L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 10 L'Italo-Americano HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS F o r m a n y I t a l i a n A m e r i c a n f a m i - lies, the story is t o l d t h e s a m e w a y : a g r a n d f a - ther comes to New York with one surname and leaves Ellis Island with another. Some- where between the ship and the city, the name is short- ened, misspelled, or made to sound more American, and from that point on, the family carries a slightly altered ver- sion of itself. It is easy to understand why the story lasted as it did: it has drama, clarity, and just enough injus- tice to feel true; it also offers a single scene that seems to explain the larger upheaval of immigration. Yet, for all its staying power, the version centered on Ellis Island is usually wrong, as historians, archivists, and genealogists have pointed out for years that inspectors at Ellis Island generally did not invent new n a m e s f o r a r r i v i n g i m m i - g r a n t s ; i n f a c t t h e y w e r e checking passengers against s h i p m a n i f e s t s t h a t h a d already been prepared before t h e v o y a g e e n d e d , a n d i n practice those manifests were the official records on which entry depended. That does not mean fami- lies imagined the whole thing, but the truth sits somewhere e l s e , i n a m o r e s c a t t e r e d , somehow complex history. Italian surnames certainly did c h a n g e i n A m e r i c a , a n d sometimes quite dramatical- ly, but the change usually did not happen in one theatrical exchange at the immigration desk; sometimes, it began before arrival, when a name was copied onto shipping p a p e r w o r k i n a E u r o p e a n port; then, it could continue later in school records, parish registers, census schedules, draft cards, work papers, nat- uralization files, and all the other ordinary documents through which a person had to keep presenting himself to the new country. Once one leaves aside the clean myth of Ellis Island, what emerges is a rich story that shows identity being altered not in a single instant but through repeti- tion, accommodation, and the l o w , c o n s t a n t p r e s s u r e o f everyday life. Part of the reason the Ellis Island version refuses to die is that it compresses a long process into one memo- r a b l e i m a g e : t h e t i r e d immigrant steps forward, the official mishears the name, and America begins. Family memory often works exactly like that, reducing paper- work, travel, confusion, and adaptation into a single sen- tence that can be repeated at the table for decades after, but the actual mechanics of i m m i g r a t i o n w e r e m o r e bureaucratic than that. As the N e w Y o r k P u b l i c L i b r a r y notes, and we mentioned a few lines above, inspectors did not sit there writing down names from scratch; they relied on the passenger lists prepared by steamship offi- cials before departure. The National Archives, which holds the federal passenger arrival manifests, makes the same point indirectly through the records themselves: those manifests were the central d o c u m e n t s o f e n t r y , n o t rough notes taken sponta- n e o u s l y o n t h e d o c k . T h e consequence is important because once that is under- stood, the old image of the name-changing inspector starts to collapse under its own neatness. What happened afterward is very human in its essence; in the end, a surname could sound perfectly ordinary in Calabria, Sicily, Campania, or Abruzzo, but could become u n s t a b l e o n c e i t e n t e r e d American speech. Teachers wrote what they thought they heard, employers shortened what they did not want to repeat; clerks regularized spellings according to Eng- lish habits rather than Italian ones. Then neighbors said a name one way, a parish sec- retary another, and a census taker a third. Little by little, the version that kept appear- ing in public became harder to resist. Not every family gave in, of course, and many surnames remained intact, but for others the accumulat- ed effect of mishearing and simplification was enough to shift the name for good. But it would be naïve to ignore that there was also a more deliberate logic behind some of these changes: Ital- ians arriving in the United States in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r i e s w e r e entering a society that did not always welcome foreign- ness gracefully. A name that was difficult to pronounce, easy to caricature, or clearly foreign could become a social obstacle in work, housing, school, and business. Under those conditions, simplifying a surname was almost a form of self-protection, or simply a practical adjustment to the world as it was. The U.S. Citizenship and Immi- gration Services noted that C o n g r e s s r e q u i r e d n a m e changes to be shown on natu- ralization certificates begin- n i n g i n 1 9 0 6 p r e c i s e l y b e c a u s e i m m i g r a n t s d i d change their names, often within the first few years after arrival: an important detail. After all, it shifts the q u e s t i o n f r o m w h e t h e r names changed to when and how they changed, and it confirms that official Ameri- ca knew perfectly well that the real site of transforma- tion was usually not Ellis Island itself but the broader process of settlement. Once you start looking at examples, it also becomes simpler to understand how these changes usually looked: some surnames were short- ened, some were respelled phonetically, some others moved toward an English equivalent, even if not in a s t r i c t o r s y s t e m a t i c w a y . Genealogical sources note, for instance, that a common surname like Russo might show up in altered forms such as "Russ" or "Russell," w h i l e g i v e n n a m e s w e r e A m e r i c a n i z e d e v e n m o r e readily, Matteo becoming Matthew, Giuseppe becom- ing Joseph, and so on. What makes this subject w o r t h m o r e t h a n a b r i e f g e n e a l o g i c a l c o r r e c t i o n , though, is that it opens onto something larger than paper- work because a surname is never just a label, it is a signi- fier of sound, place, family, and social recognition. When Italian names changed in America, what changed was not only spelling but the ease or unease with which a fami- ly moved through public life. Some adjustments were cho- sen, some tolerated, some barely noticed until later gen- e r a t i o n s w e n t l o o k i n g through manifests and cer- tificates and found that the family had once answered to something slightly different. In that sense, the history of altered surnames becomes a small but telling chapter in the larger history of becom- ing Italian American: not a c l e a n b r e a k w i t h t h e o l d c o u n t r y , b u t a g r a d u a l reshaping under the pressure of a new language and a new set of institutions. And perhaps that is why the Ellis Island legend still lingers even when the docu- ments argue against it. It is wrong in the details, but it is trying to express something real all the same: that a name did not always change at the b o r d e r ; m o r e o f t e n , i t changed in the long life that followed. B e y o n d E l l i s I s l a n d : t h e r e a l s t o r y o f Italian surnames in the U.S. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI The story behind how some of our ancestors'surnames changed when they reached America is more complex than what we think, and it didn't always develop on Ellis Island (Image created with DALL-E 2)

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