From the source given in the article: immigration officials did not write names down—they checked them off on a list in front of them. In other words, the name

From the source given in the article: immigration officials did not write names down—they checked them off on a list in front of them. In other words, the names were already written down. The officials were not working with blank sheets of paper on which they created lists of newly arrived passengers, but with ship manifests, official lists of passengers who had disembarked. These manifests were required by US federal law as of March 2, 1819. If an error occurred, it occurred before they set foot on their ship. It's also an error of no actual consequence, because immigration officials at Ellis Island did not issue new arrivals with any form of identity document or record their existence into any domestic registry. Their job was simply to control the point of entry. There was no bureaucratic mechanism by which an error on a passenger manifest could have followed someone off the island. "We changed our family name because a dumb official at Ellis Island wrote it down wrong" is a story that appeals to modern sensibilities, but it's a rewriting of history. https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/6655/8939 https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/6655/89...