Ellis Island et al. (was: Re: O'Kun)

[Peter A. McGraw]

I've always wondered whether the spelling of my surname was the result of
an Ellis Island clerk's approximation of the name as he (probably) heard
it, or whether it might represent a choice my immigrant ancestors to
sacrifice the spelling McGrath in an attempt to get people over here to at
least approximate its pronunciation in Ireland, [mIgra:].  I hadn't heard
about the ships' logs as a possible source for a respelling, but I wonder
about it.  It seems highly unlikely that anyone in Ireland (even a British
steamship line official stationed there), where an emigrant's steamship
ticket would have been issued, would misspell a name that's one of the most
common in Ireland and is NEVER spelled McGraw there.  In any case, would
U.S. immigration officials really get the passengers' names from a ship's
log?  Even if it was before the age of passports, wouldn't
emigrants/immigrants have carried official identification "papers" of some
sort, and wouldn't immigration officials have taken the names from those?
(I haven't seen the research that reached the ship's log conclusion--maybe
it somehow ruled this out.)

Peter Mc.

--On Friday, July 26, 2002 10:20 PM -0500 Donald M Lance
<lancedm at MISSOURI.EDU> wrote:

> There's a video out by an Alan Berliner who looked up other people with
> that name and had a dinner in New York for 12 of them.  He did lots of
> research for the project, including interviewing people who actually
> worked at Ellis Island.  They simply took the names from the ships' logs,
> so the changes were made before they got on the boat or after they had
> cleared through the Ellis facility.



****************************************************************************
                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu