From Brzezinski to Brzezinski: How European Immigrants to the United States Kept Their Last Names

Joshua R. Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley
Guy Stecklov , University of British Columbia

Family name changes are a staple of immigration assimilation lore in the United States, but such reports are based on those who did change their names and not on the total population of immigrants. In this paper, we use a new source to look for the first time at population-level records that show both those who retain their names and those who changed them. Social Security applications from the 1930s to the 1960s allow comparison of the last names of immigrant men and their fathers. We find the vast majority of immigrant sons kept their family name, even when last names were difficult for English speakers. We use language classification methods to categorize changes, and find that most changes preserved ethnic recognizability. In this light, the so-called "re-emergence " of ethnicity later in the century was less uncovering something hidden than a renewed emphasis of ethnic origins kept in plain sight.

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 Presented in Session 59. Migration and Spatial Dynamics over Time and Space