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Americanized names

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Posted by Your Guide on July 6, 2006 9:38 PM

One problem that continues to hound researchers throughout the United States is that so many people arrived in America with names common to their homeland but quite mysterious to Americans. When an extremely difficult Armenian or Czechoslovakian (or Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality's) name was pronounced to an immigration official, they often spelled it the best way they could - phonetically. When families with the same name were registered by different officials, those names were spelled differently many times. By these inadvertent misspellings, names would become "Americanized."

If the immigration official wasn't in the mood to try to figure out a difficult spelling they would often shorten the name to something the official felt was manageable. Names like "Messeurschmidt" could become "Mercer," "Schmidt," or even "Smith." Through the course of a day, thousands of immigrants would be processed and the official had the power to Americanize as many names as he saw fit.

Names were also inadvertently changed due to differences in pronunciation. Because of the language barriers, there was often no way to spell an immigrant's name to the immigration official in a manner that could be understood, so officials wrote down names by the way they sounded when pronounced by the immigrant. It is easy to understand this process if you consider the way Asian peoples struggle with the pronunciation of the letter "L" in English. This is an over-simplified example, however, when you consider the many different languages and dialects that were common to our immigrant ancestors, you can imagine a custom official's difficulty in understanding each name as they tried to inscribe it correctly on the roster of immigrants.

Other families arrived in America with no desire to keep their native tongue or names. Many had decided on American names based on articles they had read in newspapers before leaving home or from Americans they had met or seen on the ship as they traveled across the ocean. In order to become an American family as quickly as possible, families chose Americanized names before they arrived so that they could tell the customs official their new name from the beginning.

There was no one formula for deciding what a new name might be, but knowing that these changes took place can give a genealogist new ideas as they search through lists for names that might contain clues to their past.



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