In a message dated 5/9/2005 11:44:40 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
I recall reading somewhere, perhaps the Ellis Island web site, that
immigration officials deny that they ever changed anyone's name. They claim they took
the names as they appeared on the passenger manifest and, if names were
changed, people did it themselves to assimilate.
I hate to burden the list with my original sin, but I wrote carelessly when I
asked "no immigration official ever changed my grandfather's (Dutch) name",
so why did they change Eastern European Jewish names. This is clearly a silly
modern invention (akin to "Stanford White designed it!") and I am embarrassed
that I didn't think clearly about it.
Indeed I disovered that immigration officialdom is rather sensitive on this
point, since it impugns the professionalism of their predecessors, and also
suggests an indifference to the original culture of the immigrants (which
indifference, I am sure, was shared in some part both by the officials, as well as
the immigrants, who were eager to escape pogroms and poverty, but which we are
now hesitant to recognize).
Officialdom convincingly states to me that people on the ground at Ellis
Island were working from passenger manifests presented to them by the steamship
companies. And, furthermore, that the steamship companies were in turn working
from embarkation manifests prepared at the point of departure. And that those
manifests might have been prepared by agents working in the immigrants native
countries, selling and arranging passage to them. Although embarkation
officials (Germany, Holland, France, etc.) might credibly have been ignorant of
eastern European names, it is likely that agents working in the native countries
had to speak the language itself.
This puts more autonomy into the hands of the immigrants. Did they embrace
what they saw as the "American" culture? Did they fear being rejected as
"too foreign"? Did they, indeed, wish to reject "their own" culture? What
stories circulated in incipient-immigrant communities about the admittance
process?
There is more research to be done on this interesting topic.
Christopher Gray
Office for Metropolitan History
246 West 80th Street, #8, NYC 10024
212-799-0520 fax -0542
e: [log in to unmask]
www.MetroHistory.com
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