To Kurt who was asking about Croatians changing their surnames in the States: I don't know the specifics of your particular name changes, but I know that people often traveled on borrowed passports. Lots of reasons for that, but the most common was a brother or cousin going instead of the person who originally got the passport. Maybe the original person got cold feet, who knows. Also, there were many orphans in Croatia in those days. These orphans were given an invented name at baptism and were sent out to foster families to be cared for (the foster families got a stipend from the Austrian government). These children were raised with the surname of the foster family but when it came time to apply for a passport, they often had to travel under their baptism name (often they didn't even know what it was until they applied for their passport). Then, when the time came in the US when they could officially choose the name they wanted, they chose the name they had always known (that of their foster family). See more here: http://www.croatia-in-english.com/gen/social.html#illeg And here's another possible reason: Many Croatian surnames have a nickname that goes with it. This happens in villages where there are many people with the same surname -- the nickname helps in making a quick identification among many people with the same name. A real example I can think of is the Mihovilovich-Lukrich family of the island of Brac" who moved to Watsonville, California. Their real surname was Mihovilovich but they changed it to Lukrich in the States. In Croatia they were the Lukric' branch of the Mihovilovic' family. I was once told the story of an entire Czech family who traveled under another family's passports. The original family got their passports thru some kind of passport lottery system (only so many were handed out) but they chickened out and sold their passports to another family who had children of similar sexes and ages. This family moved to the US and lived under the surname of the family who originally got the passports. It wasn't until many decades later that some grandchild was talking to one of the remaining original immigrants about the origins of the family and the person being interviewed said (nonchalantly, I was told) that "by the way, such-and-such isn't our real name -- our real name is ____". The grandchild was absolutely floored. I was told this story by the person who was floored. --Tom