Surnames Anglicized?

I was just wondering how many of your last names have been anglicized?
When my husband came to the US the INS changed it from Domal(l w/line)eczny to Domakeczny.
KT

Many of my ancestor's surnames have become butchered. Not by choice, they blame it in on Ellis Island.

This was really not how I wanted this post to go. I was more interested in seeing some examples.
Thanks,
KT

It's an interesting question. Why would they Americanize surnames in the first place? There are lots of Polish surnames that are hard to pronounce (Mike Krzyzewski - a famous American basketball coach, for example). Unless it had something to do with political immigration (or it was done a long time ago for some reason).

Not Americanize but Anglicize. There are some characters in the Polish alphabet that are not in the English alphabet. Like I said in my original post the INS took the L with a line thru & made it a K. So now our last name is pronounced Domakeczna instead of Domaweczna.
KT

In America foreign surnames were willingly or unwillingly Americanized just like in Poland some Ukrainian, German, Lithuanian and Jewish names were Polonized. In England Irish, Scottish and Slavic names were Anlicized.

that is why they call him "Coach K"

Well, I noticed that the 'ie' in my surname has been changed to 'ha' by certain people.

I can give you a number of specific examples: On his 1896 marriage certificate, my grandfather was Theophil Cyman. In the 1900 federal census, he had become Charles Ceman. By 1920, he and all his relatives had anglicized the last name to Seaman. Apparently, during the first world war a lot of German and Prussian sounding names got anglicized--NPR ran a story on this a few years ago. Another example is Theophil's father. On his son's 1896 marriage certificate, he was Ignatius Cyman. On his 1908 death certificate, he was Ignatz Seaman. On his wife's death certificate in 1935, he was Nicholas Seaman.

I believe that when immigrants came to the US, they could not read and/or write. When they were asked their names, they could only speak them. The people recording the names did not speak their langusge and wrote what they heard.

As for later on, once the immigrants were in the us for awhile, they chose to change their names to make them sound "more American". It wasn't till a few years ago that I discovered what my last name really was.

Zapatoczny was changed to Zepp. Glowka was changed to Glufka.

One thing I discovered in my research was that 2 branches of my family (close cousins and distant cousins) both "chopped" the family surname in half and called themselves "Konas".

my name zygmunt bogdanislaw barankierowczek

was changed to "ted brown" when i came to america

Why did anyone pick such a dull colour?

Actually brown is the colour of all the best things:
wood, beer, chocolate, tobacco, meat, tea, coffee...

meat's red.
and tea's green (or golden as a beverage)

I like it!

One of my cousins migrated to Canada and changed his surname from Przystawski to Preston.

my family's name was changed to Kaye from Kwiatkovski . That was in the maybe...1920s.

same here, went from Romanowski to Roman

My grandfather's surname "Grzych" was changed by his sons to "Grish" for business purposes. Prior to that, in Poland, my grandfather's family name was "Mroz".

my families name is coccia

in italy it was pernounced kocha (long o)
here ellis island changed it to kosha (long o)

they thought that the sha was better than cha

Even when the census was taken, the people recording the answers were only writing what they heard, if the person giving the information didn't know how to spell it.

If he had been given the Ellis Island treatment, what then?

Mr. Oz?

The letter 'v' in Kwiatkovski is an obvious mistake. The Polish alphabet doesn't use the letter 'v', it uses the letter 'w' to produce that sound. The only time a 'v' is use when writing in Polish is to transcribe a surname other then Polish or a foreign word containing the letter 'v'. The root of your surname Kwiat, as you may already know, means 'flower'.

The barred Ł was apparently mmisread by some non-Polish INS official as a K. Early on, I saw the Polish pope's name in some Anglo-publication given as Karol Wojtyka. Same confusion no doubt.