>Hi,
>
>Just curious, when a family immigrates in the US or Canada or Argentina or whatever country, do they eventually alter the first name and surname. If so, why and how?
>
>I'm asking this, because here in the Netherlands this is currently not the practice. The result is that a lot of immigrants have names that 'we' can hardly or not at all pronounce. A solution I see is that people alter their original name when they immigrate.

Back during the WWI, my great grand father altered the way we pronounce are last name. It was proposed as Rieckert (as in Third Riech), but now we pronounce it as Richert (like in Richy Rich). This was to avoid the persecution of being of a German decent.