Armistead, who defended Fort McHenry in 1814, when Francis Scott Key wrote ' ' The Star-Spangled Banner, ' ' was the descend- ant of an Armstddt who came to Virginia from Hesse-Darmstadt. General George A. Custer, the Indian fighter, was the great- grandson of one Kuster, a Hessian soldier paroled after Bur- goyne's surrender. William Wirt, anti-Masonic candidate for the presidency in 1832, was the son of one Worth. William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was the great- grandson of a Bohemian named Paka. General W. S. Rosecrans was really a Rosenkrantz. Even the surname of Abraham Lin- coln, according to some authorities, was an anglicized form of Linkhorn. [1]
Such changes, in fact, are almost innumerable; every work upon American genealogy is full of examples. The first foreign names to undergo the process were Dutch and French. Among the former, Reiger was debased to Riker, Van de Veer to Van- diver, Van Huys to Vannice, Van Siegel to Van Sickle, Van Arsdale to Vannersdale, and Haerlen (or Haerlem) to Har- lan; [2] among the latter, Petit became Poteet, Caille changed to Kyle, De la Haye to Dillehay, Dejean to Deshong, Guizot to Gossett, Guereant to Caron, Soule to Sewell, Gervaise to Jarvis, Bayle to Bailey, Fontaine to Fountain, Denis to Denny, Pe- baudiere to Peabody, Bon Pas to Bumpus and de I' Hot el to Doo- little. "Frenchmen and French Canadians who came to New England," says Schele de Vere, "had to pay for such hospi- tality as they there received by the sacrifice of their names. The brave Bon Coeur, Captain Marryatt tells us in his Diary, became Mr. Bunker, and gave his name to Bunker's Hill." [3] But it was the German immigration that provoked the first really wholesale slaughter. A number of characteristic Ger- man sounds—for example, that of u and the guttural in ch and g —are almost impossible to the Anglo-Saxon pharynx, and so they had to go. Thus, Bloch was changed to Block or Black, Ochs to 11 Cf. Faust, op. tit., vol. ii, pp. 183HL 12 A Tragedy of Surnames, by Fayette Dunlap, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. 1, 1913, p. 7-8. is Americanisms, p. 112.
