t pedant Names didn't get changed at Ellis Island. The name recorded at Ellis Island was whatever name had been put down on the passenger list in Europe. t /pedant

(Who am I kidding? That tag never closes.)

Most of the big name changes I've been were within a year or so of immigration, where presumably the person just got fed up with no one being able to pronounce or spell their names the right way and just decided to go with the flow and spell or pronounce it the way everyone else was. Or, they just decided that the name wasn't working out, and picked something else.

I've read about a few instances where people have found letters that their relatives wrote back to the old country, saying, "Oh, by the way, our original name sounds funny here. I'm changing to to this. When you come over, give that as your name, so that it'll make things easier."

I've read about a few instances where people have found letters that their relatives wrote back to the old country, saying, "Oh, by the way, our original name sounds funny here. I'm changing to to this. When you come over, give that as your name, so that it'll make things easier."

I really wish my grandfather had done this.

In my last name, there's this stray n that tends to drift into the spelling. I have no idea why, but even when I spell the name for someone, letter by letter, they put in the n that I didn't say. One of my relatives seems to have just given up on trying to get people to spell it right and started spelling it with the extra n sometime in the late twenties. He changed his first name from Isidore to Irving at the same time, for reasons I can't figure out.

I've also found three brothers who started out with the same last name in Poland, but in the US for some reason, one became Hochman and one became Hackman, and one seemed to use whichever suited him at the time.

My grandfather's family did this. 3 sons, 3 new names.

He changed his first name from Isidore to Irving at the same time, for reasons I can't figure out.

People called him Izzy, which is a girls' name? I've never gotten a good explanation of why my grandfather's brother had his name legally changed from Immanuel Rubin to Rubin Immanuel. It was a lot clearer why my German immigrant neighbor changed his name from Adolf Rudolf to Rudolf Adolf in the '40s.

eta: It's pretty obvious that my last name wasn't changed.

The Bohemian side of the family, where my last name came from, came over in the 1870s and I've never figured out how to track down where they came from in Bohemia. We are hampered by not knowing their parents' names. Their parents sent them to a Catholic books school in Milwaukee when the boys were 10 and 12 to escape the potato famine and never saw them again, according to family legend.

Another confusing name place in Jewish genealogy at least is the early 1800s, which is when Jews were first required to take last names in most of Eastern Europe. Until then, they'd mostly just used whatever the local equivalent of "Nathan, son of Jacob" or whatever was. Tons of instances of grown brothers each taking different names, and then when the father dies it's recorded with one of the sons' names, even though that wasn't the name the father used. Also a bunch of instances of a father taking one name, and then his son growing up and using some other name, even though the names were supposed to be fixed by then. And I've found a bunch of people who just took their first name as their new last name, so their names got recorded as Wolf Wolf or Mann Mann.

One of DH's ancestors, upon arriving in the US from England in the late 19th century, changed his name from Timperley to Templeton. I've never been able to figure that one out. It's not like Timperley is hard to say, and if he needed an alias because he was on the run from somebody, you'd think he'd choose something more distant from the original.

Wolfman!

Maybe she's a clever little liar and I am a gullible sap.

Suckah.

Look, here's when I don't take Emmett to school: Fever over 100, diarrhea, vomiting, compound fracture. That's it.

They call it bellyachin' for a reason.

One would hope you'd add crusty, oozing eyes (sans fever) or other communicable, but not mentioned above, to the list.

;p

(Yep. We've had our share of Didn't Seem Sicks passed along.)

Marcontell (not my legal last name, but Paul's) is a spelling unique to a particular branch of the Marcantal/Marcantel family that crossed from Louisiana to Texas in the late 1800s. All Marcontells appear to be related to Paul, by blood or marriage (apparently, I married into the short branch, and the tall branch produces football players). No real knowledge why they changed the spelling.