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
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