Were Immigrant Names Really Americanized at Ellis Island?
More than twelve million immigrants went through Ellis Island, America’s most famous immigration processing station, between 1892 and 1954. In popular culture and many families’ lore, Ellis Island is where many immigrants had their family names changed. Immigration officials, who often could not pronounce, let alone spell, many foreign names, are reported to have arbitrarily changed them to something that sounded more Anglo-Saxon. It is a persistent and often-repeated myth, but it is just that: a myth. Immigrants did not have their names changed at Ellis Island. For starters, inspectors there did not even write down the names of immigrants. Immigration officials did not create records of immigrants, so there was no need to come up with any presumably easier-to-spell names.
Back then, there were no visas, so immigration officials simply went by the ship passenger manifests that had already been filled out at the port of embarkation. Immigrants simply stood before an immigration clerk who had a ship manifest open before him, and answered his questions. The clerk did not write down names. He simply wanted to make sure that the answers matched the information in the ship’s manifest. Agents who filled out ship manifests when immigrants boarded ship simply went by whatever the immigrant told them. It was at that point that some immigrants changed their names to a more Anglo one. More often, immigrants changed their names after their arrival in the US to sound more American, and fit in better. There was no official name change process back then: somebody would just start to use a different name, and that was it.
