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Comment by plasticchris | Hacker News Reader

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

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“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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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