Recently I’ve taken it upon myself to try and figure out when, exactly, my family’s last name changed from “Salaj” to “Salay”. I always heard growing up in school that many names got Americanized at Ellis Island. That’s all well and good but there were, at least at one point, plenty of Salajs living in America, some from the same part of the world. Specifically, there was at least one Salaj in Elryia, Ohio which is just two hours away from Aliquippa where my family settled. Not only that, but both Nikola and Ivan spoke English and had to have known how they spell their names as Serbo-Crotian uses both a Cyrillic alphabet and a Latin alphabet. I would then assume that if they could spell their names in the Latin alphabet (which I know from Ivan’s letters that he probably could) then logically they should’ve been able to correct the spelling if there was a mistake. I know my Canadian relatives must have because there are Salajs descended from Hajnrik there today.

I doubt I’ll ever know why it changed. I can make my assumptions based on oral stories about them but I will probably never know for sure. But I can still figure out about when it changed through documents I have. So, here’s a timeline of the Salaj/Salay transformation. I went through each document I have and looked at what I thought the name looked like, not necessarily what the original indexer thought.

1909: S.S. Carphathia ship manifest – Salaj

1912: S.S. President Grant ship manifest – Salaj

1915: Death certificate for Josephina Salaj – Salie

1916: Death certificate of Marija Salaj (February) – Salay

1916: Death certificate of John Salay (May) – Saly

1917: Ivan Salaj WWI draft card – Salay

1918: Nikola Salaj WWI draft card – Salay

1920: U.S. Census – Salay

1924: West Virginia Marriage Index – Salay

1930: U.S. Census – Salay

1940: U.S. Census – Salay

1942: U.S. WWII draft cards – Salay

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Logically, I feel like I can assume the last name officially changed from Salaj to Salay in between the deaths of Nikola’s wife Josephina and his daughter Mary. On Josephina’s death certificate it has it as “Salie” which could sound phonetically like how I was told my Canadian relatives pronounce “Salaj” (like Sa-lie).

I wonder if Ivan and Nikola ever discussed something as trivial as how they should spell their name in America.