Do You Think Your Family Name Was Changed On Ellis Island?
lizziecat said:
Ellis Island was the entry point for immigration between 1898 and 1924. If your relatives came before or after this interval, they didn't come through Ellis Island. Also, the only immigrants who were processed through Ellis Island were the ones whose passage was in steerage. The boats would dock at Ellis Island, and the passangers in steerage debarked through a gangplank. Passangers in first class and in other cabin classes remained on board until the ship docked at one of the city piers. So my grandmother, who arrived in 1900 on a tourist visa, travelling in a cabin, simply walked off the ship and into the arms of her brother, who was waiting on the pier. Immigrants who arrived befor 1898 were processed through Castle Garden, in downtown Manhattan.
Yes, my maternal grandfather arrived on a higher class of transit and did not have to go through Ellis Island.
This explains why I could never find family names. Either they came "up top" or changed later. The surnames I suspect of being changed are more adjustment for spelling & pronunciation. At least I hope that's the case with my great-grandparents surname. I take a lot of teasing over it (my middle name).
And don't bother asking.
Colella was her name, spelled Colelia on the manifest. She already had a US birth certificate (or whatever the heck they called it a hundred years ago)...so it didn't matter.
As an aside...how many people would let their 14 year old daughter sail across the ocean, alone?
Most of my family came in ths 1700-1840's so they are shrouded in mystery. I think its cool to have been an American for so long. My husband just says that out of all the people who were kicked out of their previous countries, my ancestors were the first to get the bus ticket out of town.
My great grandmother, Scully's grandmother, came through Ellis Island. I still am unable to find her records. From documents written in the 50's she believed she was actually registered under the name of a family friend, and not her real name. Of course, the document I am referring to was written half a century after she went through Ellis Island, so who knows. I've looked for her under her name, and under the family friend's name, but have yet to find a match.zucca said:
The story I've always heard is that the new name was the name of their sponsor, whatever that means. Not sure how the change came about.
Once here she used the same name she had in Germany until her marriage.
In 1883 my she was born Rosina Giehl in Schrappach, Germany. The family was well off, but after her father was injured in a war they soon ran out of money. In 1886 her mother died in childbirth, I assume the child died too since there is no family record of a birth in that year. In 1888 her 10 year old sister died of TB. In 1895 her father died. In 1896 her 15 year old sister died of TB. In 1898 her 19 year old sister died of TB. In 1899 she was 16, she and her 15 year old brother were the only ones left. Her brother then joined the the German Navy. With nothing and no one left, she set out alone at age 16 to the United States. She saw her brother in the US a few times before WWI, but then never heard from him again, so she then assumed that he had died in the war. She was dismayed to discover that he lived until 1958 in Alaska, having never contacted her after 1907.
As her brother left no will, they needed to find the nearest relative to settle the estate, which was fortunate for us since we now have the correspondence from that time which left us with an invaluable record of events from her early life. In attempting to prove her relationship to her brother, she was asked to recount her past. Because of the sum involved, the attorney's office even researched the family tree in Germany looking for the closest living relative. Since most of my great grandmother's recollection is from memory, 60 years after coming to the US, some details do not match the facts provided by the German government, such as the spelling of names. Also, both my great grandmother and her brother apparently used the name Giel, yet are listed as Giehl in Germany. The following is from one of the letters, written on her behalf by her daughter to the attorney:
Thank you for your letter of August 13, 1959 on behalf of my mother, Rosina Giel Praml. Below you will find the answers to the five questions you asked:She was 16 when she came to this country alone, an orphan, and she spoke no english at that time.
(1) Mother says that she came to America when she was sixteen years old, and she remembers shipboard preparation for the comming celebration of the turn of the century. That would place the year as 1899. She was helped in obtaining her entry papers by her step-grandfather Baier's son Joseph, who was a police official on Munich at that time. She recalls being paged at the entry port as Baier's Rosa. She does not know whether her entry papers read Giel or Baier.
(2) Mother remembers that her brother worked as a baker on a German Naval Vessel. The first stop-over she recalls was in Philadelphia. She was not married at that time but her fiancee (my father) accompanied her to Philadelphia to visit her brother. Several other times Michael visited her in New Jersey and at two of these times he accompanied her on a visit to their cousin Mrs. Ottilie Leuchs. Aunt Ottilie confirms these visits and recalls that one was in 1903, the year of her marriage. The last time mother saw her brother was in 1907 when he called at her home in Orange, New Jersey. During one of these visits Michael gave mother the two portraits enclosed.
We have no idea when he made his residence in this country. We can only assume that at the end of his Naval Service he decided to remain here.
Unfortunately, I am still unable to find her records at Ellis Island. I have searched under the name Giel, Giehl, and Baier. To take misspellings into account I also searched for Baer. Because oral family history had the sponsor's name as Brown, not Baier, I also searched under Brown and Braun. I have yet to find a Rose or Rosina with any of the above last names that would be of the right age who came through in 1899, even using +/- 5 years on the date of entry. The only clue I have to go on is my great Aunt recalls finding the name at Ellis Island, and that it was misspelled.
spon, try using the spellings Beyer, Bayer, and Beher or Baher. You never know... (They're pronounced in similar ways)
I tried Bayer first, and came up with an almost match. The year is wrong, but the hometown is right. The text version shows the hometown as Schrappat, but a quick google search shows no town of that name. Looking at the original manifest I can see the town is actually Schrappach, so it looks like it was mistyped when they put it in the database because the handwriting was so sloppy. This might really be her. The only thing is, it shows the entry date as April 1901, not 1899 as she remembers. Of course, memory is fallible.joanne said:
spon, try using the spellings Beyer, Bayer, and Beher or Baher. You never know... (They're pronounced in similar ways)
The handwriting is very hard to read, but it also shows that the passage was paid for by "uncle" which also goes with what my great grandmother remembered. After speaking with Scully, we really think this might be her.
So Joanne, any suggestions for alternative spelling for the name Praml? We can't find my great grandfather anywhere, though certain clues may point to his having been an illegal alien, so he might have used forged papers with a fake name.
If/when I hear back from them I will be sure to post here what their answer is.
To update, the people at Ellis Island agreed with my correction and the name of the town was corrected to Schrappach in their official file. Thanks again to Joanne, had she not helped me out with the alternative spellings for the last name I never would have found my great grandmother's records. She was 18 when she entered the US, not 16 like she remembered, but still, to come to this country alone at such a young age must have been terrifying.
And in regards to the name changed at Ellis Island, most the most part that has been shown to be a myth. Many people did change their names, but it was AFTER they arrived. As far as misspellings and such, ship documents were filled out in the old country, so if a name was misspelled in the ship's manifest then it was done by one of their own countrymen, not an American clerk at this end.
Oh, and one more Ellis Island myth to put to rest, WOP does NOT mean With Out Papers, it is a version of guappo. It's still an insult though.
All of the surnames made it through unchanged, but my paternal grandmother's first name was changed at Ellis Island. It had been "Teodolinda" and they changed it to "Mary" - I was supposed to be named after her, but Mom thought Teodolinda was too long, too, so she just named me "Linda". I've always been ticked off about that, because there were so many Lindas when I was young, but I have never, ever met a Theolinda (the English version of Teodolinda).
Surprisingly, my paternal great-grandfather's last name was NOT changed at Ellis Island.
My name was changed at Overlook Hospital. 74 years ago, I entered nameless and came out Jersey Jack
Everybody knows Vito Andolini from the village of Corleone in Sicily, had his name recorded incorrectly in the register as Vito Corleone. Anyone who does not take this as concrete proof that names were indeed changed on Ellis Island will find a horse's head in their bed.
If you search Ellis Island records you can find Hector Boyardee under his birth name of Ettore Boiardi entering a couple of times. I can find this guy, but I still can't find my great grandfather, L. Praml. I've even found cousins that had their name misspelled in the computer records as Prainl (the ledger reads Praml but a stray ink mark makes the m look like in) but my great grandfather is nowhere to be found.
I have to say, I am finding a lot of errors in the Ellis Island records when they are transcribed to computer form. I understand why this happens, the handwriting was horrible. I already submitted a correction for the town my great grandmother came from, they had Schrappat instead of Schrappach. Ellis Island agreed and made the correction.
I am now going to have to submit corrections for my cousins to change their records from Prainl to Praml. And I have another cousin who came from Morcone, Italy, which they transcribed as Marcine. Again, all of these were written correctly in the ledgers 100+ years ago, they were just written very sloppily.
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Given this, how would the 'official' manifests cope with inducements to overcrowd steerage, passengers with forged/false documents, etc as well as the legitimate difficulties in different alphabets and identities?