On May 8, 2013, at 11:33 AM, [email protected] wrote: > The purported "Ellis Island" name manglings is a myth. > Every immigrant's name had to be and was matched to the ship's manifest, and > any deviation was massively illegal.
As was selling alcoholic beverages in the United States between 1920 and 1933. There's often a large gap between what's legal and what happens, and you can't legislate competence among overworked immigration functionaries who may not really care about accuracy. More to the point, 12 million people entered the U.S. through Ellis Island. If the functionaries got the names right 99.9% of the time, the descendants of 12,000 immigrants owe their names to clerical errors. Oddly enough, there were 11,998 persons of Slavic or Ashkenazic descent who mistakenly received the name "Francesco Canova" at Ellis Island, including the famous Francesco da Minsk. You can look it up. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
