The choice to Americanise their name

The fact that Grandma’s brother Georg Bernhard August Madsen chose to Americanise his name after almost 70 years living on the North-American continent is not that strange. The spelling George B. Matsen probably made it easier to fit in in the English-speaking community, and he did not need to spell out his name daily. Why a different relative, August Johansen, chose to call himself Carl August Wickstrom during his 26-year stay in the US is not as obvious, and completely impossible to find the reason for the name choice; he had no close relatives with the first name Carl, and he did not have any known relation to any Wickstrøm-family.

In this article we are going to look more into some common name change patterns Norwegian immigrants could be inspired by. Furthermore, we are going to look at how these name changes can influence the information we find in the American source material, not just on the emigrants themselves, but also on their Norwegian origins. Throughout this article we will look at relevant sources that hopefully can help lead us through the jungle of name changes.

Names were not changed at Ellis Island

A very long lived myth, both among Norwegian and American genealogists, is that emigrants had their names changed to more or less recognisable anglicised versions of their names at Ellis Island. This myth has not ties to reality; a fact both authors of American books on genealogy and historians on Ellis Island regularly tries to point out, but it does not seem to stick. Philip Sutton writes about this in the blog entry “Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One That Was)” published at New York Public Library’s websites. Here it is pointed out that the officials at Ellie Island used already filled in lists from the ships as the basis for the arrival registrations of the passengers, and therefore they did not note down the emigrants’ data themselves. When the emigrants still chose to change their name and/or be registered with different versions of their names in English and Norwegian sources, there were different reasons for this.