I have no references to verify the subject but when I was very young, a family acquaintance who claimed to have worked there, said that many surnames and colloquialisms were created on the spot by employees who were processing the new immigrants. Many immigrants were identified by the towns that they came from, losing to posterity, their actual surnames in the process. Among many other tales, he said that many Italian immigrants were just loaded on the boats in Italy without any identification or travel documents. When they arrived on Ellis Island, they were segregated from other Italian immigrants, who had proper documents, in large rooms that had signs over the entrances that simply stated "WOP", an acronym for "W"ith "O"ut "P"apers. Back to the original question, the friend explained the OP's question, specifically. Back in the day, a derogatory term for Jewish people was "Yid", in reference to their common language, Yiddish. Part of the registration process was to document the immigrant's religion. The process was streamlined by identifying the Jewish Polish immigrants with the "...sky" ending to their names, the "Y" in reference to their being "Yids" while others, generally Catholic, were identified with the "...ski" ending. As I said, I don't have any proof of this. It's simply what I was told.
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CarolTheDabbler (575)
a year ago
I can neither confirm nor refute any of your specifics, but I have heard one story about an immigration clerk being pretty cavalier with someone's name. I worked with a fellow who had a typical German-Jewish surname which he seemed to be mispronouncing, so I asked him about that. He said it wasn't actually his name anyhow. His family was from Russia, apparently with a long, complicated Russian surname. When his uncle came to the US, the immigration clerk told him that no one would be able to pronounce his name, and suggested that he use this other name instead, because "it's a nice Jewish name" (never mind that it was German instead of Russian). Then when the coworker's father came over, the uncle told him "over here, our name's such-and-such."
The two brothers came from a totalitarian country, so it may never have occurred to them that there was anything unusual about this. And in all fairness, the clerk was presumably just trying to be helpful. Many people are now saying that "Ellis Island name changes" were largely a myth, which may or may not be true. I would personally tend to discount the "Yid" story, but such name changes did apparently happen at least once (though not necessarily at Ellis Island).
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