Your Family's Name Wasn't Changed At Ellis Island

But why do so many believe they were?

It’s one of the most common folktales American families tell about their origins: that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of immigrants fled their home countries for any variety of reasons and made the journey to the United States. They were subjected to a cold, bureaucratic process—one so dehumanizing it even stripped them of their names. And then, once through that crucible, they were free to enjoy the fruits of American life.

This narrative is so deeply woven into our culture that it’s the story my own family told me. It’s what I learned in grade school. So when I first heard that this story was a myth, I resisted the idea. It is not easy to shatter powerful myths, especially when their purpose is to obscure an ugly truth.

But the facts do not lie. There is no evidence in the historical record of mass name changes at Ellis Island. None. The immigration process was highly standardized. Ellis Island employed translators fluent in dozens of languages who could communicate effectively with arriving passengers. Immigration officials did not have the authority to assign new names. They were required to confirm a person’s identity using the ship’s manifest—which had been prepared at the port of departure, based on the passenger’s own self-reported name. Changing that name would not only have been unauthorized; it would have created chaos in an already overloaded system designed to process the incredible volume of immigrants efficiently.

And while it is conceivably possible that some names that used non-Latin alphabets, may have sometimes needed to be approximated, clerks generally did not need to write anything down. Their purpose was to verify documentation that had already been complied. But even in these supposed edge-cases, this cannot be described as systemic erasure. At the time, there was no centralized immigration database, no modern passport system, and no infrastructure to track a person’s name once they had entered the country. Over 12 million people passed through Ellis Island, and once admitted, they were free to go by any name they chose. There was no follow-up, and even if there had been, it would have been functionally impossible without a central repository of records.

These facts raise an important question: if the story isn’t true, why has it become so pervasive? Why do so many American immigrant families tell some version of it?

One need only look at the present-day political climate to understand. Nativist sentiment runs deep in American life. The Know Nothing Party was an early—and openly hostile—example of it, but to call them a fringe movement would be to ignore a long and inconvenient truth. Anti-immigrant suspicion wasn’t an exception in American history. It was the norm.

The classic American immigration story, especially in the Ellis Island era, is one of people fleeing persecution—poverty, violence, religious repression. But they could have gone elsewhere. Why America? Because this country symbolized something: freedom, fairness, the idea that a person could come from nothing and become someone. Someone who achieved greatness. It was—and still is—an intoxicating idea. And the fact that we cling to the myth of Ellis Island name changes speaks to how much we want to believe in that idea—that tells us something about who we are as a people on its own. But it is still only a myth. It wasn’t Ellis Island that changed your grandparents’ names. It was the pressure to survive in a country that promised opportunity but met them with suspicion.

These Ellis Island myths are especially common in Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish, Chinese, and many other communities. And the common thread that runs through them all is that these groups were not welcome in mainstream society. They were met with signs like “No Dogs or Irish.” They were often relegated to unskilled labor and service jobs—the kinds of jobs seen as beneath “real Americans” (sound familiar?). The dream of America collided with the reality of rejection. And for many, it was easier to blame a nameless bureaucrat at Ellis Island than to confront the truth: that their new neighbors persecuted them because they were from elsewhere.

That persecution became pressure. If families changed their names to sound less ethnic, they might get better jobs. Their children might not be teased in school. They might gain access to whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. Life was easier if people thought they were American. So, American they became.

This is the great irony of the melting pot metaphor. It speaks to both the multiculturalist and the nativist. The multiculturalist sees what goes into the pot—diverse cultures, languages, traditions—and imagines the product as a beautiful blend of them all. But the nativist sees what comes out: something uniform. All differences melted down into a purified American identity, shaped by fire and stripped of what made it foreign.

The nativist streak in American politics today is nothing new. But it has grown more grotesque. The quota systems and especially the exclusion of Asian immigrants are indefensible. Still, that blame does not belong with Ellis Island—or Angel Island. These institutions didn’t write the laws. They enforced them. And in doing so, they became scapegoats for the far more damning truth: that American society, from top to bottom, was deeply aligned against foreigners.

In fact, the Ellis Island system may have been the most intricate and humane immigration processing system the world has ever seen. No nation before or since has handled immigration on that scale with such speed and care. If blame is to be placed for the persecutions of the era, it belongs squarely on the shoulders of the politics of the time—politics that reflected the public’s will. A public that feared immigrants, even as it relied on them.

And it’s a view that has changed little between 1825 and 2025. What’s changed is how we remember it. The Ellis Island myth isn’t about a misunderstanding of history. It’s a way to forget the cost of belonging.

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