I've been a member of Ancestry for 6 or 7 years and I usually log in several times a week. I've been quite satisfied with the progress I've made researching my family trees. Sometimes there are slow periods and then there are times that I can barely keep up with new discoveries.

But I don't get 'all sorts of offers .....to buy something' - Exactly what information do they want to sell you? I do have an annual membership, it includes Fold 3 and Newspaper.com. Do you think you're getting these notices because your 6 month membership is nearly over? Or is Ancestry trying to sell you Fold 3 and Newspapers.com?

If so - that's not a scam. It's just another category you can subscribe to.

The name thing is important but in my father's family I know of at least six different ways that the name they came into this country are spelled. Some have double SS or LL. Some an S or Z. I do know that they were in this country in 1819 when part of the farm was acquired well before Ellis Island.

Also look at the middle names of women. Depending on where they were and what records you are examining you may find that their middle name was the last name they were born with.

For a small giggle my mother and her sisters always spelled my mother's middle name and insisted it was the correct spelling while they all laughed. In looking at the records that name has been spelled differently each time it was passed down from grandmother to granddaughter back to the late 1700's.

You could take screen prints of info to save for researching later.

Always, no matter where you find it, save the information and the citation of where you found it to your computer. Agreements with partner companies doesn't guarantee that that document will be there on the site the next time you want to look at it. And always look at the original record NOT the transcript. On census, look at every field. They're different on each one. You can figure out your ancestor's story by reading the census. Also read the page before and the page after because some years they were two pagers. You probably will find other family members by reading a few pages before and after.

Who "suggestions emailed to me for records to check" emailed those to you? Ancestry doesn't do that.

I get weekly updates from Ancestry on records or hints to check. I don't currently have a subscription, but I got the updates even when I did. Ancestry can be a bit frustrating in that sometimes I get back hints for records I submitted or someone else will copy my submissions and I get hints for that.

Like everyone else, I sometimes find the incorrect info or other trees that are incorrect. Sometimes I make an effort to have other people correct their trees and sometimes I don't.

i found Ancestry helpful, but there were trees on there that I knew were not correct. You need to double or triple check information. I found much information on the LDS (Mormon) site. Ancestry does seem anxious to sell you a DNA test.

I do genealogy work for others through our historical society. A lot of our time is spent helping people DISPROVE what was found on Ancestry. While Ancestry has piqued an interest in genealogy it can also lead someone far astray. Our mantra is....." Spelling does not count".

Folklore has it that the workers at Ellis Island changed people's names when they came through. Not true (at least, not that I've ever found).

Lindsey -- this is the story handed down in our family -- the whole name was not changed but the ending -ac was changed to -ich . We were told that the immigration officer said the name would sound less foreign with ich!!! It actually sounds more foreign. Ha Ha. When my father came of age he went through the process of changing it back to the original.

" Folklore has it that the workers at Ellis Island changed people's names "

It's not folklore. I've encountered many people who said their ancestry research found that their old country names had been, let's say, simplified or Anglicized in a spelling or phonetic sense. Further simplifications or changes in an effort to assimilate or be viewed as more local and less foreign, that's another matter.

"Lindsey -- this is the story handed down in our family -- the whole name was not changed but the ending -ac was changed to -ich"

I don't know if this applies to you, bleusblue, but names of Serbian or Croatian origin often end in ic (and less commonly ac) but are phonetically as if "itch" (atch), not ick. So, the old country pronunciation of Babic is Bab itch. The spelling switch to help use of the "itch" sound was pretty consistent with people with such names, an effort to help correct pronounciation. Watsonvillle, CA had a concentrated Croatian immigration from the late 1800s into the 1900s and many, many people down there have names today that end with "ich".

Spelling changes to keep phonetic sounds aren't that uncommon. Take the J pronounced as Y sound in German - there are examples I've run into first names too: Yacob (Jacob), Yohan (Johan), etc.

The most common error that I have found as to names on the census, once I got back earlier than 1920, stemmed (I think) from the fact that sometimes both the census taker and the person reporting were only semi-literate, or was a neighbor reporting on the folks down the road, and so names were spelled according to how they sounded to the person and ages are off. Thus Barbara is recorded as Barbery, Lewis is Loos, and so forth. I've found one branch's surname spelled at least 6 different ways. Imagination and persistence is always required when searching!

Especially when trying to search records that have not just been translated, but transliterated -- such as when I look for my Lithuanian ancestors in Russian Empire records -- the information has been originally recorded in Cyrillic script, in the Russian language, and it has been interpreted sometimes first into Lithuanian, then into English. I have to rely on phonetic similarity to the names I am looking for to try to make a match.

Also, Ancestry doesn't always make the search easy! When I was using it a lot, I found that they didn't send hints from newspapers -- I had to make a specific search through those (the ones available in the basic subscription); and once I found my person on page 13 of the search results -- even though the spelling matched, the location matched, the name matched exactly, for some reason the search engine didn't recognize it as a high match and relegated it far down in the search results.

In my father's branch, the last name survived intact, but nearly everyone anglicized their first names -- which made them a challenge to find in ship manifests.

I had written, "Folklore has it that the workers at Ellis Island changed people's names when they came through. Not true (at least, not that I've ever found)."

Elmer then pulled a Donald Trump and selected only part of that quote, to wit: "Folklore has it that the workers at Ellis Island changed people's names" and then added his own statement, "It's not folklore." He attempted to bolster that with, "I've encountered many people who said their ancestry research found that their old country names had been, let's say, simplified or Anglicized in a spelling or phonetic sense."

Elmer, did these folks whom you encountered tell you that they found evidence that the workers at Ellis Island (or any other point of entry) deliberately changed their ancestors' names? Or did they simply say that "... their ancestry research found that their old country names had been, let's say, simplified or Anglicized in a spelling or phonetic sense." There's a HUGE difference. For example, my paternal grandfather was born in Italy. I grew up knowing his name, where he was born, and the exact date he arrived at Ellis Island. For years I searched for the ship manifest with his name on it, but I could not find it. My grandfather's first name is Joseph, and I knew that in Italy his name would have been Giuseppe. I also, of course, knew the surname, because it is the surname of my father and it is also my maiden name. I also know that many people misspell Giuseppe as Guiseppe, and I searched both spellings, as well as for Joseph, but I simply could not find the manifest. Then one day I decided to search for the manifest for my grandfather's best friend, Angelo. They were best friends growing up in Italy, both had come to the USA, and Angelo married one of my paternal grandmother's first cousins. I easily found the manifest with Angelo's name on it, and much to my surprise, there was my grandfather's name right below it! My grandfather's entry had been lined out, which meant that he had not made the voyage. He was only 15 at that time (and I knew he came to the States when he was 17), so I wasn't surprised that he hadn't made that trip. (Although I've never read this as fact, my research bears out my thinking that no one under the age of 16 was allowed to make the trip unless they were traveling with a relative who was at least 16 years old.) BUT, there was a big surprise in that manifest entry. As I said, I knew it was my grandfather, because he was listed right after Angelo, as well as the facts that the place of birth (the little hilltop village) was correct, and in the column for "Name of nearest relative in the country from whence you came" had "Cesare - father" - and I knew my great-grandfather's name was Cesare. The surprise was that the surname was "wrong." My very Italian maiden name ends with an o. But the name written on the manifest ends with an i. Even when said with a very heavy Italian accent, the name with an o and the name with an i do not sound the same. Generally speaking, Italian names that end with an i are pronounced with the i as if it were a "long e" (think of Henry Mancini -- "man-see-knee") and Italian names that end with an o are pronounced with a "long o" at the end.

So, I wondered how in the heck anyone could have written down my grandfather's surname incorrectly. But, I then did a manifest search using that misspelling, and I immediately found his manifest. Census records have my grandfather's surname spelled correctly, so the manifest spelling was puzzling to me until I went to the Family Research Library in Salt Lake City and found my grandfather's naturalization papers. My grandfather was not naturalized until he'd been in the USA for 29 years. My father was 24 when my grandfather was naturalized (so his naturalization did not affect my father's Italian citizenship, nor mine or that of my siblings). For 29 years, every time my grandfather's name was written on anything, it was written with an o on the end, not an i. And my grandfather's naturalization papers clearly state that he wanted his name officially, legally changed to the "new" spelling, and the request was approved.

Angelo also changed his surname. His surname in Italy ended with an i, and he did not change that. But, within the name there was an a which he changed to an e. One of Angelo's brothers also immigrated, and he left the a as an a, but he dropped the i from the end.

And, yes, I agree that there may very well have been instances at Ellis Island when a worker simply could not understand an immigrant's language and/or accent and could not understand their name and did not know how to spell it so the worker made the best attempt they could, which ended up "giving the immigrant a new name." But that is very, very different than deliberately assigning a new name to an immigrant.

As was pointed out in earlier responses by others (and as evidenced by information on the 1940 Federal Census which shows how many years of education folks had), many immigrants did not know how to read or write and simply couldn't tell anyone the correct spelling of their names. And, as has been previously mentioned, unfamiliarity with foreign names and accents was a factor in names being misconstrued and misspelled.

Elmer, as much as you like to fantasize that you are the be-all, end-all, ultimate authority in everything, you need to accept the fact that you're not. And, no, I'm not claiming to be the ultimate authority on genealogy research, but I'm willing to bet that I've spent many more hours doing genealogy research than you have; and I've helped many people get the documentation they need to join Sons of The American Revolution / Daughters of the American Revolution. (And, yes, on my husband's side of the family tree there is the name of someone who arrived on the Mayflower.)

So, Elmer why don't you ask some of these people you've encountered who said "... their ancestry research found that their old country names had been, let's say, simplified or Anglicized in a spelling or phonetic sense" and ask them if their research revealed a deliberate changing of their name by a government official.

lindsey, you're guilty of something I do sometimes too - taking informal comments too literally.

Yes, I've heard of many cases where last names were significantly changed. If you haven't, you haven't, so what? Sometimes an apparent act of sloppy transliteration (ignoring the phonetics and spelling of the originating foreign language) or sometimes rather brash changes from which you might envision a conversation "What, Taoloro? Let's call that Taylor". Deliberate? There's no way to know with the passage of so many years. There were interpreters at Ellis Island but one can imagine they focused on making sure that questions and answers were mutually understood between the arrivee and the immigration official.

"think of Henry Mancini -- "man-see-knee""

The proper Italian pronunciation of this last name is man-chee-knee.

At least for my husband's last name, which is mine as well through marriage, is completely different in spelling. We know this for a fact as family still lives there where his parents are from and have that pre immigration name. Over here the K became a c and the u became an o and the i became a y. Actually it was a difficult name to translate because it is a u with two dots above it. Plus it is a long name. I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen as much anymore at all. We have done our genealogy thing and there are lots of good reasons for my parents to have moved here let's say. :/