May 22, 2021
Image: Immigrants arriving in New York City, 1887 engraving - Library of Congress/Public Domain
It’s a common story in many American families, the one about how the family surname changed from Hanstein to Hanson, or Fuchs to Fox according to news.trace.com. “It was changed at Ellis Island,” you may hear by way of explanation. But was it really? Like any other question in genealogy, the answer lies in the archives. And in this case, the archives tell a different story.
In 1921, journalist Elizabeth Heath described a typical contemporary scene at Ellis Island for the New York Times: “Here are rather humble people, who have left all they knew or had, and have come a long journey to a new country from which they hope much. Here they meet the last obstacle before their goal,” she wrote, trying to capture the emotional drama of the moment.
“Fear of deportation is before them all until they are safely through the mill. It seems to them the whim of a mysterious power.”
New York Harbor’s Ellis Island was not the only point of entry to the United States, but it came to symbolize the American promise of immigration. Approximately 12 million people were processed there between 1892 and 1954. It is now the National Museum of Immigration, open to the public for tours of the facility as well as researching family history.
While immigrants arrived on Ellis Island from all over the world, their descendants often begin their research with the same question: Was my ancestor’s name changed when they passed through Ellis Island?
“Emigrants coming to the ‘Land of Promise’ [Ellis Island]”
No matter where they’re from, the answer is always the same: If your ancestor’s name was drastically changed, it probably didn’t happen at Ellis Island. It’s an unpopular answer and one many find hard to accept because the legend of Ellis Island renaming immigrants is so widespread.
One element of the mythical name change that’s rarely questioned is the premise of the exchange of information between an immigrant and an immigration clerk. Somehow many of us got the idea that the immigrant walked up to the window, spoke their name, and the clerk simply wrote down a version of what he heard, often ending up with a more “American-sounding” name. Sometimes the transaction is framed as a benign misunderstanding, such as in the 1972 film The Godfather, when the young orphan Vito Andolini arrives on Ellis Island with a name tag pinned to his vest. The clerk mistakes the name of the boy’s hometown, Corleone, for his surname, and writes that down in the big book. Thus, Vito Corleone is reborn in the United States.
Sometimes the mythical name change story becomes a tale of insensitivity and outright hostility to foreigners, with the clerk imposing an Americanized name on an immigrant. In this case, an Italian family with the name Cuccia might be informed that they would henceforth be known as Cook. In this narrative, the Ellis Island experience becomes the first step in the erasure of the immigrant’s national and/or ethnic culture.
In recent decades scholars have pored through the Ellis Island archives and one of their major discoveries was this: Immigrant names were rarely changed at Ellis Island. How do we know? Because it was not the clerk’s job to transcribe the name of every immigrant. Instead, the clerk was handed a copy of the incoming ship’s manifest, a document created by the shipping company before leaving its home port. Manifest in hand, the clerk simply attempted to confirm the data that was already listed for each passenger. They often also made corrections to incorrect information.
Elizabeth Heath’s 1921 article supports this. Here, Heath describes the process. “Upstairs, in the great main hall of the building, the straggling crowd is skillfully split into a dozen long lines, each leading to the desk of an inspector,” she wrote. “Before him is spread the manifest of the steamship company, giving the required information about each steerage passenger - religion, relatives in America, amount of money, etc.”
The clerk was reading a name written by the shipping company, which was incentivized to get it right. The United States government assessed a fee to the company for every immigrant deemed unfit for immigration, for reasons that changed depending on the era, but included illiteracy, tuberculosis, and “idiocy,” among other factors. Immigrants provided the names and paperwork for the manifest when they boarded the ship.
But what about the whims of the clerks? According to its own employment records, the Department of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, between 1892 and 1924, a third of the immigration inspectors at Ellis Island were themselves immigrants and they spoke an average of three languages. New York City was itself a city of immigrants, publishing newspapers in dozens of languages to serve the city’s diverse population. The employees of Ellis Island were probably the least likely to blanch at the appearance of an exotic surname.
The most likely explanation for why the Ellis Island name-changing myth persists is the change in perception in American culture over the past century regarding issues of assimilation. Letters reveal thousands of immigrants who, once established in their new community, typically picked a name that would help them blend into the group. One man from Eastern Europe wrote to change his name to a Swedish surname, because he had moved to a Swedish neighborhood in New York City.
Tracking down a name change is not the only reason to visit Ellis Island, of course. The National Museum of Immigration is housed in the restored Main Building of the Ellis Island immigration facility, a grand, Beaux-Arts edifice of red and cream bricks, with a majestic tiled ceiling vaulting over the Great Hall, or Registry Room. Virtually every person passing through Ellis Island once stood in this Hall, from your own ancestors to actor Cary Grant, Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, and Irving Berlin, among thousands and thousands of others. Standing in the Great Hall can be an emotional and deeply meaningful experience and a way to personally connect with the courageous people who came before us, whatever they chose to call themselves.
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