Ellis Island. 1989
Creative history
Casper Glattfelder immigrated to the United States from Switzerland in 1733. My family attended a huge "name family reunion" when I was a kid and we received a lot of research literature on the topic. Ellis Island didn't even exist as an immigrant processing facility in that year, so why was my ancestor's name there? It turns out that when that monumental wall with all those names was inscribed, one only needed to pay money to have a name added. Some of Casper's progeny went on to be locally rich (of paper-mill fame). They were also the people who sponsored that reunion and all the genealogical research. Certainly it was their deep pockets that put the ancestor's name on a wall of immigrants even if he did NOT arrive via New York (more than likely it was Philadelphia).
Glattfelder (person from a flat field - which I verified) means a native of Glattfelden, Switzerland located in the Rhine Valley. There are Glatfelders, Glatfelters, Gladfelters, and more. Glotfelter actually more approximates the original pronunciation, but that might just be by chance. The only thing my brother and I complained of bitterly growing up in Southcentral Pennsylvania was having a name that was one letter off a more common variant and having our names misspelled our entire lives. It was so bad that we both were stressed at high school graduation that our diplomas might actually be spelled wrong. Ironically, if we leave that area, no one has a problem with pronouncing or spelling our surname - it's just back home in Southcentral Pennsylvania that the "name madness" for us rears its head.
The BEST two permutations of this name were in Japan and Saudi Arabia. In Japanese, I was Gurottoferutah. In Saudi Arabia it was Flafarter. At least the Japanese got a little closer to the original. Luckily, in my jobs overseas people have used my first name more often. Mr. Matthew is a LOT easier to pronounce than Mr. Glotfelter.