Gjakova to Garcia: Albanian-Americans Are Taking Their Real Last Names Back

A Name Is Never Just a Name

When Donika Berisha-Malaj was growing up in Yonkers, she never questioned why her grandfather went by "Berry." It was just his name. Simple, American, easy to say at a deli counter or a job interview. It wasn't until she was cleaning out his apartment after he passed — boxes of old letters, a battered Albanian-English dictionary, a faded photo of a stone house in Gjakova — that she found the original paperwork. His name had been Berishah. The customs officer had shaved it down to something easier to process, and her grandfather had let it happen without a fight.

"He needed to work. He needed to survive," Donika said. "But that name was a whole family. A whole place. And it just got cut off."

She spent the next two years working with a genealogist and an immigration attorney to legally restore the full surname for herself and her two kids. Last spring, she finally got the court order. "My daughter cried," she said. "She's eleven and she cried. That told me everything."

Donika is not alone. Across the Albanian-American community — from the Bronx to Detroit to the suburbs of New Jersey — a quiet but accelerating movement is underway. People are reclaiming surnames that were shortened at Ellis Island, altered by well-meaning social workers, anglicized for professional convenience, or simply lost in the chaos of immigration paperwork. And they're doing it with a level of intentionality and pride that would have seemed unusual just a generation ago.

What Happened to the Names in the First Place

Albanian immigration to the United States happened in multiple waves — early 20th century arrivals, Cold War refugees, and then the large post-communist surge of the 1990s. Each wave came with its own pressures to assimilate, and names were often the first casualty.

"The transformation of Albanian surnames in America is pretty well documented if you know where to look," says Arben Kola, a genealogist based in Chicago who specializes in Albanian family research. "You had names ending in -aj, -lli, -shi, -ku — suffixes that carry real meaning, that tell you about a family's regional origins or even their clan. Those endings got dropped, swapped out, sometimes just phonetically approximated into something that sounded vaguely Italian or Greek because that's what the officer assumed."

The result was a kind of nominal camouflage. Families named Hoxhaj became Hoxha, then sometimes just "Hoxha" got written as "Hoxa" or even "Hoxa" morphed into "Fox" by the second generation trying to fit in at school. Gjokaj became Goca. Rexhepi got trimmed. Shqipëtari — the very word for "Albanian" — is the kind of name that practically begged to be simplified by someone who had never heard it before.

"These weren't malicious acts, mostly," Kola notes. "But the cumulative effect was a severing. You lose the suffix, you lose the geography. You lose the geography, you lose the story."

The Genealogy Boom Is Fueling the Search

Part of what's driving the name reclamation trend is the explosion of genealogical tools available to ordinary people. Platforms like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and MyHeritage have made it dramatically easier to trace family lines, cross-reference immigration manifests, and find the original spellings buried in ship logs and naturalization records.

For Albanian-Americans, this research often carries an extra emotional charge. Albania's communist era, which lasted until 1991, created additional layers of complication — name changes mandated by the state, records destroyed or hidden, family branches cut off by the Iron Curtain. Piecing together a full surname history can feel like detective work.

"I had a client last year who discovered that her family's name had been changed twice — once by the communist government in Albania, and then again when her parents emigrated," says Mirela Dushi, an immigration attorney in New Jersey who has handled several name restoration cases. "She had been living under a name that was essentially a fiction built on top of another fiction. When she finally found the original, she said it felt like exhaling for the first time."

Dushi notes that the legal process for restoring a surname in the US varies by state but is generally straightforward — a petition to the court, a hearing, a publication requirement in some jurisdictions, and then a new birth certificate or updated identification. "It's paperwork," she says, "but it's meaningful paperwork."

A Generational Shift in What 'American' Means

What makes this moment distinct isn't just the availability of tools or legal pathways — it's the cultural permission to use them. Younger Albanian-Americans, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, seem far less interested in the assimilationist bargain their grandparents made. They're not trying to sound less foreign. They're trying to sound exactly like themselves.

"My parents were proud to be American. They worked so hard to fit in," says Enis Shkodrani, a 29-year-old graphic designer in Philadelphia who recently changed his last name back to Shkodrani from "Shoda," the version his grandfather adopted in the 1970s. "But for me, fitting in means something different. I want people to know where I'm from. I want my name to do that work."

This shift mirrors broader trends in American identity politics, where hyphenated and hyphenless identities alike are being reasserted with new confidence. But for Albanian-Americans specifically, it carries extra weight. The community has historically flown under the radar — not as visible as Greek or Italian Americans in terms of cultural infrastructure and representation. Reclaiming a name can feel like a small act of emergence.

"There's a visibility question here," says Dr. Luljeta Mema, a sociologist at a New York-area university who studies diaspora identity. "Albanian-Americans have often felt like they had to explain themselves constantly — where Albania is, what language they speak, whether they're Muslim or Christian. A restored surname is a way of saying: I exist, I have a specific history, and I'm not going to sand it down for your convenience."

The Kids Are Asking Questions

Perhaps the most striking driver of this trend is a simple one: children. Multiple people interviewed for this piece mentioned that their kids' curiosity — questions asked at school about last names, ancestry projects assigned in class, casual conversations about "what are we?" — pushed them to start researching in the first place.

Donika, back in Yonkers, says her daughter's reaction to the restored name was the moment she knew it mattered. "She went back to school and told her teacher her name was different now. And she explained why. She was proud. That's what I wanted to pass down — not just the name, but the reason for the name."

For Enis in Philadelphia, the decision to restore Shkodrani was partly about a future he hasn't started yet. "I don't have kids," he laughs, "but when I do, I want them to have the real thing from the beginning. Not something that was made easier for someone else's comfort."

A name is a container. It holds place and time, ancestry and accident, survival and choice. The Albanian-Americans digging through ship manifests and filing court petitions aren't just recovering syllables. They're deciding what kind of story gets passed forward — and insisting that story be told whole.