Family Myths
Today Kim Powell at About.com:Genealogy addresses the “our name was changed at Ellis Island” myth in her most excellent column.. She address 4 of the common family myths in an earlier article entitled “Family Legends–Fact or Fiction?“–the 3 brothers, the Indian Princess, name change at Ellis Island, and the family inheritance gone awry.
Where I work, we see these myths on almost a daily basis. We have one customer who has written us 6 times about his Indian great-grandmother. No matter how we phrase it, we cannot convince him that the girl with the same name who is on the Dawes Rolls is in fact not his great-grandmother. And another repeat customer is certain we can find out what happened to the inheritance her mother was “cheated out of” by an uncle who went for ministerial training.
One of my great-aunts insisted that her family name was originally “Unrau” instead of “Unruh” and that it was changed at Ellis Island. At some point in time, the family name may very well have been “Unrau,” though I’ve found some fairly old church records from the time they spent in Russia that have “Unruh” recorded. As for the Ellis Island myth, the family actually came in through Philadelphia. The came at the end of 1874, almost 20 years before Ellis Island was opened in 1892.
I tend to believe that most family stories have a kernel of truth, but it’s my job to research and sort fact from fiction. It’s one of the things I love most about doing this sort of research. Our family did indeed immigrate, but the port they came in through was not even in operation at the time of their arrival. This underscores the importance of doing good, basic research of the history of the time. Contemporary records, such as the church records, are another means of determining what’s gotten changed through time in the the family story.
