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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

And sometimes "Americanized" means "the guy at the immigration counter didn't know how to spell their name so he put the closest thing there"

If you knew how to spell Matthäus, good, otherwise it was Matthew

"Over half of Russian migrants Americanised their names; only 4% of Irish migrants did so."

Not surprising, and I would bet the 4% consisted of Siobhans, Padraigs, etc

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I've been suspicious that the "changed at Ellis Island" story may be more of an urban legend. My family was always told that was the case, and then we found records proving my great grandparents changed their name years after migrating to the US, and for some reason they had hid that information from my grand father his entire life. My theory is that it was a point of shame having lost the family name, so they chalked it up to lazy immigration people.

My family lore says that a Russian ancestor's name was mangled in immigration, and while he hadn't expected it he was pleased at having a different name. Doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to think that if he was pleased to get a new name he might have been willing to take the credit for changing it himself, but I've seen no documents either way.

Russian names are also much more likely to get mangled, as you'd have to do a very careful sound-by-sound transfer. You can't just go by the letters, because the vowels are pronounced differently if they are emphasized in the word.

In the history of my last name:

We found records of the origins of my family in the US. Their name was not changed at first, except 10 years later the first letter "I" got inexplicably changed to a "J." Considering how close a capital I can look to a capital J when written hastily, I gotta believe it was a clerical error.

Actually, the "Americanized" names were mostly picked by the crew on board the steamship line (Cunard, White Star, Holland America, etc). The immigration inspectors just worked from the provided passenger lists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island#Records

Interesting

It even mentions: " However, many last names were altered slightly due to the disparity between English and other languages in the pronunciation of certain letters of the alphabet"

Unfortunately their source [34] is a link that does not exist anymore at that URL

I can certainly see a phonetic name being created for a Cyrillic-using person. The others -- I suppose it was a case of "accented characters are hard" so they got dropped.

Not sure if it counts as an americanized name, but this reminded me of Godfather 2; in Ellis Island, Vito Andolini from Corleone was "rebaptized" as Vito Corleone.

It's worth noting: The passenger lists from Ellis Island are now online. http://www.ellisisland.org/search/index.asp

It's worth noting that the password requirements for an account on that site are insane:

  Password Must be 10 characters and begin and end with a number.

Yes, they actually mean exactly ten characters. And no, that's not has a number in it, that's begins and ends with a number.

How many people have 1234567890 as a password? Here's a login I made that anyone can use... Username: M8R-RSNT121 Pass: 1234567890

Also here is a third party search tool (that even ellis island website recommends over theirs): http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB/ellisgold.html

Oddly, even that third party form has an "old version you probably shouldn't use". (The link takes you to "gold". The old one is "white").

For extra laughs, take a look at the URL when you view the ships manifest images.

Wow, that's interesting. I wonder if there was something similar going on prior to American independence? My ancestors immigrated to the US in the early 1700s. For some inexplicable reason that no one has been able to figure out, they changed their surname from a Germanic-sounding one to (apparently) totally unrelated nonsense (an unfortunate side effect is that every living family member can be uniquely identified in the world by first plus last name.) If it was some kind of passenger list screwup, that'd make some sense.

At least three branches of my family are pre-revolution immigrants. Two are scots-irish and just have the surnames that still exist in Scotland (though maybe anglicized over there way back, I don't actually know).

One is French Huguenot, though,and it's not so much anglicized as just misspelled. It certainly would have marked them as French, but I wonder how much of it is just chalked up to poor literacy on all sides.

That's interesting -- my family name is from the French Huguenot also. There are a few different spellings -- from what I was told, there was a family fight a many generations ago, and 3 brothers each changed to a different spelling. From what I understand, this was somewhat common at the time, to change the family name spelling in order to distance oneself from the family.

Just to add a little from my experience: I went to study English to Canada about 4 years ago (I'm Mexican) most of my Asian class mates would choose to be called James, Michael, Sophie and what not instead of their actual name exactly for that reason.

It's common for Chinese to choose an "english name" when they study english even back in China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3U5u3D2L9Q

The first day in Spanish class in middle school we had to pick a "Spanish name" for ourselves. We were called by that name the entire year by our teacher, and she insisted we call each other by our Spanish name.

In the Northeast United States.

Asian -- what kind? It's extremely common for Chinese to choose english names independently of their "true" names; the Japanese people I know don't do that.

Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese

Many Irish already had their names Anglicized by the English before they left Ireland.

> Siobhan

I'm not sure how you could possibly anglicize that, short of adopting an entirely new name. "Sean" would be phonetically close, but Siobhan is exclusively feminine.

Yes, I know it is feminine, but my mental list of Irish name is short

Irish curse.

Sharon

How 'bout Joanne?

As "Joan", "Joanna" or "Jane", presumably.

Slightly off-topic: I can't find a link, but I'm sure I read somewhere that Irish speakers in the nineteenth century would routinely anglicise their own names when writing in English: e.g., a man called Sean would sign letters as "John".

It's usually anglicized as Shivon.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Chevonne

Anglicise, surely ;0)>

"Shavaun" ~10 per million in US census name information. "Shavaughn" seems similarly [un]popular too.

Also, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Amusing-Misspellings-of-Siobh....

Anecdotally, I've never met a "Shavaun" (or "Chivonne", etc).

All the "Siobhans" I've met seemed proud of their Irish heritage and history. Making it easier and losing the Gaelic "bh" seems a bit more lower-class.

It seems like there'd be a selection bias, and our cultural attitudes toward outsiders have shifted various directions over time - we're currently pretty accepting of the Irish.

>"I've never met a "Shavaun" (or "Chivonne", etc)."

I wouldn't think I could say the same. My work means I do spell the names of most people I meet, but certainly not all. I consider my spelling to be very good but even so there are names each week that I can't spell [correctly] and/or have never written before. Homophonic alternative spellings appear to be in vogue.

As it happens I knew someone for maybe 20 years called Siobhan before I learnt that was how you spelt it; if she was using a alternative spelling I'd never have known.

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