Name changing among immigrants

DEFINITION: Voluntary and involuntary changing of family surnames by immigrants

SIGNIFICANCE: Modern Americans researching their family histories have often been hampered by name changes made when their ancestors immigrated to the United States (US). It can be unsettling for many to learn that a family name held in much pride is little more than one century old. Some Americans have changed their names back to their ancestors’ original surnames, but understanding the reasons for the name changes can help provide a better understanding of what ancestors experienced when they immigrated.

It is sometimes complicated for twenty-first-century Americans to understand why immigrants of the past were willing to change their surnames when they entered the US, as name-changing tended to cut them off from their ancestors and even from their contemporary relatives. However, connections between immigration and name-changing are not merely from the past. As late as the early twenty-first century, the first section of the US government form on which immigrants apply for naturalization still contained a space for name-change requests. Its location near the top of the form highlights the continuing connection between changing one’s citizenship and name. However, while the motivations of modern immigrants for changing their names are seldom as strong as they were for immigrants a century earlier, many immigrants still choose to start their new lives in the US with new names.

Involuntary Name Changes

Many modern Americans believe that their family names were changed by lazy or careless immigration officials at immigration reception centers such as Ellis Island in New York Harbor and Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. This idea has become entrenched in American thought by family traditions, popular literature, films, and even scholarly works. However, a close study of the procedures followed at these immigration centers shows that casual name changes were rare. Immigration officers did not always follow government regulations, but it is important to note that a federal regulation specifically prohibited officials from altering the names of immigrants. However, this regulation was not drafted to protect the integrity of ancestral histories but to prevent the entry of undesirable aliens into the country.

One reason behind misconceptions about name-changing at immigration reception centers is the false notion that immigration officials asked immigrants what their names were and then simply wrote down something phonetically close to what they heard without bothering to ask the immigrants how to spell their names. In reality, however, immigration officials did not get the names from the immigrants but from the passenger lists of the ships on which the immigrants arrived. Many photographs of newly arrived immigrants at Ellis Island show them standing in long lines wearing what appear to be name tags. The tags the immigrants were wearing bore the names of their ships and the numbers of the lines on the ships’ manifests on which they were listed. The immigration officer simply copied the names from the passenger lists, including whatever errors may have been on those lists.

Language differences can undoubtedly cause confusion with names, particularly when the languages are written in different alphabets or systems. However, immigration officials at major centers such as Ellis Island usually spoke the languages of the immigrants to whom they were assigned. In fact, around the turn of the twentieth century, one-third of all Ellis Island officials were immigrants. A small army of translators was also on duty, available to assist in getting correct information. Because immigrants later often described their entire immigration processing simply as “Ellis Island” or “Angel Island,” it was easy for family traditions to incorporate the idea that their surname had been changed at one of those reception centers.

There is little doubt that many immigrant name changes were involuntary; however, it is much more likely that such changes can be attributed to errors in the ships’ passenger lists than to mistakes made by immigration officials. Errors could find their way into those lists in several different ways. For example, some surnames had no single spelling recognized as standard when they were recorded. Moreover, many immigrants were illiterate and could not spell their names if they were asked when they boarded the ships taking them to America. Those who could spell their names may not have been asked for the preferred spellings by shipping line clerks.

Some involuntary name changes came after the formal immigration process was completed. In one representative case, when a child of Polish immigrants reached school age, a school refused to register the child unless the long Polish family name was simplified. The child took the mother’s maiden name as a family name and later passed it on to his descendants. In another case, a well-meaning teacher persuaded the parents of the only Jewish boy in a small school to call him “Jack” instead of “Israel,” his real name. She was concerned that the Christian children would tease the boy. The parents complied but made sure the boy understood that “Jack” was short for “Jacob,” who took on the name “Israel” in the Bible. During the twenty-first century, such schoolteacher actions would bring on lawsuits and dismissals. Still, until the late twentieth century, immigrants were rarely in a position to argue against changing their names.

Voluntary Name Changes

Immigrants arriving in America changed their names voluntarily much more often than they did involuntarily. Most of them had already left their homes and relatives behind and made an arduous journey across the ocean to build new lives in a country whose primary language many did not speak. During the early twentieth century, few employers had qualms about discriminating against prospective employees for any reason they chose. Many employers would hire someone with a more “American” name if an immigrant's name was difficult to pronounce or spell. While changing a family name may seem an extreme step to modern, native-born Americans, it was probably seen as a minor sacrifice by impoverished early immigrants who had already given up so much simply to reach America.

Ethnic Naming Conventions

Confusion caused by differences in naming conventions among different ethnic groups has often been the cause of immigrant name changes. Even during the twenty-first century, such differences cause some immigrants sufficient problems to move them to change their names.

Chinese naming conventions place family names first, followed by given names. Sometimes, given names include generation names, which other members of the same generation share. Generation names fall between the family and individual given names. For example, the name “Lee Qin Chun” indicates a person in the Lee family and the Qin generation with the given name “Chun.” If Lee Qin Chun were to have two sons, they might be called “Lee Han Li” and “Lee Han Chou.” Because Western naming conventions have no equivalent for generation names, opportunities for confusion are obvious.

Another Chinese convention that confuses Westerners is the practice of Chinese women retaining their own family names when they marry. However, they sometimes add their husbands’ family names to their own given names. Children take the family names of their fathers. Western women have only recently begun to retain their maiden names after marriage, but this relatively new custom has done little to eliminate Westerners’ misunderstandings of Chinese married names. A question married Chinese women face when they immigrate to the US is whether they will retain their maiden names or take their husbands’ family names.

Before the nineteenth century, German Jews did not use surnames. Fathers’ first names were used in a form that would translate into English as “Jacob the son of Isaac.” In 1808, Napoleon I decreed that all Jews living within his empire must adopt family names. In some places, the government gave them a list of names from which to choose and assigned names to those who failed to make selections. When these European Jews came to America, their attachment to the family names imposed on them was often tenuous, making them more prone to change their names after arriving. In addition, Jewish merchants quickly learned that in America, their gentile customers were more likely to patronize stores with Anglo-Saxon-sounding names than those with Jewish names. Discrimination in hiring, housing, and other aspects of everyday life also made name-changing acceptable to Jewish immigrants.

By the early twenty-first century, many immigrants to the US were Hispanics, making the naming conventions used in Spanish-speaking countries important. Traditional Spanish names combine the surnames of both mothers and fathers. Full names are usually made up of two given names and two surnames. For example, the name “José Rafael Sepulveda Calderon” indicates a person whose mother’s surname is Calderon and whose father’s surname is Sepulveda. However, confusion arises from the practice of omitting the mother’s surname in informal usage. Small differences such as these can cause problems when filling out forms such as employment applications.

Spelling and Pronunciation

The Cyrillic alphabet is used by dozens of Central Asian and Eastern European languages, most notably Russian. Created during the early nineteenth century, this alphabet has many characters that resemble characters in the Latin alphabet used by English and many other languages. However, some of the characters that appear to be the same actually represent different sounds, and each alphabet has characters not in the other. Because Cyrillic and Latin characters do not match perfectly, names transliterated from Cyrillic forms often have several different possible spellings in the Latin alphabet. Moreover, some transliterated names appear to Westerners to be missing vowels, such as the name “Aleksandr.” Spelling and pronuncing Slavic names are particularly difficult for Americans and non-Slavic people. Recognizing this fact, many Slavic immigrants chose to simplify the spellings of their own names or to change their names entirely to avoid problems in their newly adopted country.

Chinese languages present even more difficult pronunciation challenges. Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, and the meanings of words depend on their rising or falling tones when spoken. Mandarin, for example, uses four different tones to give meaning to spoken words: mid-level, low falling, high rising, and high creaky-rising. For a Westerner used only to placing stress on some syllables more than others, subtle tonal variations used to convey differences in the meaning of a word open the door to considerable confusion. Consequently, some Chinese immigrants avoid such problems by simplifying their names.

In the twenty-first century, the idea of name-changing when immigrating, especially in terms of “Anglicizing” one’s name, has largely disappeared. Still, some immigrants may be compelled to change or simplify their names for various reasons. Some may feel that changing their name will decrease the chance of facing job discrimination. This is just one of the social and economic benefits many feel might come from changing their name. Changing one’s name may hasten the assimilation process, protect an individual from prejudice, allow for the creation of a new identity, and, finally, may be done just to simplify a complicated name. 

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