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Comment by arrowsmith | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be -sen, not -son, if it was Danish or Norwegian? And -sson (double S) if Swedish.

I imagine the vast majority of -son Anglo surnames come directly from the English word "son", not from immigrants.

My surname was originally -sen, and was changed to -son when they got to America due to a typo (according to my Grandma). Name came from Denmark

A lot of names get transliterated and/or misspelled when people move around.

Someone with the last name Blank told me their family lore was that the (Ellis island era) immigration paperwork person just gave up.

“Name changed by staff at Ellis Island” is a myth. Some people, including many Eastern Europeans, did change their own names to make their ethnicity less obvious or to shorten the name (Schwarzenegger => Schwarz, Stein => Stone, etc.)

Certainly we could rule it out as a widespread normal practice, but transcription errors or spelling changes would happen, right? Especially from languages that have letters that don't exist in English.

Yeah, I can't imagine that a lot of Russian or Polish immigrants - who wouldn't have spoken English - would have had any idea how to consistently transliterate their last names.

How do you transliterate Жижщенко? Anything with a ё in it? Or an ы, or й? Was there a policy on differentiating between "е" and "э"?

The transliteration was done by the passengers themselves, by the shipping company that transported the passengers, or by interpreters at Ellis Island.

While many of these immigrants wouldn't have been fluent in English, they still would have had access in their home countries or through the shipping company to someone bilingual who knew English as well. It's not like English was some incredibly inaccessible language to someone in Poland or Russia.

Is there even a consistent way to do it in a language? The Russian chess player Ian Nepomniachtchi is called Jan Nepomnjasjtsjij in Norwegian for instance. Must be so many ways to do it.

Depends. Some non-Latin scripts (eg Greek) have standardised transliteration schemes. Others (eg Arabic) have no clear standard, so the transliterations are wildly inconsistent.

> rule it out as a widespread normal practice

That's the part that's a myth: that it was widespread or normal. Of course small errors would happen.

But the main reason it didn't happen frequently is that employees at Ellis Island weren't even recording anyone's name. They were just checking them against manifests that were written elsewhere.

And when passengers were consulted about immigration-related issues, it was through an interpreter who would know the script and language of the arriving passenger.

More info: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...

I know it's a myth, but I wonder: did the myth become widespread because of the scene in The Godfather Part II where Vito changes his name to Corleone at Ellis Island? Or was the myth already widespread, and the moviemakers got the idea from the myth?

I have a relative in the hospital with a fairly long Russian name. The staff can all be sorted into either the "not even gonna try" category, or the "let me practice my Russian pronunciation while I walk with you down this hallway" category.

Literacy used to be much less common. If you don't spell your own name, what does it mean to misspell it?

You said your name to the civil servant, and they might "misspell" it. That is: it's recorded "correctly" somewhere (e.g. birth certificate) but somewhere along the line it becomes "wrong" (registering your child, getting new papers, etc.)

My surname is Tournoij, which I inherited from my father. him, me, and my brother have that surname: the entire rest of the family is Tournoy. Mistake during registration when he was born ("y" and "ij" are often pronounced identical in Dutch), and apparently it's nigh-impossible to correct afterwards.

As to the original of Tourno(y|ij), my guess is that it's several degrees of misspellings from Tournai, a place in French Belgium.

Interestingly, my paternal great-great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. in 1868 with Carlson as his last name; later in life, my sister was born in Sweden because we happened to live there at the time, and her birth certificate was written as Carlsson - tbh I always thought my dad just didn't fill things out right and hence why she has a different spelling on her lastname.

In my grandfather's and great-grandfather's time it was common to spell names in lots of different ways, at the same time. Made for interesting research for my father when he took up genealogy.

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