Smoke pours from the ears of veteran genealogists when they hear “his
name was changed by the immigration authorities”. Numerous analyses of
the experience of immigrants through Ellis Island and Castle Garden
offer convincing evidence that US immigration authorities used ship’s
manifests and the landing card pinned to the immigrant’s clothing to
determine their name and did not change anyone’s name.

So, why is the “my grandfather told me his name was changed at Ellis
Island” so widespread?  Either an entire generation of immigrants
conspired to lie to their children about how their name changed, or
SOMETHING actually happened.

Consider the case of my grandfather, who arrived via Castle Garden in
1891. All I know for sure is that his name was KEMAK on the 1891
manifest and COHEN on his 1895 marriage certificate. The story my
uncle told me was “when they asked his name, he gave his full Hebrew
name, including HaKohain and they wrote down Cohen.” My uncle would
have heard this directly from his father, who was the actual
immigrant. So where does the story come from?

A possibility:

The day he arrived, my grandfather was 19 years old, alone in a
strange country, whose language and customs he did not know.  It seems
likely to me that, when he left the immigration hall, tired and
bewildered, he would have been relieved to find a helpful Yiddish
speaker from an immigrant aid society (perhaps HIAS?) outside the
building. That person would have given him advice and direction. Part
of that advice might have been “no one here can pronounce your name,
your name should be _______.” It could have been as simple as the aid
society person writing down the immigrant’s name in Roman letters, so
that the immigrant would know how to write it. (Note that the stories
often say “they wrote down…”  Wrote down where? Apparently, immigrants
left the customs hall with no documentation from the US government.
So, if their name was written down and given to them, someone other
than a government agent did the writing.)  In my grandfather's case,
the name KEMAK was easy enough to pronounce, so that would not be a
reason to change it.  I lean in the direction of someone writing his
name in English, based on his Hebrew name and not his civil name. I do
not know who that someone was, but it almost certainly was not a
representative of the US government.

While we think of our grandparents as worldly and wise, at 19 years
old, they would have been neither, and could easily make the false
assumption that the HIAS person had some kind of government authority.

Re why was this story perpetuated if there is no basis?

I would counter:  Do Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans,
German-Americans, Polish-Americans, etc, etc., have the same stories of
name changing?   Maybe the question is, why did specifically Jewish
families tell this bubbe  mayse?   My own theory is that many immigrants
were met at the dock by relatives who already were here and established
enough to invite siblings or cousins from the old country.  And the
first thing they heard was that "in America the family name is ......" 
All my cousins assured me that "Faivasovich" must have been changed at
Ellis Island to Morris.  When thru Jewishgen I found out that
Faivasovich was on the manifest, our founding greatgrandfather was
operating a business in Chicago 2 yrs after arrival with the name
Faivasovich, our grandmother was married in 1897 with that maiden name,
and ONLY in the census of 1900 hundred did Morris appear and Faivasovich
disappear!  Still they had believed the bobbe mayse. My own theory is
that the change on arrival by immigration officials (half of whom were
naturalized citizens themselves and among them spoke 40 languages) was
the least embarrassing and simplest to tell the children when they
started to ask about their names.

Jules Levin

On 6/25/2020 9:36 AM, peter.cohen@... wrote:

Smoke pours from the ears of veteran genealogists when they hear “his
name was changed by the immigration authorities”. Numerous analyses of
the experience of immigrants through Ellis Island and Castle Garden
offer convincing evidence that US immigration authorities used ship’s
manifests and the landing card pinned to the immigrant’s clothing to
determine their name and did not change anyone’s name.

So, why is the “my grandfather told me his name was changed at Ellis
Island” so widespread?  Either an entire generation of immigrants
conspired to lie to their children about how their name changed, or
SOMETHING actually happened.

Consider the case of my grandfather, who arrived via Castle Garden in
1891. All I know for sure is that his name was KEMAK on the 1891
manifest and COHEN on his 1895 marriage certificate. The story my
uncle told me was “when they asked his name, he gave his full Hebrew
name, including HaKohain and they wrote down Cohen.” My uncle would
have heard this directly from his father, who was the actual
immigrant. So where does the story come from?

A possibility:

The day he arrived, my grandfather was 19 years old, alone in a
strange country, whose language and customs he did not know.  It seems
likely to me that, when he left the immigration hall, tired and
bewildered, he would have been relieved to find a helpful Yiddish
speaker from an immigrant aid society (perhaps HIAS?) outside the
building. That person would have given him advice and direction. Part
of that advice might have been “no one here can pronounce your name,
your name should be _______.” It could have been as simple as the aid
society person writing down the immigrant’s name in Roman letters, so
that the immigrant would know how to write it. (Note that the stories
often say “they wrote down…”  Wrote down where? Apparently, immigrants
left the customs hall with no documentation from the US government.
So, if their name was written down and given to them, someone other
than a government agent did the writing.)  In my grandfather's case,
the name KEMAK was easy enough to pronounce, so that would not be a
reason to change it.  I lean in the direction of someone writing his
name in English, based on his Hebrew name and not his civil name. I do
not know who that someone was, but it almost certainly was not a
representative of the US government.

While we think of our grandparents as worldly and wise, at 19 years
old, they would have been neither, and could easily make the false
assumption that the HIAS person had some kind of government authority.

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

It is a fallacy that names were changed at Ellis Island. Immigration
personnel used the names on the passenger manifest. They were
forbidden to change any name as that might be contributing to
fraudulent purposes. Immigrants changed their names after the fact .
In New York State for instance, one could change their name merely by
adopting the new one. It was legal as long as there was no attempt to
commit fraud.

Daniel Feldman

My Lithuanian ancestors arrived in the 1880s pre-Ellis, and since I
haven't found ship manifests I still don't know where they entered the
country, or under what name. However, family lore is that they had to
buy papers to travel from Lithuania to the United States, and could not
get their own so bought them from someone named Goldberg. Possible? And
if so, what became of the paperless Goldbergs left in Lithuania?

Curious
if anyone has a similar origin story.
--
JoAnne Goldberg - Menlo Park, California; GEDmatch M131535
BLOCH, SEGAL, FRIDMAN, KAMINSKY, PLOTNIK/KIN -- LIthuania
GOLDSCHMIDT, HAMMERSCHLAG,HEILBRUNN, REIS(S), EDELMUTH, ROTHSCHILD,
SPEI(Y)ER -- Hesse, Germany
COHEN, KAMP, HARFF, FLECK, FRÖHLICH, HAUSMANN,  DANIEL  -- Rhineland,
Germany

Perhaps there was a difference between a full name change to a spelling modification. My cousin arrived in the US in the 1930's from Germany. His name was SCHULMANN. He told me that the immigration officer told him that if he wanted he could drop the second 'N', and that to do so later would be complicated. He agreed, and from then on his name was SCHULMAN.

David Shapiro
Jerusalem

This idea of a perfect bureaucracy is just not possible. No doubt it
was in the authorities' interests to present a picture of
infallibility, in order to scare people into compliance, but but you
only have to think of a ship full of excitable and exhausted
immigrants, some suffering from cholera, perhaps, many of them filthy
from the long voyage in a crowded steamship belching smoke and reliant
only on sea-water for washing,  to realise that the situation at Ellis
Island can't have been as orderly as some of you imagine it, and that
the well-trained clerks or the people they were interrogating, may
sometimes have suffered from an understandable impatience when the
clerks couldn't read the captain's bad hand-writing on the manifest or
didn't understand a particularly thick local dialect.  The clerks
wanted to get home for their supper, the passengers just wanted to
reach dry land, so shoulders were shrugged and a name change sanctioned..
I'm not saying that name-changes were the rule, or aren't sometimes
just a glib excuse for lack of research, but no-one can be positive
that they couldn't have occurred, whether willingly or unwillingly..
--
Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.

Perhaps there was a difference between a full name change to a
spelling modification. My cousin arrived in the US in the 1930's from
Germany. His name was SCHULMANN. He told me that the immigration
officer told him that if he wanted he could drop the second 'N', and
that to do so later would be complicated. He agreed, and from then on
his name was SCHULMAN.

David Shapiro
Jerusalem