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Actually, the "Americanized" names were mostly picked by the crew on board the steamship line (Cunard, White Star, Holland America, etc). The immigration inspe
by chiph 13y ago
Actually, the "Americanized" names were mostly picked by the crew on board the steamship line (Cunard, White Star, Holland America, etc). The immigration inspectors just worked from the provided passenger lists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island#Records http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island#Records
- jpmattia 13y agoIt's worth noting: The passenger lists from Ellis Island are now online. http://www.ellisisland.org/search/index.asp http://www.ellisisland.org/search/index.asp
- elwell 13y agoIt's worth noting that the password requirements for an account on that site are insane: Password Must be 10 characters and begin and end with a number. Yes, they actually mean exactly ten characters. And no, that's not has a number in it, that's begins and ends with a number.
- autodidakto 13y agoHow many people have 1234567890 as a password? Here's a login I made that anyone can use... Username: M8R-RSNT121 Pass: 1234567890 Also here is a third party search tool (that even ellis island website recommends over theirs): http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB/ellisgold.html http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB/ellisgold.html Oddly, even that third party form has an "old version you probably shouldn't use". (The link takes you to "gold". The old one is "white"). For extra laughs, take a look at the URL when you view the ships manifest images.
- raverbashing 13y agoInteresting It even mentions: " However, many last names were altered slightly due to the disparity between English and other languages in the pronunciation of certain letters of the alphabet" Unfortunately their source [34] is a link that does not exist anymore at that URL
- chiph 13y agoI can certainly see a phonetic name being created for a Cyrillic-using person. The others -- I suppose it was a case of "accented characters are hard" so they got dropped.
- fabriceleal 13y agoNot sure if it counts as an americanized name, but this reminded me of Godfather 2; in Ellis Island, Vito Andolini from Corleone was "rebaptized" as Vito Corleone.
- Amezarak 13y agoWow, that's interesting. I wonder if there was something similar going on prior to American independence? My ancestors immigrated to the US in the early 1700s. For some inexplicable reason that no one has been able to figure out, they changed their surname from a Germanic-sounding one to (apparently) totally unrelated nonsense (an unfortunate side effect is that every living family member can be uniquely identified in the world by first plus last name.) If it was some kind of passenger list screwup, that'd make some sense.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoAt least three branches of my family are pre-revolution immigrants. Two are scots-irish and just have the surnames that still exist in Scotland (though maybe anglicized over there way back, I don't actually know). One is French Huguenot, though,and it's not so much anglicized as just misspelled. It certainly would have marked them as French, but I wonder how much of it is just chalked up to poor literacy on all sides.
- derekp7 13y agoThat's interesting -- my family name is from the French Huguenot also. There are a few different spellings -- from what I was told, there was a family fight a many generations ago, and 3 brothers each changed to a different spelling. From what I understand, this was somewhat common at the time, to change the family name spelling in order to distance oneself from the family.