From di Carlo to DeCarlo

Several people have asked why my grandfather decided, when he reached adulthood, to change his name (apparently without going to the trouble of going through legal channels) from Pasquale di Carlo to Charles De Carlo. The short answer is that I don't know, but apparently this kind of name change was very common among Italian arrivals in the United States. 

My nonno, around the time his name changed.

I doubt my grandfather hoped to conceal his Italian origins, since altering one letter in his last name hardly would have accomplished that. But he was ambitious, and he must have felt that changing Pasquale to Charles showed that he was eager to assimilate, unlike old-country paesani who couldn't adjust to American ways.  Adding a capital D to his name also made it look a bit more Anglicized. And to English-speakers the "De" signaled the correct Italian pronunciation, whereas  "di" was easily misconstrued as "di." (Yes, I've heard Americans make that mistake, and others like it.)

I write the name as one word, but my grandfather didn't seem particularly concerned about whether there was a space between De and Carlo. Indeed, the requirement that names be consistently written the same way is pretty recent. My daughter the genealogist tells me that before our computerized data started following us around wherever we went, things like marriage and tax records relied on names entered by typewriter or, earlier, by hand, and no one much cared if someone shed or added a letter or two along the way.

For example, here's an entry my daughter discovered in a 1706 "stato d'anime," a kind of census maintained by the local church, listing the family of my di Carlo great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who lived in Fornelli with lots of other di Carlos. 

It reads: "Cecilia de Vecio, widow, age 34,  Berardina de Carolo, age 10, Ambrosius de Carolo, age 8, Roccus de Carolo, age 6, her sons." Roccus (a Latinized rendering of Rocco, which was probably his actual name) is my direct ancestor, part of a long line of di Carlos,  but for some reason the priest who wrote this entry rendered the name as de Carolo. This variation didn't stick, though, and the family went back to spelling it the more standard way. 

Creative orthography was extremely common everywhere in the old days, which gives neophyte genealogists plenty to tear their hair over. In the early years of the 20th century my grandfather doubtless thought it was no big deal to update his name, suiting it to his new life in a new country