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[deleted] t1_j2bq52b wrote

The joke is that it's true. Great example is the city of Lviv, Ukraine.I looked it up in Wikipedia. It's historical affiliations (if not it's name) changed 11 times from 1256 to 1991. My great great grandmother was from somewhere in the area of Ukraine/Bellarus/Poland. It changed depending on what year my mother asked her when she was just a tot. Now I know why.

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SchwarzeHaufen OP t1_j2cqxez wrote

My father's mother has a similar thing, but with her name. She kept localising it to fit in, so we are not actually sure what her birth name is anymore.

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[deleted] t1_j2csb7k wrote

I understand. My great grandfather came in off the boat to Ellis island way back when. They changed the spelling of his name. Just enough. So that other relatives in the old country couldn't find him, supposedly. IDK. The story changes. My grandfather didn't know it until he needed a birth certificate - somehow something didn't match up.

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SchwarzeHaufen OP t1_j2ct18t wrote

I actually have a joke about that:

So you remember uncle Shaun?

Big man, spoke with a heavy Austrian accent, constantly sloshed?

Well, he got his name when he was going through Ellis Island. You see, he had heard from his neighbour's wife that to succeed in America, you needed to have a good Anglo name like Cedric Wellington, so he had determined that he would change his name when he got there.

Standing in line, he started thinking of all the things he would do and all the things he would see, like visiting the Statue of Liberty! Oh, how nice that would be. But as he was doing this, he forgot to notice that he had come up to the immigration officer's desk.

'Name?'

Taken out of his day-dreaming, he got caught flat footed. Thinking desperately, he tried to remember the name he wanted and so to try to stall for time he blurted out. 'Ich habe es schon vergessen!'

And that is how he came by the name Shaun Fergusson.

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Shammurammat t1_j2cwn82 wrote

Nice one, although to sound perfectly German you should either say "hab ich schon vergessen" or simply, "schon vergessen". The second one works better with the joke.

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