How American Immigrant Surnames Changed After Ellis Island

Twelve million people came through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. Ask their descendants how the family name ended up spelled the way it is, and a lot of them will tell you about an inspector on the island who heard something he couldn't handle and wrote down his best guess.

Inspectors at Ellis Island didn't write down names. The paperwork got there before the passengers did.

The list was made on the other side of the ocean

Steamship companies put together their passenger manifests in the port of departure. Ticket agents and pursers wrote down whatever name a passenger told them, usually without asking to see anything, and the completed list sailed across the Atlantic in the same ship as the people on it.

When a vessel docked, Ellis Island received that manifest and treated it as the official record of who had arrived. The interview in the Great Hall was a verification exercise. An inspector read questions straight off the manifest and checked that the answers matched what was already written there. Sometimes he corrected a spelling he thought looked wrong, and when he did, the original stayed legible underneath the correction. The island also kept a large staff of interpreters on hand, which undercuts the image of a monolingual clerk drowning in Polish consonants.

So by the time anyone reached the island, the name had already been committed to paper weeks earlier, in Hamburg or Naples, by somebody who spoke the language it came from.

Then where did all the changes come from

Slowly, afterwards, in a lot of small places at once.

A school registrar wrote a child's name the way it sounded to her. A census enumerator guessed. Employers and parish clerks produced their own versions, and once a spelling had appeared on enough documents it stopped being a variant and started being the name. None of this happened on any particular morning, which is probably why no family remembers it that way. A story needs a scene.

Plenty of families did the changing themselves, deliberately. Anglicising a surname could get you past the sort of employer who read a name at the top of an application and stopped there. It also spared you having to spell yourself out loud, letter by letter, several times a week for the rest of your life. Both motives were common and both produced the same outcome within a generation.

Translation, not mangling

Some of the best-known examples aren't misspellings at all. König means king in German. A family that arrived as König and left the paperwork as King had translated the word, which takes a decision rather than an accident. Weiss to White works the same way. The German and English vocabularies overlap enough that a straight swap of meaning was available, and families took it.

Irish surnames went through something different. Ó Ceallaigh became Kelly through anglicisation, a process that had been grinding away in Ireland under English administration long before anybody boarded a ship. The prefix Ó marks descent, roughly grandson of, and Mac marks the same relationship one generation closer. English record-keeping had no use for either and dropped them, which is why so many Irish American surnames arrived in the twentieth century already stripped of the apostrophe their eighteenth-century versions carried.

Italian names tended to lose their accents and their doubled letters gradually, as families filled out American forms over decades rather than at any single counter.

The one name Ellis Island did change

There is a documented case, and it's a strange one. In 1908 the S.S. New York arrived carrying a passenger listed as Frank Woodhull. Officials worked out that Woodhull was a woman travelling in men's clothes, crossed the name out on the manifest, and wrote Mary Johnson in its place. Woodhull was admitted, walked off the island, and went on living as Frank Woodhull. The correction stayed on the manifest and nowhere else.

Why the story sticks anyway

The instinct behind it is sound. Enormous numbers of American surnames did change, and language contact is what changed them. The myth compresses years of drift into one clerk and one morning because that is easier to hold in your head than a diffuse process spread across schools, payrolls and forty years.

If your surname looks different from the version your great-grandparents used, the change was almost certainly made by your own family, somewhere in America, for reasons they had thought about. That's a better story than the one about the tired official, and it has the advantage of being what happened.