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Family Legend Has It

The Clerk Who Wasn't There

Everybody's family says the name got changed at Ellis Island, so we pulled the manifests, a 1913 court case and the archives to find out who actually held the pen.

Ruth and Danny · 24 min · 13 Oct 2026

FactUnion VerifiedEvery fact on the episode's fact sheet was checked against its sources. Wrong facts were corrected. What this meansFacts checked 13 Oct 2026

Chapters (8)

About this episode

It's probably the best-known family legend in America. Great-grandpa steps off the boat, a tired official can't spell his name, and the family walks out with a new one. Ruth pulls the actual paperwork: passenger lists written up in Europe when the ticket was bought, inspectors who checked those lists instead of rewriting them, one strange exception in a New York Public Library post, and a Brooklyn man named Frederick Persky who went to federal court in 1913 to change his own record and was turned down. Danny defends the family version the whole way through.

The verdict is Better Than True. Usually the person who changed the name is in the family photos, not at the inspector's desk. We also cover where the paper trail of a name change is kept today. Historical immigration files are moving from USCIS to the National Archives, and comments on the proposed rule (docket USCIS-2026-0331) close October 20, 2026. Requests for transferred files go to archives.gov/research. This week's question for your parent: When did we start using our name, and who decided?

Hosted by Ruth and Danny, performed by synthetic voices. Supported by SagaSeal.

Facts and sources

Every fact used in this episode, with the sources it was checked against. Download as data

196 of 196 recorded lines matched the checked script.

  1. Ellis Island passenger manifests were created by steamship companies at the port of embarkation when tickets were purchased, not by officials at Ellis Island.

  2. Federal regulations required passenger manifests to be typed or printed in English.

  3. At Ellis Island, inspectors verified each arriving passenger’s identity against the pre-existing manifest, and the station employed a large staff of interpreters.

  4. Ellis Island inspectors could correct a manifest entry if persuaded there was an error, but they did not erase or entirely scratch out the original entry.

  5. Original Ellis Island manifests contained notations in red and blue ink made by the inspectors who examined the passengers, but the paper originals were destroyed in 1948 and only microfilm survives.

    Reworded to match its sources. The red and blue ink notations are confirmed, but the page says the original paper manifests were destroyed in 1948, so they no longer contain anything.

Show all 27 factsShow fewer facts

  1. USCIS states that immigrants often changed their own names after arrival, usually within the first five years, adjusting spelling or adopting new names as they became Americans, and that stories of names being changed by Ellis Island clerks are seldom supported by historical research.

    Reworded to match its sources. USCIS says immigrants changed their names after arrival and that clerks at the port did not, but it does not say descendants made the changes; it only says descendants built their own explanations of the changes.

  2. Historians, NYPL, USCIS, the Smithsonian and JewishGen describe the Ellis Island name change as a myth.

  3. In re Perkins, 204 F. 350 (S.D.N.Y. 1913), records that Frederick Persky was naturalized in 1898 under the name Persky.

  4. In 1912 Frederick Persky obtained a decree from the County Court of Kings County changing his name to Frederick Perkins.

  5. In 1913 Perkins petitioned the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to amend his naturalization record to his new name, and the court denied the petition.

  6. The Perkins opinion states: “I think the court is without power to do what is asked, in the absence of some statutory authority, such as is given, for instance, to courts of the state of New York in section 1251, Code of Civil Procedure. The prayer of the petition is denied.”

  7. The Perkins court reasoned that the record of his naturalization as Persky was accurate as of its date, and that he could prove his identity by producing the certificate of the court decree that changed his name.

  8. NYPL’s 2013 post says a newspaper search found only one story from Ellis Island’s years of operation about a name change there: a 1944 Washington Post column reporting that an inspector told Harry Zarief his name was too complicated and recorded it as Friedman. The name change the post features in its title is that of Frank Woodhull.

    Reworded to match its sources. The post's featured name change, the 'One That Was' in its title, belongs to Frank Woodhull. The Zarief case is the only newspaper story about a name change that the post found from that era.

  9. According to the NYPL post, Harry Zarief eventually changed his name back, and the post presents his case as an exception rather than a practice.

  10. Historian Kirsten Fermaglich has written that the image of Ellis Island name changing did not take hold of the American imagination until the 1970s, while historians Marian Smith and Vincent Cannato have argued that Ellis Island officials did not forcibly change immigrants’ names.

    Reworded to match its sources. The page credits the 1970s timing to Fermaglich alone. It cites Smith and Cannato only for arguing that officials did not change names.

  11. Popular magazines and books contained no descriptions of Ellis Island name changing between 1892 and 1920, and over the following four decades they did not typically describe officials changing immigrants’ names.

    Reworded to match its sources. The page's 'no descriptions' covers only 1892 to 1920. For later decades it says popular works 'did not typically' describe such changes.

  12. In The Godfather Part II (1974), a silent young Vito Andolini arrives at Ellis Island, an official reads the tag on his clothing identifying him as Vito Andolini from Corleone, and records his name as Vito Corleone.

  13. The Godfather Part II is widely cited as the main catalyst that fixed the Ellis Island name-change story in the American imagination.

  14. On August 21, 2026, DHS published a proposed rule (docket USCIS-2026-0331) to wind down the USCIS Genealogy Program as historical immigration files transfer to the legal custody of the National Archives, after which USCIS will no longer provide transferred series.

  15. The public comment period on docket USCIS-2026-0331 closes on October 20, 2026.

  16. The Genealogy Program’s records include Naturalization Certificate Files (C-Files) from September 27, 1906, to April 1, 1956, and Microfilmed Alien Registration Forms from August 1, 1940, to March 31, 1944.

  17. The program also covers Visa Files (July 1, 1924, to March 31, 1944), Registry Files (March 2, 1929, to March 31, 1944), and Alien Files numbered below 8 million with documents dated before May 1, 1951.

  18. Once records are transferred, researchers must request them directly from NARA, with request information at archives.gov/research, and USCIS will announce transfers on its genealogy website.

  19. Harald Welzer’s 2002 study ‘Opa war kein Nazi’ analyzed 40 German families through 182 interviews and found ‘cumulative heroization’, with family stories growing more flattering across generations, in two-thirds of the families.

  20. In Welzer’s study, Sieglinde Grubitsch’s account of simply never bothering a Jewish family, whose father was her family’s doctor, was retold by later generations as a story of rescuing Jews.

    Reworded to match its sources. The account came from Sieglinde Grubitsch, not a grandfather, and it concerned a Jewish family whose father was the family doctor.

  21. As of 9 October 2026, FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search had 6,742 searchable, full-text transcribed image collections with over 2 billion results.

    Reworded to match its sources. The figures are correct, but the evidence calls the collections full-text transcribed and never says AI-transcribed.

  22. Independent testing of FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search found roughly 85% accuracy on clean paragraph-style handwriting, falling to 25-45% on faded or overlapping documents.

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