Polish surnames

Question

My greatgrandfathers name was John Brobisky. He was born in Prussia ( German occupied Poland ) in 1854 and brought by his father to Saint Louis Mo. at about 1 year of age. I am wondering if his fathers surname would have been different. I have been unsuccessful with ships records and immigration searches because the surname may have been different. Also if Polish, the surname might have ended in i ?

Answer 1

You can search on surnames at https://geneteka.genealodzy.pl/index.php?op=se&lang=eng . It's an incomplete database but can be helpful. There are no names of Brobisky in the decade starting 1850, and less than 10 of Brobiski variants in a sound-alike search which yielded Brobek, Brubinski and Brobowski. My experience with my ancestors is that the Americanized surnames were sometimes wildly different. (We were told a surname was Marniska but it was actually Smarzynska, which made searching difficult without the spouse's name.)

Comments

It is very difficult and maybe impossible to trace the immigrant. My great grandfather and his father would have come to America in 1855. There is no record in the 1860 or 1870 census. All I can think of is that my gg grand father had a different surname that my g grandfather was living under until he struck out on his own.

Answer 2

How have your family surnames varied in the decades since? Does everyone spell Brobisky the same? Brobiski, Brobiska (feminine version) would be possible. Could the B' be P'? Probisky, Probiski, etc?

My great grandfather' surname Andrzejewski is spelled Andrejewski, Andrzejewsky, Andrefeski, Andrews, Andrewski by current generations.

Comments

The only trusted document I have for him is his marriage license in 1885. His surname then was Brobisky. His surname was also Brobisky in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census. There is  John Brobiskey in the 1880 census but he is 5 yrs younger. All descendants have there surnames as Brobisky. Thank You

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Don't rule out the 1880 census as "not him".  A 5 year difference in age is nothing for census returns, so checkout other things such as who else was in the household (if anyone), where was the residence (same place as preceding, or succeeding, or possible move).  

I have one ancestor who got younger with each successive census.  If she'd lived long enough she'd have been younger than her grandchildren.   (Have also just done info for someone who didn't age a day between a census and their death a couple of years later.)

Answer 3

Hi, there is this page https://nazwiska-polskie.pl/ , where you can check how many people with certain family name live, and also where, in modern Poland. Unfortunately there is no Brobisky ( I expected this ) in the register, also no Brobiski or Brobiński, so I'd say it's pretty sure that your ancestors name was changed at the arrival port in the US. Prussia was quite big, it was also Eastern and Western, if you have more exact place of birth, it would be easier to start the search for the possible similiar names.

Comments

Careful: one thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that the name was NOT changed at the arrival port. Nobody there had the authority to change anyone's name.

(The Ellis Island name change myth is highly ubiquitous and oft-repeated, but it is completely false.)

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J, I know I'm speculating where I'm ignorant, sorry, but the immigrant in question was present at the arrival port and had the agency and authority to change their own name, as we all do. Mightn't some people have already planned a name change, and stated the new name when they arrived? There might also be the possibility that the name was accidentally misspelled on the immigration record, and the person just kept using the result.

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Hello, thank you very much for your comment. The name changes done to the Polish names (but not only Polish) were done in largte numbers, and not by a BAD WILL. I will try to explain why huge number of Polish names HAD to be changed on arrival (not just on Ellis Island, but at any immigrant arrival port or place in whole world). Polish language has additional letters in the alphabet: ą, ę, ń, ł, ó, ś, ć, ż, ź, (and I am using just those to make this case simpler) which are not just accents, they describe different sounds. Let's say I am arriving to the US TODAY with granted right of immigration, and I fill all the documents myself using the pen and I write "Słupiński" in the form. When scaned or rewritten by the officer the "ł" and "ń" letters HAVE to be CHANGED to "l" and "n" as "ł" and "ń" do not exist in English alphabet, and this way whole name is CHANGED. Let' have some more fun and move in time to the XIXth century, and we have a Polish lady (at this time comming from Prussia), and her full name is Świętosława Brzęczyszczykiewicz, as a lot of Polish immigrants at this time, Świętosława doesn't know how to read or write, she just can say her name as it sounds in Polish language (maybe even with some local accent). I can only wonder what kind of a interesting construct would be created by the Immigration officer, at the Ellis Island, just TRYING to write it RIGHT. This is why the names HAD to be changed, and why people DID change their own names is different story, just as Jim mentioned bellow. Just to make whole storry more spicy - during my family research I found a branch using three different forms of their name in the smae generation - Dąbski, Dębski and Dębiński (all information from the church records in Poland). And yes - this could have happened just because the priest (a Polish native speaker), writing down the record, HEARD the name wrong! In my very subjective opinion, the only thing we can say with "absolute certainty" is that we'll die at some point.

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Well said, Maciej.

My ancestors did not have the variety of accents available in the Polish language. Spelling was not standardised and even English family names have variations.

I believe with high certainty, that if you are employed you will pay tax.

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The detail where your idea of what happened at the arrival port breaks down is where the official tries to record what the person just said. That's not how it happened. The employees at the arrival port were not writing down any names. The passenger manifest was filled out by a shipping company employee, usually based on written travel documents (such as passports and tickets), either at the departure port, or on board the ship. At the arrival port, officials cross-referenced people's entries, asking some of the same questions as the ticketing clerk had asked and adding some others. The arrivals clerk could make corrections to the manifest, but this is not where or when name changes happened. The transcription-type changes (like l for ł) had already happened by then (since German doesn't have slashed-L any more than English does), and the "everyone's saying it wrong"-type changes happened later, once the immigrant figured out what his new environment would do to his name.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that our modern notion of The One True Spelling is _very_ modern. In a world where most people weren't literate, it was the sound of a name that mattered, and writing down the sound could and did vary: different languages have different spelling rules, and different people apply them variously.

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..."While that seems like a set-up for fudging a difficult name into the record books, or maybe even just making the best guess on a name that perhaps a nonliterate immigrant might not know how to spell correctly, it didn’t go down that way at all, Urban says. Name changes “could happen, but they are not as likely as people have been led to believe,” he says."... This is citation from:  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-smithsonian-did-ellis-island-officials-really-change-names-immigrants-180961544/ 

 I hope this brings end to the discussion about "absolute certainty" that it didn't happen at the arrival in the US. 

My primary answere was not aiming US immigration authorities in any way. The intention of my answer was help in finding ancestors of the anonymous who asked the question. I don't have absolute certainty, but I am convinced that the oryginal name was changed. It would be much smarter of me to state that the change of the name probably happened at one of the stages of the emigration.