@rosered55 Your grandmother would be proud.
I kept my name and do not regret it. My kids have DH’s name and mine as a second middle name. I will admit to occasional flashes of wishing we all had the same last name, but it is generally a non-issue. I am not bothered if someone calls me Mrs DH’s name but find it funny when they call me Mrs. mylastname, since I am not Mrs. that. We also go by the mylastname - hislastname family.
Many of my friends of my age kept their names, but not those 10 to 15 years younger. It is much more prevalent in my current, upper middle class town than it was in the more middle class town we lived in when first married and with kids.
I did not want to hyphenate as both of us have multi-syllable last names and it would be unwieldy. Plus I never figured out how that would work in the next generation.
@NJres - Yup, Happydad gets called Mr. Hername every once in a while too.
Happydad’s two last names are the same (think Suarez Suarez, or Suarez y Suarez if you want to get fancy about it). When he first came to the US as a student, just the first last name was put on that university’s paperwork and on his student employee SS card. His research papers were usually published with two middle initials instead of Spanish-style with an initial for the second last name (A. B. C. S. Suarez, rather than A. B. Suarez S.). I have no idea who came up with that, maybe his PI in grad school, or maybe he cooked it up himself. After trundling along for nearly 30 years with one last name in the US, when he became a citizen, his naturalization papers had the full double last name. Which was fine until we hit the SS office to update his records. Yup, new SS card with double last name and a whole lot of correspondence with banks, DMV, etc. to get that second name tacked onto everything. There still are a couple of banks we haven’t done the work for.
Lots of names at our house. If it comes in the mail and looks reasonably like somebody’s name, it gets put in that person’s pile.
I didn’t change my name after marriage. I liked my surname and wanted to keep it. My mom took the traditional route and became Mrs. Dad’s first name and surname. My dad didn’t want his kids to be named solely after him or have to deal with changing the surname later and came up with what I think is a great idea, using a culturally unique and important occupation in our clan like (insert[religious building]) architect.
It is an appellation that is genealogically identifiable.
I realized that I grew up in a very culturally diverse area because I know of so many different last name and name changing traditions than mine.
I have many school friends who changed their first name and surname after marriage. So Jane Brown now is Mary Smith. Makes it very difficult to respond to FB friend requests as photos after 30 some years are not helpful either.
I have friends who named their children in this manner: girl children take the mother’s first name as their surname and boys take their father’s first name as the surname. This is the traditional way in their families.
Friends who have taken their husband’s first name as their surname and their kids have the same. Another very commonly used system.
This last one is a bit more unique. I know people who follow a matrilineal tradition. The family lineage is traced through the mother and her mother and so on. The family names in this case are usually house/estate names or village names. The men keep their mother’s family names after marriage, kids of the marriage take their mother’s family name.
Mr R constantly gets called Mr MyLastName because I am the one that does everything for when we travel, buy things, etc. He’s gotten used to it and responds to it.
I grew up in a Polish community with last names running to 12 or 14 letters. At high school reunions there are people who put both maiden and married names on their nametags, and the response is always, “Please tell that is not a hyphenated last name!”
Years ago I was quite rude to my son’s Spanish teacher (elementary school) when she called the house. When someone called for Mrs. (H’s last name) it was almost always a junk call. This was not. I felt badly and apologized profusely. I still remember that and I eased up a lot after that.
My old boss had a name that was just one letter different from the “f” word and the errors in the mail to him were pretty hilarious. His wife did not take that name…
My favorite name change story - the woman had taken her new Hubby’s name upon marriage so that the future family would share the same surname. She changed her own records and had two children with birth certificates, passports, school records, etc. with Hubby’s surname. Then the DH, after years of distance, had a rapprochement with the step-father who raised him. Hubby changed his own birth surname, taking the step-father’s name to honor the step-father. So now, despite her early efforts and planning, the wife and children have a name not connected with DH’s.
My sister took her husband’s name when she got married at 18. She got divorced at 23. She put herself through college as a single mom with two kids. She changed her name back to her birth last name when it came time to fill out the paperwork for her diploma, despite doing all her work under ex-H’s last name. No way did she want the final credit for her efforts reflecting on her abusive, high school dropout ex-husband’s name, and have to look at that name on the diploma on her wall.
One I found funny: I met a guy who everyone called “Buckhead.” I was surprised when I met him because his head seemed normal sized, buckhead being a pejorative term for someone with an abnormally large cranium.
About a year later I was at his house and saw something on his wall with his legal last name on it - Buck-Head. His birth father was Buck and his step-father was Head, so he decided to honor both and hyphenated.
So I go by first/maiden/last, (Firstname) Smith Jones. Or Firstname S Jones or Firstname Jones. No hyphens. Long story but when we moved here, the local DMV rep registed my new license under “Smith Jones.”
Fine? But I’m under “S” in some city/state records, not J. This sometimes works to my advantage. And other times, they can’t find me under Jones, til I clue them to look under Smith. It may explain why, on a 3 leg international flight x both directions, I got pulled aside for a frisk 6 times.
Ah, yes, the looking up things under a name. Forget sometimes whose name something is under and when info not found have to ask them to check the other name. Unfortunately some businesses/utilities did not have a way to list two names so one or the other of us got the honor.
Somewhere the junk mail people put a space into H’s last name so we sometimes get the first part of his last name used as a first name- really weird when last-comma- first format is used. We also know it is junk mail based on how things are addressed - Mrs. my name, Mr. my name, my first his last name…
They whole idea of last names is to be able to relate people to one another. A Jones, a Smith- you knew which clan you were dealing with. It also diminished women, we don’t count after all (hah!). An arbitrary name makes it difficult to follow relationships.
Cultural differences. I note the Spanish nod to both sides. We Americans have aunts, uncles, cousins- regardless of which parent’s they are. H is from India and sometimes his description of a relative adds qualifiers we consider unimportant. Mix up so many people from everywhere and after so many generations it is either very complex or- who cares.
I grew up in an area where my ethnic last name was not only long but unusual for the area. But my sister and I had the same English teacher one year (same subject matter covered how things were done-honors/regular)and the teacher only suspected the relationship when our separately written essays about “my personal prison” basically covered the same thing (father/family). I guess being totally different in appearance (ht, hair, eyes…) makes a difference in assumptions. Then in a medical school rotation back in the city with a lot of the ethnic group I thought they had misspelled my name by one letter when actually it belonged to a CRNA student observing anesthesia in surgery.
It used to irritate me when a store or bank clerk would address others by their last name (using paperwork/credit card as the guide) but use my formal first name because they couldn’t figure out how to pronounce. If you want to be on first name terms with me use my nickname!
Sorry, deviation from the thread. But- what’s in a name is important in many ways.
Mr R had the observation tonight that perhaps one of the reasons I’m so attached to my name is because I’ve spent a lifetime with people trying to give me a different name. My name is commonly a nickname (I’ve actually never met another person with my legal name) and people constantly want to expand my name to something else. They can read it on a form as (for example) “Jo” and just automatically call me Josephine, Joanna, or Jordan. No. Look at the sheet- it’s Jo.
Maybe it’ll change when we have kids, but Mr R & I having different last names has never been an issue. It doesn’t raise any eyebrows when he takes me to the hospital as his spouse. We didn’t have to prove we were married when I added him to my insurance.
Getting mail addressed to Mr & Mrs HisName means it’s either spam or something from his religious family asking us for money. Either way, into the recycle bin it goes. Makes things easier.