Genealogy /
POLISH IMMIGRANT NAME-CHANGING [10]
A FEW REMARKS ON IMMIGRANT NAME-CHANGING
POLISH ACCENT MARKS:
Although all those dots, bars squiggles and acute accents may mean little more than fly specks to the average American, in Polish they can make all the difference, even changing a word’s meaning. Example: “los” means fate or destiny in Polish, while “łoś” is an elk (US/Canada: moose). If available, check the immigrant ancestor’s Old World documents (baptismal/birth certificate, passport, steamship-ticket stubs, etc.) for the pre-arrival spelling of his name. Naturalization papers are not good, because they show the post-arrival state of the name which may have shortened, respelled or otherwise modified.
NASAL VOWELS:
Since the nasalizing little squiggles beneath the vowels “ą” and “ę” got lost and were meaningless in America, many Polish immigrants respelled their surnames to retain the original pronunciation. For instance, if left as it was, Dębkowski (something like Oakton or Oakwood in meaning) would end up being pronoucned by rank and file Americans as deb-COW-ski. But if respelled Dembkoski, it retained its perfect pronunciation. The same thing occurred when Bąkowski was respelled Bonkoski (dropping out the “w” gets rid of the “cow”!).
PHONETIC RESPELLINGS:
At times, Polish surnames were respelled in America to make them more pronounceable, and this one is a good example. For instance, since the letters “j”, “w”, “ch”, “cz”, “sz” and others were pronounced differently in Polish and English names such as Jabłoński, Nowak, Chomiński, Czajka and Szymański were respelled as Yablonski, Novak, Hominski, Chayka, and Shymanski. OTHER CHANGES:
Sometiems long names were shortened wtihout losing their Polish idnetity, eg Kołodziejczak > Kołodziej, Chrzanowski > Chrzan, Jeleniewicz > Jeleń or Tomaszewski > Tomasz. Still others were translated adn that usually obliterated the name's ethnic origin; eg Janowicz > Johnson, Bednarski > Cooper, Zima > Winters.
HOW AND WHY?:
Many of the late 19th/early-20th-century immuirgatns were illiterate and unwillingly had their names Anglo-mangled at Ellis Island or other ports of entry. Some were pressured by bosses, teachers or naturalization-class instructors into changing their names or did so voluntarily for the sake of convenience, for business reasons or to avoid ridicule. No-one can be crueller than schoolchildren, and in a N. American school someone named Dombkowski could invariabnbly expect to be taunted with 'Does your DUMB COW SKI?'
