It’s not like Andrews is a bad or difficult to pronounced name (heck it works for Julie Andrews) but for whatever reason they changed the family name to Anderson back in the early 1900s even my own grandma don’t even know so if not sure if it’s lost to history or not.
Here’s an article on the topic that might help you! Why Did Our Ancestors Change Their Names?
I’m by no means an expert on the subject but I think it’s very likely that it’s from errors/variations of the name in records like the census, it’s happened in a few places in my family tree.
that wasn’t the case because my grandma told me that my ancestors put down [name_u]Anderson[/name_u] when they were doing the US census
I’m sure no one here will be able to explain the exact reason your specific family changed their name… but I bet that article could give a good insight or two! Perhaps it was a minor change somewhere along the tree… to “son of Andrew” rather than “Andrews” itself. Who can say! I wonder if your grandma knows, as you mentioned she knows some about the ancestors who wrote their surname was “Anderson” on the census.
In my country a lot people used to change their surname in order to fit in - because of the new order of the country. A lot of people even changed their first name, cause they were scared to not fit in. For example in my country, some families changed their family name to sound more Russian or [name_m]German[/name_m] and then decades later, someone in the family decided to change it back to it’s original form.
that’s pretty much all she knows about the name she doesn’t know why they chose it and all she can say is that they made up the name (which i find it unlikely during that time) i believed that they either saw the name somewhere or was inspired by someone who had the last name [name_u]Anderson[/name_u]
Maybe they were trying to align themselves with a different group of people? [name_u]Or[/name_u] get away from the rest of the family?
anderson means son of anders, which in turn is technically andrew, so maybe a son one where down the line had a bit of fun and changed it? a lot of names are changed in the past, too, for cultural and immigration reasons. i’m sure no one here could tell you exactly why, though.
that is possible
your maternal family would probably know