Re: Simon Pangonis
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In reply to:
Re: Simon Pangonis
Angela Martinez 2/23/10
Angela,
The reason it is indexed as Tanzonas is that the volunteer who examined the record for ancestry.com thought that's what it read.Such mistakes are very common.
The letter "p" is often confused with "t" and vice versa when one is reading original handwriting, just as with "u" and "n" and "o", "t" and "l" and numerous other such problems."y" is often mistaken for "j"or "z" or "g".
Some of the handwriting on these records is so difficult to read that some transcribers or indexers (the people who read the writing and type the names as they see them) make significant errors.The passenger manifest for my great-aunt on her Ellis Island manifest used the Polish form of her married name "Walutkevich". The transcriber of her record on Ellis Island indexed it as "Wlaking"!One would never find her record using any spelling variant of Walutkevich (and there many).I found it because the transcriber at ancestry.com of the same manifest indexed it as "Walotkiewicz".As I read the same original manifest, I would have used this spelling as well as I myself read the document, just as it is clear to me (and someone else like me) on Szimon's name that his surname begins with the letter "p".
One must remember that passenger manifests were created to meet government regulations and only so that customs and immigration officials would know key information about who had arrived on the ship.They would be astounded today to know that their handwriting was transcribed into digital form and examined by hundreds of others like me.
It is these transcription errors that led to the mistaken belief that people's names were "changed" at Ellis Island or by immigration officials.Not at all true.It was in everyone's interest that the names on the manifest correspond exactly or as closely as possible with the names used by the passengers.No, immigrants changed their own names whenever and however they wanted to.The vast majority did so without any judicial process at all.They simply changed their names to make life easier for them among non-Lithuanians.
John Peters
John Peters