No One's Name Was Changed at Ellis Island | Hacker News Reader

No One's Name Was Changed at Ellis Island

marginalrevolution.com

16 pointsimpish920836 comments

It's also worth noting that names weren't as fixed in the past as we think of them now. Just as English words didn't have consistent spellings until at least the 1600s and often later, names didn't either (meaning a son spelled his last name differently from how his father spelled it). It was also common to change your name completely after moving to a new country. One example is the many French immigrants to England during the Huguenot persecution of the 1500s that changed their French surnames into English translations of those names.

I am not as familiar with 19th and early 20th C immigration to the US, but I would imagine some of those factors were still true then as well (both creating new names and changing spelling of existing names, the latter certainly influenced by the double-digit illiteracy rates of foreign-born residents in the US up until at least the 1940s).

As for names changing in the actual process of immigration, I've worked recently with a number of refugees and seen the challenge of registering a name in the US that is written in a different character set (eg Arabic or Chinese). These names are recorded as a transliteration into the English alphabet, which is then the person's legal name in the US forever. So that definitely still happens quite a bit.

Changing one's name is still not difficult. Yes a judge (well, court) is involved but it's form-based and straightforward. In the US.

what a meaningless article - lots of stories of this happening (including on the comments on the article), and the entire article is basically saying - without any proof whatsoever - that it has never happened, not a single time, ever in the history of the millions of people who have arrived there.

Hard to believe a statement like that - and what exactly was the point of writing it?

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole

Good old Hacker News, if you're not careful about your wording you get a chorus of "aaaaactually".

His point was that people say (the comments you mention show this) that this happened so much you'd think it was a common occurrence that clerks at Ellis Island were just randomly changing names out of spite, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc. They nearly always weren't, the changes were almost always intentional on the part of the immigrant.

No reasonable human would take this to mean the process had 100% fidelity.

Hyperbole tends to make people lose trust in the author and stop reading. It is in their interest to tone it down so that their point can be heard. A decent contingent of people are sick of clickbait and tired of people using absolutes. I tend not to get too mad at people calling out silly behavior that has been normalized. The author here BARELY added anything to the articles the quoted. It seems the majority of the post itself is quoted text.

Hyperbole only makes people who don't know what hyperbole is lose trust. It's an obvious, unspoken thing between the author and reader here that he does not mean 100% but instead very close to 100%.

The author was quoting (very much the blog version of a re-tweet), so yes, there was very little added. The headline came from what he was quoting. Perhaps it would have been better to title his post something better. Actually the linked post he was quoting from has a better title.

But nonetheless, an 8 year old could read that post and know the "no one" was not meant literally, so why go into a comment section and respond to it? It just seems like garden variety "aaaactually" behavior which adds nothing to anyone's day, but is in every freaking HN post and makes you kinda hate the site you love sometimes. How much better would this place be without all of that?

The truth is sure a whole lot closer to "no one" than to the urban legend, just as if someone said (pre-2020) "no one's letter got lost in the mail and anyone who tells you that happened was lying". A statement that is right 99.9% of the time is barely even hyperbole.

The reality is (according to this article) that people everywhere think this happened, it didn't, it can be verified that it didn't via ship manifests, and people only think that because of a scene in a movie. That's what a 5th grader would take from reading it. Can we all just respond to that? It's an interesting claim.

I just read the source article and it is even more definitive in its language and not using hyperbole. It explicitly states that anyone who believes otherwise is wrong and it’s even bolded by author for emphasis. This is why I prefer the absence of hyperbole and mostly chose not to engage with articles that deploy it.

I mean, I’m not saying, I think the language was great or anything, just that it’s pretty obvious hyperbole, they obviously weren’t implying that nobody ever made a mistake, and coming in here and making comments like that just makes hacker news worse.

And not only that, it happens on like every post several times

To get clicks

> and the entire article is basically saying - without any proof whatsoever - that it has never happened, not a single time, ever in the history of the millions of people who have arrived there.

First—for proof you dig into the linked articles.

Second, that “never, not a single time” interpretation is a bad interpretation of the article. The article should be read as ordinary language and not like a mathematical paper. The process at Ellis island was to check the manifest. There’s not much opportunity to change somebody’s name when all you’re doing is looking up their name on a ship manifest.

The article was presumably written because people like reading articles about common misconceptions.

In fact the article is bristling with evidence and explanation.

It's very simple. Ships manifests were completed before arrival at Ellis Island. If names were changed, they were changed in the port of origin.

People's reluctance to believe this is wild.

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/6655/89...

Whereas today it happens all the time.

My colleage Hsung Wei Lee was told upon arrival by the Chinese-speaking American at the immigration desk, "Your name is now Willie Hsung". Which he has used ever since.

"Now" in the sense that he should expect Americans to call him that, so he decided to use it as a nickname?

Or "now" in the sense that US government documents record him under that name?

What is "the immigration desk"? When he first arrived to the US? When he got his visa? When he got his citizenship?

When he enters the US (pre-citizenship, on his Chinese passport), how do they reconcile the name on his passport with the name on his US-issued documentation?

The Chinese nationals I know in the US did not have their name changed. Some do have English names, which they chose voluntarily as nicknames, but that does not affect their legal name.

Yeah this was thirty years ago. Still, closer to today than that time was to Ellis Island.

Not chosen voluntarily. A young man, a kid really, arriving in a foreign country does what he's told. So that was his name.

You'll have to look up the documents yourself.

The Chinese nationals I know 30 years ago, both emigrants who were in my high school and the young adults who came to the US for college or grad school, did not have that happen to them.

What does "do as you're told" mean? Use that suggestion as a nickname instead of one chosen voluntarily? Or go to the courthouse and get your name legally changed?

Since I don't know who the person is, your suggestion is rather hard to follow up on.

It could also be your friend was very gullible.

Since you say it happens all the time, surely there should be more examples, yes?

He is making up a story or repeating one that fits his world view. It is a way to soothe himself after having previous notion upset (the racists at Ellis island changed people’s names).

Ooooor, repeating what he experienced, leaving it to you to fit that into your worldview.

Which apparently involves building elaborate persecution fantasies. I get it, there's a whole political party that has turned to that strategy.

This depends on what he means by "used". It could be that it's an English name he goes by, which is perfectly laudable, albeit from an unusual source. I doubt the USCIS officer wrote that down as his legal name on official documents.

The lengthy quotes that are the bulk of the article are from the much more verbose source the author linked to:

https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/6655/89...

That piece explains that at Ellis they didn't assign names to anyone, they just checked that the people matched the manifests the ships were legally required to have or passengers would need to be returned.

Steerage Act of 1819:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steerage_Act_of_1819

Based on my own genealogical research, you can’t expect exact fidelity over time once you go back 120 years or so.

From my Irish side we haves back and forth over recorded name, baptism records, common names, nicknames and what all.

Not to mention just poor handwriting. Forebears that maybe couldn’t write, local variations of names, etc.

Walsh/Walch/Welch/Welsh

Mary Ann could be:

Maria Mariah Anne Marianne Annie Anna depending on the time, relation and who said it to the census guy

One thing I am pretty sure happens: people who come from countries where they use a different alphabet get wildly different spellings of the same names. My last name (Maroon) has been spelled Maroun, Maron, etc.

In many cases you probably had someone who doesn't speak much English, doesn't know our English/Latin alphabet, and a clerk who is just sounding it out as best they can.

> No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port

So there were no errors, communication issues, or smudges in 60 years with 12 million peoples details? That seems very hard to believe

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole

well having done a bit of genealogy the last couple years yes a lot of people have had names either incorrectly written down on a passenger manifest or incorrectly indexed by someone reading it, often decades later from microfilmed documents of varying quality. I haven't read the article yet but the field is a bit less black and white than stated in the headline here.

The practice will teach you to get good at making wildcard searches or just looking at a document holistically for context.

Edit: there's an aside here about how a lot of amateur family historians are quite lazy and trust what an index / record extract will say without actually reading the source record itself. The widespread availability of record access these days has made it a bit harder to determine who has actually done correct research and who is just going with what a "hint" will reveal (garbage in-garbage out).

or latinizations? (or whatever you would call a latin sound being reduced to the 26 character alphabet)

baš -> basch

There were likely thousands of misakes.

None by Ellis Island personnel.

I don't know what your understanding of what happened there is, but it seems wrong.

Ellis Island personnel did not ask for and then reissue names to people. They checked pre-existing lists, and then those lists were filed away never to be looked again, except for by historians debunking the Ellis Island name change myth.

Even if a clerk said "your name's Joe Sch'mozle now" it didn't change anything. Ellis Island personnel didn't issue a single scrap of paper to the immigrants and did not write down the name of anyone passing through.

All they did was look at a list of names the ships arriving into port had, and make sure nobody not on the list came through (sans bribe).

Curious if you read the article? The point that it is making is that immigration didn't write down people's names at all, they were just checking them off a list, so there was no opportunity to alter, change, or butcher the names. It surely happened, but either before or after; don't blame the immigration official.

In reality, 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. Beginning on that date (i.e., when the federal government assumed control over immigration), ship captains were required to report a list of all passengers brought to US shores from foreign countries; information required included name, sex, age, and occupation

Would later official documents reference the Ellis Island records or how were the official names determined eg when an immigrant was naturalized?

it varies but after 1906, yes (I think this is what you're asking, apologies if it isn't)

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Naturaliz...

> After 1906 an immigrant was required to submit a certificate of arrival when he petitioned for citizenship in order to prove the length of his residency. This document gives the place of entry, manner of arrival, and date of arrival. This was kept in the file with the petition.

> immigration didn't write down people's names at all

Technically no, but the immigration system accepted names that must have contained mistakes and were presumably used as part of the naturalisation/documentation process later

So Phil's story about his last name being Leonardo instead of Leotardo is false?

My dad didn't arrive at Ellis island, he arrived somewhere in Sweden. But he did change his name to get a new start and for the Swedes to be able to spell it easier. It was his own choice and after escaping a communist regime in the 60s nobody could really argue with him.

So you're telling me none of the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island over the years had a similar idea?

They could have changed their names, but they would have recorded the changed name on the passenger manifest before setting sail, or after arriving and being processed. Ellis Island, the facility and staff, didn't determine anyone's names, it only cross-checked the names on the passenger manifests. Ellis Island didn't change anyone's names.

If you had read the article, you would know it makes this point exactly. Ellis officials merely had lists (written at the port of embarkation) they checked off and the name changes later blamed on them were actually conducted by the immigrants after arriving (or when they bought their ticket in the home country).

No. The false urban legend is that "the changes were done at the entry point [by immigration officials] and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications" or more specifically that these officials "carelessly or maliciously altered an immigrant’s name because it was too difficult to spell or sounded too foreign".

The link is clear that "Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family." and "immigrants changed their own names, usually during the citizenship process".

All quotes from the text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com