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.