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Comment by fjjjrjj | Hacker News Reader

My Norwegian ancestors arrived in the US as Nordhus surname, and left immigration with a completely unrelated -son surname. That happened a lot and I understand it's because they didn't speak English and the immigration officers had busy lines to process so they used a default name of sorts on the paperwork.

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This is a common myth that often shows up in family lore and has bled into popular culture, but it simply isn't true. Historians are unanimous that it didn't happen (with perhaps some extraordinarily rare edge cases).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ellis-island-isnt-...

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

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

Yup. It was common in the 1800's and early 1900's for immigrants to change their last name to become more "American", to assimilate better.

I don't believe this was a common thing to do upon arrival -- it was more like, when they wanted to open a business and be perceived as more American, more established, more trustworthy. It might not even be the immigrants themselves but their second-generation children, or even third generation.

If you visit a cemetery with lots of 1800's gravestones, it's pretty wild to see crazy diversity of last names from all over Europe, that we just don't have any more. Ellis Island didn't simplify or change anything. And which shows that in many of those cases, it was indeed the children who changed their name.

My family's last name was probably Schaefer in Germany. The earliest graves in America show them as Scheffert instead but shortly after they became "Shuford" which I guess they thought sounded more English (they were here pre-Revolution).

I always find it funny they did such a bad job of anglicizing it. Shuford doesn't really sound any more English to my ears.

Ha, that's a funny one -- Shuford is an unusual one. If they'd gone with "Shefford", it would have sounded 100% Anglicized:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shefford,_Bedfordshire

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