Helen: I've seen several examples of the types of changes you listed. I was watching a historical program about a miners strike that took place in south eastern Pa. around the 1880's. The mines brought in a lot of eastern Europeans as strike breakers. If I remember the strike lasted about 6 months. After the strike ended the eastern Europeans were laid off, and there was so much resentment against them that a lot of them anglicized their names to be able to get work. Larry On 12/24/2010 7:09 AM, roger@fyi.net wrote: > Larry, > A good many people have already given you answer to this, all of them > correct. Let me throw my two cents worth in just from what I observed > from headstones and doing genealogy. > Two basic ways names get changed the accidental and the deliberate. > The accidental happens through differences in languages. Such as the > resident saying to the census taker his name and the taker recording it > in his phonic sense such as my ggreat Aunt's name being changed from Hite > to Heid on censuses 1870 to 1900. Another whose name was spelled Hoi in > French came up Hay and stuck in baptismal records.Those were accidental > of course. > The deliberate I see more in headstones. > You can see the progression. The original immigrant is something like > Guttenboi, which changes to Guttenboy in the second generation Gutboy, > the third and Goodboy in last. Some people anglized their names to be > more American such as Schmitt to Smith or Kronnenberger to Crownhill. I > know a lot of people over the years with eastern European names shortened > them to make it easier for Americans to spell such as Laitkaiteroski > becomes Laitkait. > Sometimes people would go back and change mistakes or take back their > original spelling, but most people either didn't know or let it slide > HELEN in Pgh. > > > Hi group: >> One of my lines is a Forrester family that was in Allegheny City. I >> found where they were buried in Union Dale Cemetery. On one of the >> headstones it has that he was born in Kircolm, Scotland. His brother has >> that he was born in Gallowayshire Scotland. Gallowayshire is the county >> where Kirkcolm is located. I got the church records from the Kirkcolm >> church and found the baptismal and marriage records for the family, >> except they were all listed as Foster. Then I found the immigration >> record for the parents and one son, which again listed them as Foster. >> But once they arrived in the US all of the records list them as >> Forrester, including the headstone for the parents. >> Any idea why the family would have changed names when they got here? >> >> Larry >> -- >> My genealogy page >> http://twothompsongenealogies.com/ >> Allegheny County Maps page >> http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lt0168/maps/ >> >> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ >> >> Visit our Allegheny County, PA Website: http://www.rootsweb.com/~paallegh/ >> ------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to >> PAALLEGH-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the >> quotes in the subject and the body of the message >> > > > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > Visit our Allegheny County, PA Website: http://www.rootsweb.com/~paallegh/ > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to PAALLEGH-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message > -- My genealogy page http://twothompsongenealogies.com/ Allegheny County Maps page http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lt0168/maps/