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it was not, almost all cases of translation of names or renaming that I’m aware of (as someone who defended my PhD thesis about Slavic immigration and cross Atlantic cultural connections) were done voluntarily by immigrants as a way of assimilating or leaving their previous life behind. isolated cases may certainly have existed but the vast majority of name changes that I’m aware of occurred after settling in America.
NoiseAnnoys has a new favorite as of 21:46 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 21:43
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misspelling of names was common of course but that’s not what was being talked about.
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Mar 28, 2024 21:44
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Being a Slavic immigrant to the US myself, instead of giving my actual, complicated name at restaurants and such, I give the more manageable, shares-a-few-letters "Boris." It's a transactional event, so why bother. What's funny is that it then becomes misheard as Morris.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:00
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Trabant posted:According to Max Miller -- for what the credibility of the "Tasting History" YouTube channel is worth, although he seems to do a decent amount of research -- the whole "Ellis Island clerk changing your name to sound more American" thing is largely a legend, or at best anecdotal, as there were no documents being issued there. All the immigration officials would do is compare people's names to the ships' registry as a means of checking the passengers were who they said they were. Changes in names (and the Americanization) happened after, when the immigration process would actually get underway.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:09
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Trabant posted:Being a Slavic immigrant to the US myself, instead of giving my actual, complicated name at restaurants and such, I give the more manageable, shares-a-few-letters "Boris." It's a transactional event, so why bother. table for Maurice, party of one. there’s a ton of weird myths about late 19th and early 20th century us immigration that have some how become accepted as gospel truth and they don’t make sense at all once you learn how processing centers like Ellis island functioned.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:12
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I’m of Jewish descent. My family name supposedly came from my great great grandfather. When asked for his nonexistent last name, he said “I’m Leah’s kid”. So our last name essentially is just Leah’s kid in Yiddish, with a letter removed. Probably not true but it makes a good story.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:17
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patronymics are common in a lot of cultures, ashkenazi Jewish culture included, and those often did get weirdly processed by the American immigration system.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:20
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My family on both sides changed their last names after coming to Canada to sound more scottish instead of Jewish so they'd have a chance of getting a job. We weren't sure of my grandmother's actual birthday though for quite a while, since they didn't know what it was in the Gregorian calendar when they came over, so they just kind of guessed.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:28
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“Those gosh durn clerks at Ellis Island changed the family name!” is a bit like “we have a Cherokee princess in the family tree”. Many immigrants voluntarily anglicized their names. Later generations got the idea that the family was proud and had always been proud of the old country. In their minds, corrupting the family name is incongruous with this, so the narrative is rewritten to take the decision out of great grandpa’s hands.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:33
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Guy Fieri at least owns that it was a family decision to anglicize the surname to Ferry, and he chose to change it back to Fieri in honor of where he came from.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:43
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Flavortown
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Mar 28, 2024 22:44
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verbal enema posted:Flavortown Città del sapore.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:48
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NoiseAnnoys posted:table for Maurice, party of one. He's a joker, that one.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:51
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Platystemon posted:Many immigrants voluntarily anglicized their names. This is what my family did that came here in the beginning of the 20th century. It still confuses people, but it’s easier to pronounce than it would have been otherwise.
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Mar 28, 2024 23:10
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Nessus posted:Huh! I guess family mythology lied! I bet we aren't even descended from Hercules. They just said that to hide your family's deep, dark shame of being descended from Heracles.
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Mar 28, 2024 23:15
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It's been a few years since I was there but I'm almost positive Ellis Island has a whole exhibit refuting the name change myth
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Mar 28, 2024 23:27
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500excf type r posted:It's been a few years since I was there but I'm almost positive Ellis Island has a whole exhibit refuting the name change myth It's going to stay alive forever thanks to Godfather Part 2. Not nearly as bad as the myths that Gone With The Wind will continue to perpetuate
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Mar 28, 2024 23:59
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NoiseAnnoys posted:what alternative? having your birth name stay your birth name? One alternative was being an Asian person trying to immigrate via angel island, which as I understand it was not a very pleasant experience.
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Mar 29, 2024 00:29
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my dad's family probably emigrated in the 19th century but didn't anglicize their names, or stop speaking german at home, until wwii. even then only one side of the family did it and they did it specifically to break up with the other side of the family who were german-american bund nazi supporters. hell yeah pennsylvania (i don't actually have the right to talk poo poo on pennsylvania, i never lived there myself)
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Mar 29, 2024 02:24
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Nessus posted:Huh! I guess family mythology lied! I bet we aren't even descended from Hercules. Max miller ruined that part of my family’s history too. Prince Charming looking motha fucker.
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Mar 29, 2024 02:27
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My family name is a Americanized mutation of a common French surname, but we didn't need no Ellis Islanders to gently caress it up. Instead they lived on the frontier in the 1700s and couldn't spell good.
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Mar 29, 2024 03:15
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Cat Wings posted:My family on both sides changed their last names after coming to Canada to sound more scottish instead of Jewish I'm gonna flip if it turns out you're Ashley MacIsaac
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Mar 29, 2024 03:45
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Hamish McGoldstein
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Mar 29, 2024 03:52
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Is there really no truth to the Ellis island thing? My mom's side of the family came over from Russia in like 1904 and their last names end in -dig -dack -deck and -dick and no one knows which, if any, is correct. I doubt each family unit or whatever came with differently spelled immigration papers. Or know if they even had any.
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Mar 29, 2024 04:21
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I remember in elementary school one day they set up a kind of ellis island LARP in the gym we were supposed to go through as immigrants, where all the teachers sat behind stalls with gibberish names and yelled gibberish at us to simulate how none of us knew english, and we were roughly herded from place to place by other teachers pretending to be security. some of us got thrown in the fake jail
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Mar 29, 2024 04:24
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It certainly doesn't have to be institutional to be endemic, one set of great grandparents changed their name from MacGregor to an anglicized name BC apparently community mistrust of Scots was a thing in interwar Australia for some reason?
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Mar 29, 2024 04:53
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I studied one Black family that moved to my area from Virginia in the 1800s, and their name was Bloxsom. Or Blaxsom. Or Bloxon. Bloxom. Blackson. Blacksum. Bloxsum. I can't even remember all the variants, but it was impressive. Bloxsom is what ended up on the graves of two of their children, but wowsers I wonder what the gently caress it was really supposed to be.
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Mar 29, 2024 05:00
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Laopooh posted:Is there really no truth to the Ellis island thing? My mom's side of the family came over from Russia in like 1904 and their last names end in -dig -dack -deck and -dick and no one knows which, if any, is correct. I doubt each family unit or whatever came with differently spelled immigration papers. Or know if they even had any.
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Mar 29, 2024 05:21
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Standardized spellings of everyday words wasn't a thing in written English for a long time. I suppose it's not that strange that spellings for names was also all over the place.
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Mar 29, 2024 05:45
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Borscht posted:Max miller ruined that part of my family’s history too. Prince Charming looking motha fucker. Can't stay mad at him though!
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Mar 29, 2024 06:17
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NoiseAnnoys posted:patronymics are common in a lot of cultures, ashkenazi Jewish culture included, and those often did get weirdly processed by the American immigration system. It was for that whole patronym pattern that for years I thought the name Rothschild was Roths-child, i.e. child of Roth, instead of what it actually is Roth-schild, i.e. Red shield.
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Mar 29, 2024 06:41
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Platystemon posted:People who make barrels are “coopers”, and people with the name “Cooper” are problematic. But Tommy Cooper famously wore a silly red hat. Surely that absolves him of the crimes of his ancestors?
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Mar 29, 2024 08:18
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We have a grand total of six examples of William Shakespeare's signature and he never spells his own name the same way twice.
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Mar 29, 2024 08:20
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canyoneer posted:It's going to stay alive forever thanks to Godfather Part 2. Funny thing is in the original novel version of The Godfather, Vito changing his last name from Andolini to Corleone had been an intentional change on his part rather than how the film went with the Ellis Island myth, though I imagine more than anything that was a change done as it would be a simpler to show onscreen bit
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Mar 29, 2024 08:36
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My dad and his two siblings came to the states between the late 70s and early 80s. They kept their last names, and I think both kept their OG first names but added an Anglicized one because it’d make their life easier. Kept it that way to this day. My father, however, went through god knows how many changes. I *think* he came over with his first name and his last name intact. At some point he completely nixed the last name, made a shortened version of his first name (like Christopher to Chris) his new last name, added Jake (and apparently John was in the mix for a while?) as his first. It was Jake [new last name] until after I was born I think, my sister and I both have [new last name] as our last names. Then some time in the 90s, he decided to go with [new last name] as his entire name, a mononym. Cool mononym fact: this is a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare for not just yourself, but for your family, especially your kids. Said kids will later grow up into adults who emigrated from the country you immigrated to, with very serious paperwork they have to get right. I was legit worried that I’d have issues becoming a citizen here because of my dad’s ~artistic flair~ (thankfully it worked out fine). My dumb rear end accidentally changed my name when I moved here. My legal name in the US is my first and last name, maybe a middle initial on occasion. My name here? First and middle name as my entire first name, last name remains the same. I think I know how it happened but at this stage I can’t be bothered to change it to how it is in the US. When I marry my partner, I intend to hyphenate my name, adding his Finnish last name to mine. There are umlauts, can’t wait to deal with the US and their ö-oe bullshit. Three goddamn ethnicities in one name, and now new letters 
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Mar 29, 2024 09:30
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I have a fairly standard first name and two last names, one of which is spanish and consists of two words, and one of THOSE has one of these ó in it. At some point the norwegian government added a hyphen somewhere in there, exactly where depends on which government agency you ask. And my sister somehow misspelled her own name enough times on official forms that the government just quietly changed her messed up norwegianlastname-spanishlastname to something wildly different from everyone else yet still hard to get right.
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Mar 29, 2024 10:11
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InediblePenguin posted:my dad's family probably emigrated in the 19th century but didn't anglicize their names, or stop speaking german at home, until wwii. even then only one side of the family did it and they did it specifically to break up with the other side of the family who were german-american bund nazi supporters. hell yeah pennsylvania western pa, i'm guessing?
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Mar 29, 2024 10:13
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Nessus posted:Is this a case where there are multiple valid readings of the same Cyrillic name, aka the Gaddafi Effect? it would likely depend on which language you are speaking, since stress patterns fall differently in east slavic and south and east slavic has way more vowel reduction than people realize. but even in west slavic names, lots of czech and slovak names got either anglicized differently because of phonemic vowel length, or different names were given the same anglicization (usually by stripping away diacritics) and pronunciation when they weren't related in the original language.
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Mar 29, 2024 10:16
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NoiseAnnoys posted:western pa, i'm guessing? lehigh valley? that's where the surviving relatives live now anyway. i don't know if that's where they lived previously actually
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Mar 29, 2024 10:19
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InediblePenguin posted:lehigh valley? that's where the surviving relatives live now anyway. i don't know if that's where they lived previously actually also doesn’t surprise me, but i was mainly asking because the exact same thing happened in my hometown out in western pa.
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Mar 29, 2024 11:06
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