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  2. "His name was changed at Ellis Island"

Re: "His name was changed at Ellis Island" #names

Jules Levin
 

This "meme" as you call it, is discussed at length in an official
statement from the Immigration Service, and is available at some .gov
web page.  I suggest you reconsider your skepticism until you have read
it.  As a government official document, it does not qualify as a meme,
at least as I understood the term when I was publishing articles in the
field of semiotics.

Jules Levin


On 6/25/2020 3:52 PM, YaleZuss via groups.jewishgen.org wrote:
I'd like to ask people to reserve judgment until I have received the
document I requested from NARA.  If it is what I expect it to be, it
should resolve any serious questions about the
"no-involuntary-name-change" meme.  People need to understand that the
process was nowhere near as pristine as advocates for the meme assume,
and once one realizes how messy it was, all kinds of possibilities arise.
Incidentally, in reply to David Rosen, in my conversations with the
USCIS Historians' Office, they reported that what happened in the case
of Mary Johnson/Frank Woodhull was a change in /listing/ rather than a
change in /name/.  The evidence I have establishes that she continued
to live as Frank Woodhull.
Yale Zussman
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