But nobody thinks Johnny Knoxville’s real name is Johnny Knoxville, right?
And you have to confess that “Geddy Lee” sounds a whole lot cooler than “Gary Weinrib” 
I went through a similar dilemma back in my early 20s when I considered moving to Nashville to try my hand as a country singer. “Rik Osborne” just doesn’t “sound country”, and in any case I’d already spent enough time in high school explaining that, no, I’m not related to Ozzy. Then I considered going with just my first and middle names: Rick (or Ricky) Dean (I was already spelling my name “Rik” by that point, but again, it didn’t look “country”) but then I figured I’d have to keep telling people I wasn’t related to Jimmy Dean. I finally narrowed it down to two choices: reversing my first and middle names: Dean Richards, or using my mother’s maiden name and becoming Rick McKinley. But then a pair of identical twin sisters showed up calling themselves “The Kinleys”, so “Dean Richards” it was.
Getting MY family’s name “exactly right as possible” would mean I have no surname whatsoever. At some point my grandfather’s siblings acquire one, and oddly enough, for awhile they have three different ones among full siblings prior to choosing one and everyone getting their name changed to that one.
I dunno, maybe when asked for a surname at one point they just pulled something out of their ass. Fact is, though, they had no surnames in the Old Country but they appear with them shortly after arriving in St. Louis, at least according to old Census records along with various family documents.
But the notion that someone how no one’s name changed during the process of moving form the old country to the new is bogus. For all that there was a bureaucracy interested in getting things “exactly right” names still got changed.
The West and the Anglosphere of which the US is a part is strongly invested in people having a given name and a surname and our systems don’t deal well with people lacking one of those. For that matter, every couple of years I run into an issue with not having a middle name, including people insisting I have to have one, it’s legally required (no, it’s not), or a demand I make one up on the spot. I can well imagine my recent ancestors encountering similar issues when being asked for a surname they don’t have.
:smack: Of course names changed between there and here. As I said,* my own father’s name changed*.
But not by immigration officials. That’s the big, gigantic, huge, important, critical distinction. It’s myth. Worse, it’s a slander. It’s origin probably stems from anti-government suspicion and resentment, often completely justified. But saying it is rewriting the past in a pernicious way. People changed their own names. You can’t get past that by changing the subject.
If you want to continue this hijack, I’ll be happy to respond in another thread.
Back on-topic, how about Emma Chukker, who chose the stage name Emma Caulfield, because of course she did? (I mean, seriously: Chukker?)
You maybe remember her from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, where her character was forever hooking up with the character played by Nicholas Brendon Schultz?
Frankly, I’ve always had massive respect for René Auberjonois in NOT changing his quite-a-mouthful name. Can’t say it isn’t distinctive.
Cammy say it, period.
Can’t really fault Dana Owens for picking the stage name Queen Latifah, though.
There are many cases of Hispanic actors whose name mutates slightly by Spanish criteria but is apparently different enough to Anglo eyes that the mutations get specifically pointed out on IMDB. In some cases the mutation is just the loss of the orthographic accent when a movie has been recorded “abroad”, vs it being present when they work in a Hispanic country. Other times, two separate lastnames on Spanish credits get a dash in the middle for foreign credits and again IMDB will point it out. Based on my own list of aliases as reported by a Customs Officer, those are considered different aliases by the US government. How do you treat those?
When a nation’s bureaucracy insists on adding names a person doesn’t have (the patronymic and no-surname crowd) or “trimming down” the names you have (which Nava has mentioned in the past) then I question your assertion that the government has nothing to do with it. YOU see it as “those immigrants chose a new name”. The immigrants themselves might well have seen it as “you need a different name”.
You need to ground this somewhere instead of carrying it out into general “evil gummint” territory.
US immigration has never, ever changed an immigrant’s name, barring a certain number of errors or misunderstandings. Immigrants have to have papers, issued by their home (if not native) country, which are turned into US records and papers. Clerks and immigration officials are not, and never have been, allowed to or permitted to arbitrarily change names or other data at the time of entry.
If the immigrants choose to Americanize their name (almost always AFTER immigration), that’s not the same thing. If an idiot official in a town or city decides it’s on them to fix up a name, that’s on them (and just as illegal). If a nation of people/s with millennia of one or more given names and a more or less linear family name is a difficult place to have one name or eight, there is still no law or regulation that makes people truncate their legal name to fit First (Middle) Last, no matter how many forms are written that way.
But this discussion is and has been about the utterly wrong myth that “Ellis Island changed my great-grandpa’s name.” False. Completely.
Surnames are surnames, even if they are compound/complex ones from Spanish and other cultures. Since changes to surnames don’t interest me, it’s not a problem. Only those who drop or change given names are.
So (to pick an example) I don’t have Frida Kahlo listed because she was Frida Kahlo y Calderon. I have her listed because she was Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo (y Calderon [Rivera]).
Back in the 20s actors’ names were sometimes changed to make them appear to be whatever ethnicity was hot at the time. Thus Jacob Krantz, born of Jewish Austrian parents, became Ricardo Cortez, Latin lover ala Valentino.
Never said it was evil. Never. Actually, after they thought about it my relatives thought it was pretty cool - where they come from only the nobility had surnames. Wow, come to America, you can own property AND you get a badge of nobility! Wow, what a country!
YOU are the one thinking that a … let’s not called it “forced” but rather somewhere between “requested” and “required for admission” name change is bad. Which might be linked to your die hard insistence that name change never ever ever happened because that would be an error and it would be bad.
CORRECT! Errors and misunderstandings. Which you are relegating to mythical status even as you acknowledge they occur. Probably a LOT of misunderstandings occurred, regardless of how many actual errors there may have been.
Incorrect again. This is more true than it used to be, but “undocumented immigrant”, often those who are asylum seekers or refugees, may not have documents issued by their home country. In some cases their home country may no longer exist.
My father’s families were refugees who fled with literally no more than the clothes on their back and what they could carry - much of which was confiscated or used for bribes along the way. They had no documentation from the “home country” which did not want them and did not care about them. It was also far enough in the past there were no birth certificates, and since they weren’t Christian none of the commonly accepted alternatives like baptismal certificates and the like. Thank Og they were admitted anyway, which the US did not have to do, but you need to get past this notion that everything was bureaucratically perfect for newcomers. They weren’t. Which could cause some real headaches, and still can for people who need a new country but don’t have “papers”.
Fortunately, there are legal ways to deal with the situation but honestly, if the choice is between wandering (or worse) as a stateless person or changing your name to something acceptable to a new land is that really a “choice” as the term is usually used?
Likewise, to get back to the OP topic, if the “choice” is between few jobs, and only minor jobs, in your field while keeping your birth name or taking a new name and being able to make a living is that really a “choice” as the term is usually used? And who could blame someone, particularly someone who might have a family to support, for changing their name for professional reasons? If people are doing it less it’s because it’s not as necessary, not because people a generation or two or ago didn’t care about changing their names.
Obviously, you have never had an issue with your name. No, clerks can’t change it, but I have been told, more than once, by both private entities and government officials that I should change my current name to better accommodate things like computer programs. I have had people refuse to call me by my legal name and instead persist in calling me by some variant they like better despite repeated corrections. You don’t think that might have an effect?
You don’t think that a band of refugees who can not return “home”, who have come literally halfway around the world in the 19th Century, upon being asked “What is your surname? What do you mean you don’t have a surname, everyone has a surname!” wouldn’t feel some sort of pressure to change their name/adopt a new one/whatever in order to get to a safe haven and be able to have a stable, long-term home?
You’re seeing this from the government clerk’s viewpoint. I’m trying to enlighten you as to the immigrant viewpoint. The clerk is going “Ah! So that’s your surname, thanks for giving it to me, now I can complete the form!” The immigrant is going “Huh - I better remember what name I just gave them in case I’m asked again.” And in one sense it doesn’t matter which end of the voyage all this takes place - from the immigrant’s viewpoint “my name got changed when I moved to America”.
Questionable if it’s illegal. In the US you may use any name you desire provided no fraud is involved. Probably best to, at some point, regularize this with a judge which, if you say “I’ve been using this name for 20 years and I’d like all my ID’s and forms to be consistent” you’ll get if you’re a law-abiding resident. Or, in the case of my family “we are all full-blooded siblings and would like to share the same surname.”
I speak from experience it will happen anyway. I have, in the past 20 years, had to deal with banks who can’t keep straight what my legal name is. The first time is when the bank I was using was sold to another bank and the new bank, for some reason, during the transition changed the name on my account. Then wanted to CHARGE me to get the mistake corrected because “you want your name changed”. I had to go to the corporate office to get the original name restored on the account. There have been two incidents where I went to get checks printed and had my name come back mangled. Again, the same and dance where they want ME to pay for THEIR mistake. In one case "can’t we just do this to give you a middle initial and - " Fuck NO, you will put my correct, LEGAL name on my checks. Without charging me for your mistake. The second time it was "oh, well, the system doesn’t deal with with names like yours. We have the same problem with people Dutch names like Van Derwhatever and - " Well, change your fucking system! I once had a book clerk attempt to refuse to sell me something because he looked at the name on my credit card and objected that it wasn’t right - again, I had to kick it up the management ladder and while I appreciated the 10% “I’m sorry” discount it shouldn’t have happened. That’s what happens NOW, in a far more culturally sensitive world than my grandparents and great-grandparents lived in.
The system is not made for outliers and outliers can wind up with unpredictable and unexpected results. That’s not evil, it’s not an error, it’s just an effect of the system. But telling people who have experienced these effects that their experience is a myth is belittling and insulting.
Right - no errors or misunderstandings ever occurred. No one ever immigrated to America without perfect papers. No one ever felt social pressure to change their name.
Splitting the difference, though, we now have Sarah Shahi as the but-not-too-ethnic stage name of Aahoo Jahansouz Shahi.
Broomstick, you are now confusing the Ellis Island era of immigration with modern circumstances. Ellis Island and its siblings, and that style of immigration, ended long ago.
If you can’t accept that “my family name was changed at Ellis Island” is a myth - barring, as both EM and I have allowed, some certain number of errors - I’m done with the discussion. I accept that poor, poor Burmese immigrants are not being allowed to call themselves by one name and that there are large numbers of displaced persons who are having to conform to modern US demands as a condition of immigration. Not the same thing.
If you insist on prolonging this, I need to correct a mistaken impression.
Virtually no immigrants arrived in 19th century America with only one name and no surname. That’s because the overwhelming number of immigrants were European. European countries had already bureaucratized. They’re the ones who started insisting on papers and proper names and registry of birth certificates and all the other apparatus. By the time Americans formalized immigration, this was a past generation. They had to have identities just to get on the boats and the boats’ registrars. Americans just adopted the practices of the originating countries; they did not make up new rules. (It’s harder to find specific information on West Coast practices for Asian immigrants, but again the overwhelming majority of those came from countries with multi-name systems.)
All your screed has in common with what’s been said is that it includes the words “immigration” and “names”. Otherwise, it’s different times, different peoples, different practices, different circumstances. As with every other piece of information it’s important not to mix up times, peoples, practices, and circumstances or else nothing can be ever be learned.
My question referred to the whole name, even if one of the examples I gave was about scrunching lastnames together. Someone may appear as María del Pilar (firstname) when credits are in Spanish, but as Maria Pilar (no connector, no diacritic) when they’re not, and IMDB will dutifully report each case.
Yeah, that’s a good brief link. It’s the one I used in post #21.