The idea that peoples' names were changed at Ellis Island is so deeply ingrained in American culture...very interesting to find out that was not actually the case!

So if your name is now Murphy instead of Mac Murchú, don't blame U.S. immigration officials!

http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/nam ... lis-island

The one I was told is about the would-be immigrant who, when asked his name, because he couldn't understand what was being said to him, answered in Yiddish "Ikh shoyn fargessen" which immediately became - Sean Ferguson. According to the website you're showing here, it's all apocryphal but it would seem family legends die hard, there are some strong opinions voiced to the contrary in the comments when you scroll down - it's all very personal even if it turns out not to be quite true.

'Those Jerks at Ellis Island' in the forum Language Archive at snopes.com is where I checked for the Yiddish expression.

French Huguenot Protestant families sometimes but not always, translated their names when they had to flee to another country. For example, Leblanc became De Wit in Amsterdam, but that was a conscious effort on their part to fit in.

I think just about every American family has some kind of apocryphal story. In my husband's family, the tale is that, when their great grandfather came to this country, he changed his name from Nikkel to Nickel in order to jump forward in line! (It's a family joke, because none of them likes to wait)

Generally speaking these stories are simply apocryphal. Names certainly did change when people immigrated, for various reasons (to fit in, as you mentioned, to make a name more easy for people in the new country to pronounce, to hide from the law...even because the immigrant himself wasn't sure how to spell it (illiteracy wasn't at all uncommon in the 1800s), or because the shipping company clerks made a mistake on the manifest). But it wasn't the immigration officials doing the changing.

Redwolf

I think that illiteracy was one very important factor, like Redwolf said.

Being colonised by the British was even more important. People were expected to have English translations of their names for official purposes. You only used your Irish name at home. Even then it was a patronymic/matronymic name used.
Until recent generations Gaeltacht people rarely used their Irish names officially. Now we have a new pride in our own names.

Some names were changed semi-voluntarily in Ireland when people came up against the English-speaking bureaucracy, and there was a fair amount of (mis-)translation. One of my family names in Mayo is King, and it is a mistranslation of (part of) the name Mac Conraí (several similar names also ended up as King in some places), apparently due to the mistaken belief that the name came form Mac an Rí. I've heard that some MacGowan's became Smiths in a similar way, although in that case there was at least a connection in the meaning (although it should, I suppose, have become Smithson).

Some other names acquired new forms by association. The name Ó Lachtnáin in Connacht sometimes became O'Loughnane or even O'Loughlin, but in my family it became associated with an Anglo-Irish family's name and became Loftus.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

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Pride, Bríd... close enough. ;-)

I need to get my Irish citizenship application in -- and I'll be putting my name in Irish.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.