Since 2014, June has been Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States, a time for Americans to remember our status as a nation of newcomers. So celebrate Immigrant Heritage Month along with us, until President Trump cancels it! After all, if you're here and you're not fully Native American, we guarantee that either you or an ancestor qualifies! As an extra bonus, we have Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame (and English/Welsh/Scotch-Irish stock) to school us about all the things we thought we knew about our ocean-crossing forebears.
The Debunker: Did Immigrants' Names Get Changed at Ellis Island?
American family lore is full of tales of surnames being changed for the New World: Guttmans becoming Goodmans, DiMartinos becoming Martins, Szelbracikowskis becoming Shelbricks. In many accounts, this change is the fault of a clueless or capricious clerk at Ellis Island, like the harried immigration officer who accidentally renames Vito Andolini "Corleone" in The Godfather, Part II when he mistakes the name of Vito's Sicilian village for his surname. Consider the poor immigrants, having given up so many worldly possessions to make it to these shores, who now discovers that they won't even be allowed to keep their last name. Sad!
In fact, there is no truth to any of these stories about Ellis Island tossing out surnames because they had too many consecutive consonants, or ended with wrong kind of vowel. We know this because Ellis Island immigration officers of the time never even wrote down names! Their job was just to match immigrants to the names on their ship manifest, to make sure all were accounted for. Any spelling error incurred by your people on arrival to America was either the fault of the shipping company or some semiliterate ancestor of yours, sorry.
Most of these so-called Ellis Island name changes probably happened in the first months and years after arriving in Ellis Island, as the new immigrants assimilated to American life. Maybe a landlord or factory boss couldn’t pronounce a complicated name, or the new arrivals got tired of spelling it to tradesmen. Maybe an unfamiliar name was getting their kids teased at school, or slowing down business at the shop. In many cases, a family would keep its old name in their communities while adopting an "Americanized" version for outsiders. Over time, as relatives scattered, the simplified version was the one that remained.
The only case I could find of a genuine Ellis Island name change was one Frank Woodhull, who arrived from Southampton, England in 1908. He was detained by immigration officials when they discovered that "Frank Woodhull" was actually Mary Johnson, a Canadian woman who had been making her way in the world for 15 years by posing as a man. After the name change was noted on the passenger list, Mr. Woodhull was allowed to go on his way. It seems that, despite their prickly reputation, Ellis Island clerks were quite progressive for their time!
Quick Quiz: In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that most of Ellis Island is actually located in which U.S. state?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.