Q & A: Names and immigration

Q:  Did immigrants get their name changed when the arrived in North America

A: Yes — but not nearly as often as popular stories and movies suggest 🇨🇦🇺🇸

A very common myth says immigration officers at places like Ellis Island or Pier 21 randomly changed immigrants’ names because they could not understand them. Historians say that usually did not happen.

Officials typically worked from passenger manifests that had already been prepared before the ship even left Europe. The names were written down in advance, often carefully checked multiple times.

What did happen was more gradual and complicated:

• Many immigrants voluntarily shortened or anglicized their names to fit into English-speaking society.
• Employers, teachers, neighbours, or government clerks sometimes misspelled unfamiliar names.
• Some families changed names to avoid discrimination or make finding work easier.
• Others simplified difficult pronunciations for convenience.

For example:

• “Kowalski” might become “Cole”
• “Giuseppe” might become “Joseph”
• “Schmidt” might become “Smith”

In Canada and the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was strong pressure to assimilate. Many immigrants felt that changing their names would help their children succeed socially or economically.

There were occasional clerical errors at immigration stations, but the dramatic image of a tired official arbitrarily renaming millions of people at the dock is mostly folklore 🚢

Interestingly, some families later forgot the true reason their names changed, so stories developed over generations blaming “the immigration officer at Ellis Island.”

Modern historical research using ship records and census documents has shown that most name changes happened after arrival, not during the immigration inspection itself.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model