Nonetheless the original name was never entirely scratched out and remained legible.

Immigrant inspectors accepted these names as recorded in the ship's manifests and never altered them unless persuaded that a mistake had been made in the spelling or rendering of the name. …mostly ticket agents and pursers required no special identification from passengers and simply accepted the names the immigrants gave them. The Encyclopedia of Ellis Island states that employees of the steamship companies, If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists. The manifest was presented to the officials at Ellis Island when the ship arrived. The ship's manifest was created by employees of the steamship companies that brought the immigrants to the United States, before the voyage took place, when the passenger bought their ticket. Inspectors did not create records of immigration rather they checked the names of the people moving through Ellis Island against those recorded in the ship's passenger list, or manifest. Their goal was to make sure that the answers matched. The clerk then proceeded, usually through interpreters, to ask questions based on those found in the manifests. When immigrants reached the end of the line in the Great Hall, they stood before an immigration clerk with the huge manifest opened in front of him. In the era before visas, there was no official record of entering immigrants except those manifests. The only list of names came from the manifests of steamships, filled out by ship officials in Europe. The proof is found when one considers that inspectors never wrote down the names of incoming immigrants. Nearly all name change stories are false.

Cannato's excellent book American Passage: The History of Ellis Island explains why this did not happen: The legend goes that officials at Ellis Island, unfamiliar with the many languages and nationalities of the people arriving at Ellis Island, would change the names of those immigrants that sounded foreign, or unusual.

American Passage by Vincent J. Cannato