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Lydia,
This "tale" about Ellis Island changing names is absolutely NOT true! The process for coming to America was as follows
1) a person would apply for passport
2) Passport was issued by immigrants home country
3) once at the port a steamship agent would begin filling in the info on the ship manifest. The info came from the immigrants passport. Manifests were completed at sea.
4) Once at Ellis Island .... OR one of the other ports of entry the ship's pursor would present the manifest to an immigration official
5) Immigrants with enough money were allowed to leave directly fromt he dock, while other alien immgrants were sent to the processing station (in the case of Ellis Is they were ferried from the dock to the island) Typically immigrants cleared processing in a few hours.
Instructions and signage was in major languages incl. Yiddish and as well Ellis Is employed interpretors.
And.... most importantly it was ILLEGAL to change names on the manifest. Now some errors were made in recording names on the manifest but nothing like we have heard all these years.
To read more about this go to
http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=3893
Name changes or spellings occured once the immigrant had begun his/her life in America.... sometimes to sound more American sometimes simply due to the letter sounds in English vs the immigrants mother tongue so as to keep the original sound.
And .... The Port of NY (Ellis Is) was not the only port of entry.... others were Philadelphia (were many entered from Russia), Baltimore, Boston, as well as Gulf Coast and Canadian ports.
Robert
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