So there were no errors, communication issues, or smudges in 60 years with 12 million peoples details? That seems very hard to believe
In reality, 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. Beginning on that date (i.e., when the federal government assumed control over immigration), ship captains were required to report a list of all passengers brought to US shores from foreign countries; information required included name, sex, age, and occupation
Technically no, but the immigration system accepted names that must have contained mistakes and were presumably used as part of the naturalisation/documentation process later
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States_Naturaliz...
> After 1906 an immigrant was required to submit a certificate of arrival when he petitioned for citizenship in order to prove the length of his residency. This document gives the place of entry, manner of arrival, and date of arrival. This was kept in the file with the petition.
None by Ellis Island personnel.
I don't know what your understanding of what happened there is, but it seems wrong.
Ellis Island personnel did not ask for and then reissue names to people. They checked pre-existing lists, and then those lists were filed away never to be looked again, except for by historians debunking the Ellis Island name change myth.
Even if a clerk said "your name's Joe Sch'mozle now" it didn't change anything. Ellis Island personnel didn't issue a single scrap of paper to the immigrants and did not write down the name of anyone passing through.
All they did was look at a list of names the ships arriving into port had, and make sure nobody not on the list came through (sans bribe).
The practice will teach you to get good at making wildcard searches or just looking at a document holistically for context.
Edit: there's an aside here about how a lot of amateur family historians are quite lazy and trust what an index / record extract will say without actually reading the source record itself. The widespread availability of record access these days has made it a bit harder to determine who has actually done correct research and who is just going with what a "hint" will reveal (garbage in-garbage out).
baš -> basch