Hard to believe a statement like that - and what exactly was the point of writing it?
immigration officials did not write names down—they checked them off on a list in front of them. In other words, the names were already written down. The officials were not working with blank sheets of paper on which they created lists of newly arrived passengers, but with ship manifests, official lists of passengers who had disembarked. These manifests were required by US federal law as of March 2, 1819.
If an error occurred, it occurred before they set foot on their ship. It's also an error of no actual consequence, because immigration officials at Ellis Island did not issue new arrivals with any form of identity document or record their existence into any domestic registry. Their job was simply to control the point of entry. There was no bureaucratic mechanism by which an error on a passenger manifest could have followed someone off the island.
"We changed our family name because a dumb official at Ellis Island wrote it down wrong" is a story that appeals to modern sensibilities, but it's a rewriting of history.
https://journals.ala.org/index.php/dttp/article/view/6655/89...
It's very simple. Ships manifests were completed before arrival at Ellis Island. If names were changed, they were changed in the port of origin.
People's reluctance to believe this is wild.
First—for proof you dig into the linked articles.
Second, that “never, not a single time” interpretation is a bad interpretation of the article. The article should be read as ordinary language and not like a mathematical paper. The process at Ellis island was to check the manifest. There’s not much opportunity to change somebody’s name when all you’re doing is looking up their name on a ship manifest.
The article was presumably written because people like reading articles about common misconceptions.
Good old Hacker News, if you're not careful about your wording you get a chorus of "aaaaactually".
His point was that people say (the comments you mention show this) that this happened so much you'd think it was a common occurrence that clerks at Ellis Island were just randomly changing names out of spite, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc. They nearly always weren't, the changes were almost always intentional on the part of the immigrant.
No reasonable human would take this to mean the process had 100% fidelity.
The author was quoting (very much the blog version of a re-tweet), so yes, there was very little added. The headline came from what he was quoting. Perhaps it would have been better to title his post something better. Actually the linked post he was quoting from has a better title.
But nonetheless, an 8 year old could read that post and know the "no one" was not meant literally, so why go into a comment section and respond to it? It just seems like garden variety "aaaactually" behavior which adds nothing to anyone's day, but is in every freaking HN post and makes you kinda hate the site you love sometimes. How much better would this place be without all of that?
The truth is sure a whole lot closer to "no one" than to the urban legend, just as if someone said (pre-2020) "no one's letter got lost in the mail and anyone who tells you that happened was lying". A statement that is right 99.9% of the time is barely even hyperbole.
The reality is (according to this article) that people everywhere think this happened, it didn't, it can be verified that it didn't via ship manifests, and people only think that because of a scene in a movie. That's what a 5th grader would take from reading it. Can we all just respond to that? It's an interesting claim.
And not only that, it happens on like every post several times