[Lee Stewart]

Ellis Island actually didn’t force any immigrants to “Americanize” their names.

The popular story goes that many “foreign” sounding last names (often Jewish or Irish) were changed by immigration officers at Ellis Island to be more “American” and easier to pronounce in their new home. This is just a myth. These officers were often immigrants themselves and had no such instructions to offer suggestions for name changes. Nobody has been able to find concrete evidence of a single name being forcefully changed at Ellis Island. This myth comes from the fact that many immigrants actually willingly changed their names before boarding their respective ships to America, where they’d have to fill out a name in the ship's log.