Kleinroc. Which might mean pebble

My families evidently came here a bit earlier. Mom's maiden name was Stone, my name allegedly goes back to Lithuania and Poland; I recall a college professor in my freshman year sharing he found it in Poland. My paternal grandma's finally Brown, came from Russia at the turn of the century.

Great topic Nanc. As you know, my maiden name is Just. The way the story goes is that my father's father's (my grandfather) last name was Yust. . . and when he came over to Ellis Island the last name was shortened and changed to Just to be "more American." The problem is that, my grandfather was so proud to be an American henever told anyone what the full last name originally was so no one in my family knows what the name was.

We were Scarratofsky. Michael was Konelsky. The best story was my maternal grandfathers. He was Ruslansky - when he got to America he became Uslan. When his brothers came to America they became Rosen. Imagine going through life with full brothers that had different last names?

My grandfather's younger brother was brought over from Russia by an older married sister, saying the youngest brother was her son, so he had a different last name also

I know a family whose name was Vanderbilt. When they arrived at Ellis Island it was changed to Rosenkranz

Oddly, everyone in my paternal grandfather's line anglicized Meyer into Mercer, except for my grandfather. People said that he didn't want to incur the expense...

The Meyers arrived in New York in 1848, just ahead of the revolutions roiling the Holy Roman Empire. My ancestor's name was Berchtold; his wife's name is somehow lost to history. He was a Protestant from Heidelberg, and I suspect that in the very Catholic south of Germany he wasn't particularly welcome. We have a photo of him taken when he was much older, and judging from said photo he was probably close to seven feet tall! Lots of very large blond and blue-eyed people on that side of the family.

Mother's families (Weiss and Goldberger) arrived from Austria-Hungary, mostly from Austria. One great grandmother, Sally, was born in what is modern Slovakia in the City of Kosice. I think they arrived around 1880, some years before Ellis Island became the immigration intake.

My mother-in-law's paternal ancestors were absolutely fascinating. Baruch Spinosa, the philosopher/heretic never married and never had children. He did, however, have a brother called Gabriel, who cared for him when he was shunned by the community in Amsterdam.

Now, my very Dutch mother-in-law's maiden name is Spinosa-Cattela, and her two amateur genealogists brothers worked for a number of years to see if they were related. Indeed, they were as they proved themselves (and my wife, of course) to be direct descendants of Gabriel. No one, however, can figure out where the Cattela came from. There is speculation that the family may have lived in a small town by that name somewhere on the Iberian peninsula.

There is, fortunately, a teenaged boy, the son of my wife's cousin Frank, who hopefully will carry that rather noble name into posterity.

Coda: About six months from the confirmation of ancestry, my wife's sister in Princeton gave birth to a son and named him Gabriel. Now how cool is that?

Hmmmm don't believe any of my family names were changed: Buscarello, Giacalone (my mother's maiden name.) Santoro (my father's mother's maiden name.) Bolivia (my mother's mother's maiden name.) Not sure how this happened but I do know that the kids at my school shortened my name to Bosco!!!!

Us, too! Countries ago, my paternal grandfather was Berteshka in Lithuania. After the war, he was a displaced person in Scotland where many immigrants Anglicized their names (even though they continued to live in strong ethnocentric communities and use their language in newspapers and churches). My father became "Bertram" before he came here on a boat as a 4 year old (with his parents.) I can't quite give it up.