For Week 7, the theme of genealogist Amy Johnson Crow's 2024 "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" project challenges participants to write on the theme of Changing Names.
Despite actual historical fact, the myth remains that immigrant names were customarily changed by immigration officials at Ellis Island, either because they cluelessly wrote what they thought they heard spoken in a language they did not know, or as part of an agenda to Americanize newcomers.
It did not happen. The names on Ellis Island records were the names written on ships' manifests before the ship left port in the home country.
That said, many immigrants, including most of my own, dropped their Italian names in favor of Americanized ones after arriving in New York. Sometimes they did it by choice, in an effort to assimilate. Other times, a teacher, employer, or government clerk changed it for them, generally without realizing it.
My U.S.-born grandfather, the little guy here, is shown with his Naples-born big brother. My grandfather's birth certificate said Raffaele De Riggi, but he used the name Ralph DeRicci all his life. His brother, born Giuseppe De Riggi, used Joe Rich for a while, but eventually readopted his father's surname.
As far as I know, all of my great-grandparents were illiterate when they arrived from Italy. They did not know if their names were misspelled, or they knew but preferred an American-sounding name. Or they just did not see that it made a difference. Even if they felt dismay or feared the loss of their culture, they wanted their children to fit in, and were unlikely to make waves if they did notice that a name had been misspelled or Americanized. So their names changed:
- Giovanni became John.
- Assunta became Susie.
- Francesco and Ferdinand both became Francis.
- Filomena became Fannie and Phil.
- Annunziata became Nellie.
- Bartolomeo became Bartholome.
- Raffaele became Ralph.
- Romeo became Rush.
- Aida became Ada.
And so many more. My paternal grandmother did not know her own name was Maria until she got married and saw her birth certificate. She had always been called Mary.
My maternal grandfather's family was the most extreme, and the differences in surnames the most difficult to sort through. Every person in the family ended up spelling the name differently. He told me that the spelling of each child's name depended on how that child's first teacher wrote the name in school records. So his father's surname, De Riggi, became, for example, DeRicci, De Richie, or just Rich. Birth certificates were just becoming a requirement around the time my U.S.-born grandfather (Ralph, formerly Raffaele) came along. Some of the siblings in the family had them, and some did not. The Italian-born siblings definitely did not. So definitive records were difficult or impossible to find.
While this causes endless headaches to modern genealogists, people in the early 1900s may have taken it in stride. In those pre-computer days, searchability did not require today's rigid standardization.
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