Paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on November 3, 2026. Berkeley News coverage here.
Context:
When people came to the U.S. from Europe, Asia and the Middle East in the mid-20th century, they faced a question that would define them: Should they keep their foreign-sounding surnames or change them to blend into their new community?
New research from UC Berkeley indicates that in much of the 1900s, name changes were much less widespread than long thought: More than 80% of immigrants kept their surnames intact.
Research and Key Findings:
To quantify how common both subtle and significant name changes were, researchers combed through a Berkeley-built dataset of millions of Social Security records. They focused on 172,000 foreign-born men from 11 countries whose first applications were filed between 1936 and 1970 — a span from the beginning of such applications to the most recent batch of publicly released data.
They found that more than 80% of immigrants kept their surnames intact. About 15% made slight changes that preserved their ethnic roots, and only about 5% changed their last name to an English-sounding one that could mask their origins.
Joshua R. Goldstein, UC Berkeley demography professor and first author of the study, and his co-author, Guy Stecklov at the University of British Columbia, also found that immigrants who moved to the Deep South had a name change rate that was double that of the Northeast. That could suggest that name changes were rarer when people lived in communities with large immigrant populations and perhaps more welcoming policies, Goldstein said.
Why It Matters:
Beyond challenging a familiar historical narrative, understanding how rarely names changed — and how they were most commonly altered — allows researchers to use data and computational linguistics tools to more reliably link historical records across generations and study a range of population trends.
The new paper builds on Goldstein’s previous work with immigrant names, showing that the children of immigrants who carried American-sounding names had higher occupational achievement — something he and Stecklov found was the case even for those with distinctively non-English last names.