No One's Name Was Changed at Ellis Island (via Maggie's and Marginal Revolution).
I agree with this, both the data and the reasoning. But strange things happen. As I recorded in The Disappearance of Iwntge Henken, Tracy's aunt came from Holland disguised as a boy, bearing a ticket with that inaccurate first name. So the study holds up as technically true. No officials in an American port changed his/her name. But it was false to begin with.
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The lore in my family was that the change was made by the 'ignorant' agent compiling the manifest created for boarding in the UK -- and of course our ancestor would have corrected it, had he not been illiterate.
Fascinating. I've heard versions of that story so often I would never have imagined it was completely untrue.
My father claimed our family name spelling was changed by a German-American school teacher who was trying to get the correct (i.e. German) pronunciation out of English-speaking Americans. I'm a little fuzzy on the timing but it sounded like it started with my father's and his siblings' school records and migrated out from there. I do know my grandfather's death records listed about half a dozen variations of his name.
My grandmother came to the USA through Baltimore, along with her parents and siblings, before WWI. Her name was Elsa Marek. After Baltimore, her name was Elsie Marek. She always told us the immigration officials wrote her name down wrong.
My best friend in high school was John Malyerck, pronounced MAL-er-rick. which looks like a transposed letter somewhere along the way. But I don't know enough about Polish pronunciation to know if that was actually a correct spelling and the very few descendants didn't know that.
The joke always was that a lot of letters got dropped in the ocean on the way over, as others would tell you along the way to simplify for English spelling.
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