Adding another reason for a change was the family used the English word for the family name. I have seen it in doing Genealogy . My mom's maiden name in Polish was Gruszka , it means pear.. Kolodziejski translates to wheeler , etc. Julie B. -----Original Message----- From: paallegh-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:paallegh-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of roger@fyi.net Sent: Friday, December 24, 2010 7:09 AM To: paallegh@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [ALL] Name changes 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