America is famously a land of immigrants, and during the years of its operation between 1892 and 1954, over twelve million newly-arrived immigrants went through Ellis Island, America’s most famous immigration processing station. In popular culture and the lore of many families, Ellis Island is where many immigrants had their family names changed. The common account is that harried and overworked immigration officials, who often could not pronounce, let alone spell, many foreign names, reportedly changed the names arbitrarily to ones that sounded more Anglo-Saxon and were thus easier to write down. As seen below, although it never happened: it is just a myth.

Immigration Processing at Ellis Island Was Different Than How Things Are Done Today

It is untrue that newly-arrived immigrants had their names changed by officials at Ellis Island. For starters, immigration inspectors at the processing station did not even write down the names of immigrants. The officials at Ellis Island did not create records of immigrants, so there was no need to come up with any presumably easier-to-spell names.

In those days, there were no visas, so immigration officials simply went by the ship passenger manifests that had already been filled out at the port of the immigrants’ embarkation. When they got to Ellis Island or any other US immigration processing center, immigrants simply stood before an immigration clerk who had a ship manifest open before him, and answered whatever questions he had.

Inspectors Didn’t Even Write Down Names at Ellis Island

Notably, the immigration clerks did not write down any names. They had no reason to do that. The clerks simply wanted to make sure that the answers provided by the new arrivals matched the information contained in the ship’s manifest. The agents who had filled out the ship manifests when the immigrants came on board simply wrote down whatever they were told. If a name was changed to an Anglo-sounding one, that was probably the first point when it would have happened.

More often, far as name changes to more Anglo ones, immigrants changed their names after they had already arrived in the US and gotten themselves situated and settled down. They did so for a variety of reasons. The key one was a desire to sound more American and fit in better. However, even when they did that, there was nothing official about it.

Today, a name change typically involves a visit to a courthouse or a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no official or formal name change process. If you wanted to change your name, you just began to use another name. That was all there was to it.

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Some Sources & Further Reading

Cannato, Vincent J. – American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (2009)

History Halls – Myths and Realities: Just How Real Was Hollywood’s ‘The Alamo’?

New York Public Library – Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One that Was)