Name changes at Ellis Island, and a woman in male attire
Until yesterday, I always believed that the stories of immigrants' names being changed against their will by officials at Ellis Island were established historical fact.
Turns out that in fact it didn't happen. The officials at Ellis Island had the job of verifying information that was given in passenger manifests. They asked the immigrants for that verification, with the help of translators. If the immigrant requested a correction, the officials would write in the corrected name.
The abovelinked article (from the New York Public Library in 2013) gives a bunch more information about some of the reasons that immigrants' names changed. Often, apparently, they changed their names themselves. It's also possible that some of the manifests were wrong and went uncorrected. And apparently many immigrants referred to their whole arriving-in-the-US experience as “Ellis Island.” So there may be all sorts of reasons for the name changes, but apparently the Ellis Island inspectors were not the ones who made those changes.
Side note: If you have ancestors who arrived via Ellis Island, you can look them up in the Ellis Island Foundation's database of 51 million passenger records. Unfortunately, you of course have to know the spelling of their name that was used in those records.
The second half of the NYPL article is fascinating for an almost entirely unrelated reason: it tells the story of Frank Woodhull, who was originally an English-Canadian named Mary Johnson. If I'm understanding right, Johnson's facial hair led to mockery, and so Johnson began wearing male clothes and going by the name Frank Woodhull, at which point work opportunities began to be available. After fifteen years with that identity, Woodhull gave that name to an Ellis Island inspector (on the way back from a trip to Europe), but ended up having to confess what was going on. A Board of Special Inquiry investigated, and declared that Woodhull was a “desirable immigrant [who] should be allowed to win her livelihood as she saw fit.”
(I'm not sure what pronouns to use in that story. The library article uses male pronouns; I suppose that regardless of Woodhull's gender identity, we can be pretty sure that he preferred male pronouns in most contexts, so I suppose that's the right choice.)