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

Factual Questions
61

That is what one of the more colorful credentialed individuals called it.

There are family Myths of names like “Bernstein” being changed to “Smith” without the immigrants request and that almost certainly didn’t happen but llet me quote the OP to try and explain.

To directly answer this we need to break the “Name Changing” into two separate claims and I addressed the first form. To answer the quoted OP we need to consider other forms of changes.

Apparently this is a huge area of debate and there are claims out there by even credentialed individuals who make patently false claims or suffer from confirmation bias by limiting their searches to specific groups who were unlikely to experience this event at Ellis Island.

Here is one example of an overreaching claim that is absolutely and verifiable as false.

That claim is wrong for multiple reasons but you will note that typically individuals making these arguments almost universally provide evidence from 1917. Laws and policies change but the main issue with cherry-picking data from this era is that it is way past the busiest periods of immigration through the facility.

You can search for information about William Williams two tenures running the Island and you will see that corruption, workloads and fraud by both officials and the steamship companies is rampant. There are court documents and congressional testimony that covers this in detail if you aren’t avoiding it.

Unfortunately most of the correspondence immigrants would have working to correct this data is not indexed by name but by topic and someone would typically need to sift through the documents by hand to find a specific case. They would have to do this while physically looking through documents and microfilm at NARA to do so. Anyone who is claiming different should cause suspicion as to the depth of their research.

This page from the UCIS website will verify this while covering portions on why the absolute claims are also false.

It is important to note that site also cites “INS Operations Instruction 500.1 I, Legality of entry where record contains erroneous name or other errors, December 24, 1952.”

And this list.

[ul]
[li]A fictitious name[/li][li]The name of another person[/li][li]The true name in a misspelled form[/li][li]The surname of the stepfather instead of the natural father[/li][li]The surname of a putative father in the case of an illegitimate child[/li][li]A nickname[/li][li]The name used because of foreign custom, such as the given name of the father (with or without prefix or suffix) for the surname, the name of the farm, or some other name formulated by foreign custom[/li][li]The maiden name instead of the married name[/li][li]The maiden name of the mother instead of the father’s surname[/li][/ul]

Note the issues and limitations on accessing these records as documented here.

If you read through the claims of those who tend to a claim that “there were no name changes” They almost universally make two claims in their argument.

  1. That Inspectors had no authorization to change names.
  2. Than in fact Inspectors often corrected the names manifests.

This should start to raise a few eyebrows as those two claims are mutually exclusive. With the caveat that most errors were probably caused by the steamship companies here is some information that will help get closer to the truth.

  1. Inspectors worked directly off the Manifests and annotated information directly on them as immigrants went through the process.
  2. They were authorized to make corrections to names.
  3. They were also authorized to make changes if so requested by the immigrant themselves.
  4. These manifests were the primary documents for naturalization and immigrants had the ability to amend the name when they applied for naturalization and these changes would be made to the original documents. (sometimes with a reference number)
  5. Even simple record inquires were often directly recorded with annotations on the original manifests even years later.

When experts and even those with letters after their names or job titles cite these manifests as proof no changes were made they often blame the steamship companies. While the steamship companies or the immigrants themselves were the most likely sources of discrepancies and errors they are begging the question here and they have no more grounds for their claims than the typically incorrect family myths do.

Their claims may be merely an exaggeration of the confidence level of their evidence but at a minimum they are overstating their claim.

Unfortunately this field has not embraced the open-data movement and even if you make the mistake of paying for a paper it will not have their data-sets. That said the largest cited searches have focused on populations with biblical based names or populations from Indo-European languages.

The harder line advocates like to point out that most inspectors were Immigrants and were multi-lingual but this is also confirmation bias as most were from backgrounds also in fairly Indo-European languages. As this maps directly to the largest populations and because Ellis Island is well documented as being understaffed this should be expected.

With proper funding it would probably be trivial to find official requests for corrections in the national archives. As I am only familiar with the Finnish side of immigration I can make a few claims that are far from either controversial or impossible to document with access to the national archives.

  1. Most name changes were probably initiated by the immigrants themselves
  2. Truncation may have been initiated by the immigrants or due to error.
  3. Misspelling (minor through total butchering) may have been caused by the immigrant but was most likely the steamship companies and errors on corrected names may have happened at multiple points from buying the tickets to the inspection processes
  4. The nature of butchered names and common misspellings that do not match official Finnish records most likely came from someone with little to know knowledge of the language.
  5. Common changes in spelling seem to map to sounds English speakers have challenges with.
  6. As immigrants from Finland were legally required to have passports to leave the country and those spellings are unlikely to have diverged from the official records; the common claim that verification procedures prevented these errors is false.
  7. Due to how common these spelling changes are, claims that pre-WWI processing required verification and referenced immigrants official papers appears to be false
    If a Genealogist categorically claims last names were not changed at Ellis Island your best course of action is to find another Genealogist. But you should also be very aware that not only may the information you find out never explain why there was a name change but that it is also highly likely that the tree you build is likely to be wrong anyway.

Record keeping wasn’t all that great and your ancestors records may just not exist or be cataloged. It is not uncommon to find multiple conflicting dates even in official records or even confusion between multiple people with the same name but different birth dates.

Genealogy in general should probably be considered as being “for entertainment only” and any absolute claim needs to be approached with skepticism.

To quote Bernard Ingham “Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.”

There is no direct evidence of an immigrant becoming Smith at the random whim of an official on Ellis Island. There is a lot of “cocked-up” mistakes, errors and omissions and some of it was based on people looking to make a buck. As is often in life the truth seems to be in the middle and not on the extremes.

62

I don’t think what is at issue here, among those of us who are participating in this threa, is a categorical claim that no one’s name was ever changed while they were being processed at Ellis Island.

The myth is that name changes were routine and were the result of officials who were as a rule careless, ignorant, arrogant, etc.

If you live for any significant time in America and talk to people about their family names, you will hear a significant portion of them refer casually to “oh our family name was probably X but you know that Ellis Island thing” or “we can’t locate our specific ancestors because they screwed up our name at Ellis Island.”

Americans assume that Ellis Island officials fucking up their names through inattention, negligence, or even malice is almost a universal experience.

The fact is that people have adopted that as part of their foundational myth and this right here —

—is pretty what needs to be pounded into their heads.

And if I may speculate, I think the underlying phenomenon is related to the same reason why Irish-Americans or Catholic Americans tell stories about their forebears facing discrimination—“No dogs or Irish allowed.”

It has to do with white Americans wanting to tell a story of overcoming systematic prejudice, in part to suggest that groups facing systematic prejudice today don’t have it so bad, or with a little gumption can overcome it just like their own ancestors did.

What it comes down to is any American who casually tells you that “oh they did that Ellis Island thing to our names” needs to be challenged. Do you have any specific reason for thinking that or are you just casually claiming that as a fact because you like the way it makes you feel to believe that?

63

You are making the same error I am describing here.

Let me share you a quote from one of the cited authors I am talking with right now.

Sure any story that you were a “Smith” and they changed it to “Hill” is probably bull.

But your other claims are not supported by the evidence. Complete name changes probably didn’t happen but things were mangled often. “Smyth” may have become “Smith”.

You are building a straw-man by bringing up the prejudice portion. A heavy workload, short staff and a huge volume explains most of it. There is no need to resort to romanticizing typos and clerical errors.

Even the intro lectures from the National Archives warns of this

Do not conflate the fact that intentional Americanization probably didn’t happen with the myth that names weren’t mangled or misspelled.

64

No, I am not. I am saying that that we are dealing with a persistent myth in American society that people casually repeat with no specific evidence. I am saying that people ought to stop saying that about their own family histories without having specific evidence in hand that this actually happened to a specific person in their family.

I didn’t actually make any claims that are at all addressed by any of your quotes.

This makes me think you don’t know what “straw man” means. No straw man starts with a clear statement that I am speculating about what I’m going to say next.

None of this is evidence that Ellis Island officials routinely changed immigrants’ names out of carelessness, callousness, negligence, or other related bad motives.

And it is not evidence of any spedifoc person’s claim that his or her own ancestor experienced a name change from such bad motives.

65

Strawman:
an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.
“her familiar procedure of creating a straw man by exaggerating their approach”

Please provide any quote where I claimed it was due to “bad motives” with the rare exception of false claims of US citizenship and bribes, which are documented in testimony links I offered above.

If you were a relative you could obtain the naturalization documentation in this case right here, which is an incorrect correction at Ellis Island.

https://imgur.com/a/qmn9wit

I am not making a claim that Johnson’s became Smiths, but changes WERE made it is documented and if someone wants to sift through the national archives those records exist. Unfortunately they are index by subject and not name so it is non-trivial.

But lets be clear, I cited actual text from “INS Operations Instruction 500.1 I, Legality of entry where record contains erroneous name or other errors, December 24, 1952”

Which was a policy written to deal with this issue and which calls out several ways this issue may have happened.

Outside of denials or framing the argument in a way that doesn’t relate to this point you have provided zero cites.

Lets be clear, after 1906 when name changes were required to be filed and when women and children of immigrants had to apply for their own naturalization this caused issues for these people in many ways including restricting their right to vote.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/images/AsszonyMiazaroz.jpg

I get that you are trying to dispel one type of myth but it is not proper to replace it with yet another myth.

Until someone has convinced me that people I know who had to deal with name issues didn’t and until someone actually indexes this dataset by name or digitizes it you are claiming to know information you cannot possibly know.

Bureau of Naturalization Correspondence files (1906-1944)
NARA Record Group 85, Entry 26
(ARC Identifier 563066 / MLR Number A1 26, A1 26-A )
Location: National Archives (NARA), Washington, DC

As I said, while most errors were probably from the shipping companies not all of them were.

Perhaps this issue was some how uniquely an experience of Finns who chose the cunard line, but the ability to make corrections and the fact that manifests were directly annotated during processing will require some cites as the claims of the restrictions on making corrections or changes has been debunked.

Make a case for all other processes being open to having these issues, yet a corrupt, overworked and known lax on the rules agency was somehow perfect maybe?

It is not like these were unknown issues and they actually played a role in aspects like the presidential elections. In fact the passenger ID tags that arrived in around 1906 are directly related to the issues on the island and shipping companies and were passed after McKinley was assassinated.

Your claims are not just dismissing some guy on the internet it is dismissing congressional reports that span 20 volumes!!!

I assume that your argument keeps swinging around to an argument about intent or malice despite my continued assertions that agree those are almost certainly myths that you cannot provide a cite to prove perfection of the agency that doesn’t depend on the false claim that Inspectors weren’t allowed to make corrections or changes?

While full details may be lost or require a trip to the national archives these names are typically and intentionally never fully obscured.

66

Wow, what irony. A false accusation of a straw man argument, followed immediately by a genuine straw man in the very next sentence.

I’m starting to reconsider whether participating in this thread has any benefit.

Name an actual claim I have made that is at all related to anything you have written.

No, you know what, don’t. Having read the rest of this post, it’s clear to me that there’s no point to this.

67

Exapno Mapcase has made that very claim, that it never , ever happened. :dubious:

But yes, the idea that the name changes were routine and without the immigrants approval is a total myth.

I suspect more names changes were by the request of the immigrant, perhaps by a friendly suggestion, or by simple error.

Or in the case of my Great grandfather-

Pan (meaning lord) (pronounced Pawn) nameofvillage the eighth (in that ukrainian dialect)

New name “John Theeighth*.”

But he had no last name anyway. And it wouldn’t be common to give his Christian name (and we dont know it, but certainly it could have been John). Now, this could well have been by suggestion and his approval. The official could have pointed out that they needed a last/family name, and GGDad didn’t have one. So they settled on “the eighth”.

*or as close as you can get to “the eighth” from that dialect.

68

That seems to be exactly what Exapno Mapcase is claiming, to the point where he thinks that my family’s name change is worth notifying experts about since it would be the first such name change that has been found. I don’t believe this for a second, and I hardly think that my situation is unique, especially when the name change is basically phonetic.

Now this I believe (that it is largely a myth), although there probably were at least a few officials who were careless, ignorant, or whatever. In any government office, you are going to have exceptionally good employees, exceptionally bad employees, and a bunch of largely mediocre employees. Some unlucky immigrants had to end up with the worst guy in the office handling their paperwork. Were mistakes common? I doubt it. And most name changes that did happen probably occurred long after the fact, changed by the immigrants themselves. But with an office that was processing a few hundred thousand immigrants per year, there had to be a few cases where the guy doing the paperwork just totally hosed up the job.

69

And yet that is exactly the claim that is the foundation for the myth, except that anodyne Anglo-Saxon names are not used. It is exactly the claim made by the people posting in this thread. ftg said “For me, one great-grandfather left the old country with one name and arrived in America with another.” The claim is always that long-standing family names in the old country became shorter or more easily pronounced or more “American” because they went through Ellis Island. That is the myth. It’s a hugely important myth for many families.

Dozens of people have independently studied this myth. All of them have found out that the myth is an impossibility. And I do mean all of them. I’ve been reading the refutations for many years and I have yet to come across anyone who said otherwise. Whenever the Johnson to Smith change occurred it happened at a different time or a different place or on a different form.

I asked for a verified instance of a name change at Ellis Island. Verified means that it has been examined by an expert in such things so that we can know where and when and how in the process it occurred as documented by official records and forms.

I presume that someone with the user name engineer_comp_geek is familiar with journal articles. What credence would you give to someone who claims to have evidence that will overturn the overwhelming consensus in a field and open an entirely new avenue of study but refuses to publish it, show it to an expert, or explain how it works? Why should this field be treated with any less seriousness or respect for the current massive research?

The myth was debunked years, decades, ago. I cannot believe that in all those years engineer_comp_geek or rat avatar or ftg are the very first people to dispute that. I’m going to assume that the multiple independent investigations by every organization that has a serious stake in this issue might just possibly have looked into these claims and found reason to reject them. That’s kinda the definition of research and expertise.

But as I’ve also said, I’m not an expert in this field. I’m relying on the words of experts. So they might be wrong. True, experts are seldom wrong in so obvious a way. Categorical statements seldom are made without the experts first investigating the most obvious first objection that any untrained amateur would make.

Which is exactly why I told engineer_comp_geek to get the evidence into the hands of an expert for verification. That is the very least I can ask. Your unsupported assertion isn’t persuasive. You would not accept anecdotes as proof in any field of science, so why should I do so here?

I’m not challenging you to prove me wrong. I’m asking you to so that we can know more about the how, the when, and the where. That’s what’s really of interest. That’s a valuable contribution to research. Fuck anecdotes.

Opioids don’t get me high. Documentation does. Give me the hard stuff.

70

Can do

I just provided one that matches that if you remove “bad motives” which is part of the stawman I was mentioning.

But to answer one portion, it was not more common because really the inspectors just didn’t care. It was more work for them to make a change and they just hid and destroyed documents when needed.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/theodorerooseveltcenter/TRC/LC/1600/035/0800/0870.jpg

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/theodorerooseveltcenter/TRC/LC/1600/035/0800/0874.jpg

And while most of the documents haven’t been digitized, the issues were rampant.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/theodorerooseveltcenter/TRC/LC/1600/022/0700/0786.jpg

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/theodorerooseveltcenter/TRC/LC/1600/022/0700/0787.jpg

Typically when there was bribery that involved in the immigrant’s slipping through the cracks of the system the records were never created or simply destroyed.

For someone researching their history the lack of malice doesn’t matter. The names changed and no matter who, why or where they change they sometimes did.

But the time that better controls were put in place, like after 1917 the vast majority of the number of people who would arrive through that station already had passed.

Before 1917 the system just didn’t care about the accuracy of the names that much and they would have taken aliases and yes made spelling and clerical errors.

You may argue that is minor and not important but if it impacts your ability to prove citizenship or vote or other activities because the spelling differs from your father or husbands it is important to those individuals even if their descendants don’t care.

The only way you can explain away the changes and annotations that happened is by being under the mistaken belief that those manifests were unaltered and all corrections were done by the steamship companies.

The presence of official policy surrounding changes, documentation of those changes happening discredit that claim.

I stand by my statement that random replacement of names happening is a myth but last names being changed at Ellis Island is true. Please remove any references to malicious intent if you disagree and want me to concede. Or simply provide a cite showing that investigators were forbidden from making corrections or changes.

71

No that is the foundation of a different claim, it is your instance that different types of claims must be lumped together that is the barrier to truth here.

To provide an example that is distanced from this consider these two statements.

  1. 9/11 was a conspiracy by agencies of the United States and/or individuals within such agencies were either responsible for and/or purposefully complicit in the September 11 attacks.
  2. 9/11 was a conspiracy carried out by 26 al-Qaeda terrorists who sought to enter the United States to carry out a suicide mission

Sure you could lump both of those statements into one “9/11 conspiracy theory” buckets…but one of them is true. The fact that one is not true does not discount the fact #2 is.

If you state in absolute terms “9/11 was NOT a conspiracy” you ignore the evidence that it was. The fact that there are 9/11 truthers that don’t believe it was 26 al-Qaeda terrorists who conspired to carry it out does not change that fact.

72

I need to address the characterization that I am alone in these claims as that is incorrect and here is a cite (which had been provided previously):
https://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/Manifests/name/

I provided it before but note the “Clarified or Corrected Names . . .” section.

A few “experts” I have talked to have quite clearly communicated that they avoid discussing this reality because of the non-rational and emotional response it generates on both sides.

I am a bit slow but now it is quite clear why people just keep quiet. I apologize as I hadn’t realized it was one of those subjects that is somehow unable to be discussed without resorting to hyperbole.

73

In the thread, some speak of malice or errors by immigration officials. Others may reference cases where officials cooperated in changing a misspelling, or allowing a surname variation. Is this confusing the debate?

I’ve a related question though it precedes Ellis Island. My Campbell ancestor was exiled to the colonies after the Monmouth Rebellion, but he doesn’t seem to appear on (admittedly incomplete) lists of exiles or prisoners in Scotland. Is it likely that a prisoner from a different sept (surname) of Clan Campbell would adopt the higher prestige surname as part of his giant life-change, coming to the New World?

74

The reason changes or misspelling may happen are numerous and the fact they could happen at any stage adds to the complexity. The concrete examples I am aware of which are more than simple transliteration (E.G. where ä and ö would be replaced with a or o) are quite obviously errors and not intentional. I am biased in my knowledge and it is focused on Finnish but there are many diphthongs in the language which are just unmanageable by many English speakers. Other examples were related to other challenges to non-native speakers like double consonants being pronounced.

If you only consider a name “Anglicized” if it is an unrelated replacement like “Smith” becoming “Jones” you may consider those transliteration. If you have Finn’s as ancestors and their original name was Pulkku or Pulkkinen but was written as Polk you may be of the opinion that the name was “Anglicized”.

As for your history and the Monmouth Rebellion, records are sketchy in the year 1900 even after the rise of the anti-immigration movement so good luck with that.

While this mistake was from the steamship company a good example that should be obvious to even non-Finnish speakers consider this name.

Heikinpaika, Ekayas

You can find that on www.libertyellisfoundation.org because it is a cherry picked extreme example.

The last name is slightly misspelled but “Ekayas” is absolutely butchered and was probably close to the Finnish form of Eric.

While google translate is pretty bad just listen to this audio and imagine it with a Finnish accent. It is quite understandable that this may become Marlowe. That said without evidence to the contrary the most likely reason it would have changed is that the immigrant chose to change it. But that is not true in the case of Ekayas.

The reality is that even if you find an error, unless you are lucky enough to find documentation knowing where the change happened you will probably never know.

If the name is crossed out and updated on the passenger list, it could have happened at Ellis Island or even later during naturalization or have been updated based on request. As it could have changed on the ship you need other clues to even hazard a guess.

I wish I could provide evidence but the documented example I have access too cannot be shared because the family doesn’t want the attention. This is not a cite nor am I claiming it proves anything besides I won’t be moved by statements that do not provide evidence.

As I stated before I think people overestimate the reliability of any of this data even just 110 years ago.

TL;DR This is a complex subject with very different based on arrival year and even the shipping line used.

75

None of these links work for me.

76

I can find Ekayas Heikinpaika by doing a passenger search. All it shows are a few facts. I assume you’re saying that the spelling is impossible for a Finnish name but how would anybody know where or when the name was changed?

We need to know this. When you quote “This clarification may have been performed by a steamship company clerk prior to departure, by the ship’s purser during the voyage, or by an Immigrant Inspector during the inspection process.” you say it all. Which ones were done during the inspection process? What was done with them? What were the immigrants told? What paperwork did they take with them? Was this done to individuals or whole families? If done to parts of families, what then?

The claim that names were changed at Ellis Island is not answerable by “yes they were.” That’s just the start of the research process. Nor does it explain why experts who have access to paperwork as shown on the Jewish Gen site maintain it didn’t happen.

77

Where are you seeing multiple hits? I only see one?

I am going to quote this site again.

The rest of that page will explain why typically the claims about names being changed at Ellis island are all most always a myth.

But remember that there is a very big difference between *almost always *and always

It is important to NOT confuse the former with the latter.

These events were not common, because during the rush years workers were too busy and to be honest they just didn’t care what the name was on the manifest for most cases until the massive post war restrictions were placed. If an immigrant was put through the board of inquiry is likely the only time an Inspector would even get that information.

Once again I am not claiming these changes were common in fact I am saying changes were rare but could and did happen.

Once again, corruption was rampant, and here is the actual court records from the Testimony of Albert Wank. I am only offering this because sites like the USCIS tend to present a rosy romanticized picture of the service.

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

The service was a mess, staff was over worked and underpaid and turnover was massive during the busiest years. Fines and protections like tags that were worn by immigrants weren’t even implemented until about 1906 and shipping companies often intentionally submitted incomplete or fraudulent passenger lists. There are documented fines and court cases related to this.

You also need to understand the climate at the time from the perspective of the Immigrant.

Here is a cite that covers this from a lawyers perspective.

These two laws were contradictory, and immigrants were coached to make it through the process and they were afraid of making waves.

Add in that immigrants could change their names at will after the process or during naturalization (still can today btw) the above requirement for an immigrant requesting a correction would be rare. This results in changes being made at Ellis Island typically when “inspection demonstrated the original information was in error”.

Due to coaching, stories and fear even if an inspector made an mistake during these “errors” immigrants typically wouldn’t have dared to point out the error. They wanted to get to the other side of the gate and not sit in the pen waiting this out.

The problem with most of the studies showing that these errors didn’t happen is that they almost universally use those annotated and corrected passenger lists as a source and while you make the claim that the “researcher who have access to paperwork” and that it “proves it didn’t happen” is that they didn’t have access to the documents that would be required to establish it did happen.

The case I am familiar with was discovered not through a search for a family myth but to provide evidence for a “Delayed Certificate of Birth”

Even if an individual is over 100 years and you file a USCIS Form G-1041 Genealogy Index Search Request and you have to put the names and misspelled names on the search request to get hits on that data. If you don’t know the misspellings you may not find their intent letter or naturalization form which will show a name change that they requested.

For a long time if they requested the change on this form it would have been crossed out and updated directly on the original passengers list.

There are more areas one has to search if someone knows a reliable list of the misspelled names.

If the individual had correspondence with the Bureau of Naturalization related to nationality and citizenship but NOT naturalization files you are lucky because that is indexed by name in the The Name Index to Bureau of Naturalization Correspondence. Some has been digitized but most is on 140,000 index cards or 19 rolls of microfilm.

If they arrived after 1906 their records would be in a USCIS C-File, which would have this name change marked.

If they arrived before 1906 naturalization was handled by local courts and you would have to search through every court record in the country to do a study and most of these records will not be digitized.

Now comes the rub, lets say that a change did happen and the immigrant wanted to correct it. Those records would be kept in the “Immigration Policy and Correspondence files” and many of those records no longer exist. The surviving records in this index are only indexed by subject.

This is very important.

The naturalization series includes a vast number of files containing correspondence from immigrants and citizens who had questions about their nationality status or nationality policy in general.

This data is indexed But this data is not digitized and the quantity of data is huge. To claim an change in error never happened (not that it typically didn’t) would take an exhaustive search of all of these data sources.

While I cannot gain permission to share the case I am familiar with the documentation is significant.

It includes:

[ul]
[li]Finnish Church records and a Passport that match.[/li][li]A ships contract with a properly spelled name.[/li][li]A passenger manifest with the properly spelled name crossed out and replaced with a spelling that would never be made by a native speaker but would be phonetic to an English speaker.[/li][li]A baggage claim receipt with the name spelled properly[/li][li]A vaccination record with the name spelled correctly[/li][li]Census and other documentation showing the individual kept using their original name.[/li][li]Records from a County court related to naturalization explaining that the name was changed in error.[/li][/ul]

To go back to this cite:

There is a reason the USCIS chose the term is seldom supported and didn’t say never supported.

As the Original question was:
“How Can Geneologists Caregorically **Say For Sure **that last names were not changed at Ellis Island.”

The answer is that they cannot.

This answer will stay the same for the same reason most of the name change stories are myths. They simply cannot support that claim in an absolute way.

78

I have no idea what you mean by this. I don’t talk about hits of any kind.

Yes, I’ve checked out the links you have given. All acknowledge a common problem: that there is little to no way to tell when those handwritten emendments were made in the process. They don’t rule out that some of them may have been made by immigration officials at Ellis Island, but do not ever cite a specific case in which it happens and which resulted in a family getting a new name. That’s also true of your list. No time table, no evidence of when the manifest was annotated. And you say explicitly that “the individual kept using their original name.” So how the hell is that a name change?

79

It isn’t…unless they came across after 1906 and they tried to file there naturalization papers with their original name.

Or…if their children and or wives did not suffer the same change in spelling and just didn’t care that they weren’t citizens and thus couldn’t vote etc…

I have already posted cites to archival letters that show this, where some how in the immigration/naturalization (doesn’t matter where it happened) the name a person used or had differed from what was on the manafest or their name differed from their parents.

At that time if you immigrated with your parents as a child you would never even file for naturalization papers, you simply just used your father’s.

As I mentioned before, personally the genealogy part doesn’t matter as much of that work is so error prone anway. But it is a bummer if your grandpa can’t get his passport or has issues with retirement benefits because one of these errors.

The polices that surrounded fixing these errors so that some good LDS teenager or curious adult could find his long lost relatives. These policies were directly related to exercising the rights of a citizen and were important.

Before 1906 this was slightly less impactful but as the eugenics policies of 1906 and the Anarchist Exclusion Acts started to take effect it became more critical.

Part of the reason that these errors diminished in the 1920’s examples that lots of people use is that the quotas restricted the same populations which were most likely to suffer these types of spelling error while simultaneously raising standards on all parties to produce accurate records due to this rising level of anti-immigration law.

The Immigration Acts of 1903, 1907, 1917, and 1923 were a long chain of escalations on restrictions which changed what was “important” and as federalization of the process was part of this things changed over time.

I would challenge how you can make a claim that I am in error in GQ if this is new information. Although I should disclose that until someone fully digitizes the William Williams papers that are sitting in boxes at the NY public library archives no one knows when some of the reforms were actually put in place or enforced during the most critical times.

As an example the ID hang tags seem to happen after his tenure but he is credited with implementing them.

80

None of this is evidence of name changes on Ellis Island. I think we’ve beaten our respective points to the ground, so unless something brand new appears in this thread I’m letting it drop.