I have to differ with the author of [link] . My family name changed (well after the Ellis Island era) on immigration to the States. Can't blame any INS people, though. My Pops could not spell English.

That's not disagreement; the article is about the unlikelihood of name changes actually deriving from the procedures at Ellis Island.

That's not disagreement; the article is about the unlikelihood of name changes actually deriving from the procedures at Ellis Island.

Too true. Ellis Island procedures from then are not the INS procedures of today. Today, the INS just says "No!", which is much easier to spell.

My family name changed (well after the Ellis Island era) on immigration to the States. Can't blame any INS people, though.

Ditto my family name, and ditto the blamelessness of the INS. We went for decades believing that it had been mangled by an incompetent clerk, but when I asked my grandfather about it (in his nineties at the time, recalling his arrival at Ellis Island at the age of 13 accompanied only by his also-13 best friend), he said cheerfully that he'd shortened the name himself because he wanted something short and jaunty and American (with a possible small side order of he was all on his own, would never see his parents again, and there was nobody around to forbid him from doing exactly whatever the hell he wanted with his name, so there).

My grandmother & her parents' names came from the ship's manifest (a form provided by the department of Labor) which, given the proper swedish punctuation and spelling, was filled out by a swedish speaker.

I can actually look them up at ellisisland.org and view a scan of the manifests. It's how I learned my g-grandmother's middle name and that they initially went to Lackawanna, NY (I knew they spent some time in NY when they first arrived, I just didn't know where.)

All my forebears names survived pretty remarkably intact. I do have a Russian great uncle whose name became "Walter Johnson" when he immigrated, but I don't know by what process that happened. He was 17 and didn't speak English and was the first of the family to make it to America, he may have picked an American name to fit in. I don't even know his birth name, he was always Uncle Walter to me.

I think there is a cattle egret outside my window.

Someone once told my aunt that people with my last name were Jews chased out of Spain, and then forced to convert to Catholicism when they entered France, and given the name of the town as the surname.

Mom's grandmother's last name remained intact, but they decided on the way over from Ireland that Bridget was far too Irish immigrant sounding or something so they changed it to the much more American sounding Delia. Huh.

None of my ancestors' names got changed at Ellis Island, since they came before that, but I think the Hoovers used to be Hubers and the Fanchers used to be something like Faucher (I'm a distant cousin of the Fanchers who were massacred at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is about the best I can do for interesting ancestry). And for some reason some of DH's ancestors decided to change Templeton to Timperley, or maybe it was the other way around.

I can actually look them up at ellisisland.org and view a scan of the manifests.

Isn't that cool? I found a remarkable number of relatives that way, including ancestors who were just visiting.

I think then that his brains decayed after he left the rarefied air of Oakland. Because, he is universally regarded as a joke in Boston.

I dunno about that. The one time I saw Canseco play live in Fenway, he hit three home runs and a double for Texas. The Sox fans weren't laughing at him then.