?