"His name was changed at Ellis Island" #names


YaleZuss@...
 

Tom, 

If your comment was addressed to me, please be advised that the absence of any legislation addressing this issue, pro or con, guarantees that there won't be any written documentary evidence of the kind you appear to want.  Any claim that this result must be interpreted to mean that no such involuntary changes took place is the result of a logical error known as an "argument from ignorance;" you may be familiar with this kind of error in the form "The absence of evidence is evidence of absence." 
 
Before the absence of a certain kind of evidence can be meaningful, there must be a reason why it should exist if the phenomenon it documents took place.  The absence of legislation requiring such documentation means there is no reason to expect to find any, regardless of whether the phenomenon exists, so the mere absence of the documents you want proves nothing whatsoever.
 
In the absence of any actual case establishing why involuntary name-changes could not have happened, the best evidence on this are the various family narratives asserting that it did.  The "No involuntary name-changes" meme has undoubtedly already caused large numbers of these narratives to be abandoned, taking with them whatever genealogical information they contained, some of it quite possibly not available anywhere else.
 
In this context, your little old lady would be holding an ice-cream cone, and her "Where's the beef?" would be incomprehensible.  
 
Yale Zussman

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