A little off the subject - I work for county government in Colorado. There is the same named county in two different states. Utah and Ohio. About once a month we get inquiries where they person got the state wrong. It’s pretty easy to sort out though, we are used to it.
When I was house sharing, we were named Big Melbourne and Young Melbourne. The person who devised the convention worked on the theory that calling one of us “small” or “old” might be offensive: he was perhaps influenced by the fact that we were both still single at the time.
I have a common first name, especially for when I was born, there are lots of us around. I have a common word for a last name, but not a common name. There’s another guy with my name running around and much be my same age.
Years ago I was working at a factory and someone asked me why I had come to work. Turned out the other guy had gotten arrested and they all thought it was me. Another time some woman I knew from high school called my dad asking about me. I called her back and she got mad at me for never calling her back after the other me slept with her. It’s been 20 or so years since I’ve been confused for him.
I have gotten a few emails over the years for other “me’s”, I sometimes try and tell them I’m not the right one depending on what it was about.
I was also an early adopter, and I have FirstInitialLastName at gmail dot com. Even though my last name is uncommon, I get a fair number of emails intended for other people with the same first initial and last name. Also since some people use my last name as a first name, I get emails for people with the same first name as my last name, and same last initial as my first initial.
At one point, I’d identified about two dozen distinct ‘alter egos’ whose email I was getting. I’ve received rental car and apartment lease agreements, information on upcoming job interviews, ‘time to get your car serviced’ emails, and too many emails to count about ‘my’ food orders out for delivery, usually with the recipient’s address included. Most of these people are in the U.S. but some are in Europe or in Africa. It’s quite interesting.
My last name is rare—like hard-to-spell, harder-to-pronounce, Google-thinks-you-misspelled-it rare. And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to live in two towns where folks with the exact same surname owned popular local businesses. One sold ski gear, the other ran a car wash.
I spent years answering calls from strangers asking if I could wax their skis—or their Subaru. Eventually, I figured I might as well lean in and open a combo shop: Tibby’s Slopes & Soaps—we’ll buff your ride and your bindings. Free air freshener with every snow goggle purchase.
I only know of one other person with the same first and last name as myself. I’ve gotten congratulations on the birth of a child when it was published in my local paper, been invited to high school class reunions (multiple times) for a high school I never attended, been sent condolences on the death of my father (who is still alive), and been instructed to report to “the base clinic” before deploying in the near future (I have never served in the military).
After all this, I received a friend request on Facebook (back when I still had a Facebook account) that I accepted. I then realize that he grew up in the town I now live in. He told me people insist to him that he still lives in his childhood hometown. He tells them he has moved to a town that sounds like it is an hour and a half away, but is actually 3 states and 9 hours away because of another duplicate name.
Nobody else had my first and last name, at least not that I could find on Google, until a few years ago. When my son was about a year old, we started getting newborn baby items in the mail. Confused the hell out of me, until a woman showed up on our doorstep announcing herself to be the mother of the other Spice Weasel. The baby items were sent to us because people were confusing my baby registry with hers.
I think it’s funny that now that there are two of us, we live in the same town. We’ve started having mix-ups at the doctor’s office, where I’m pretty sure it’s a HIPAA violation to say, “I’m just verifying your date of birth because we have another client with your exact name.”
I happen to be the 13th person with my first and last name on my father’s side, well since we came to this side of the pond. From family lore, my folks had no idea of this when they named me, they just liked the name. I’ve never met another, although there are a few out there.
I mentioned this recently in another thread. There are eight or nine people in my husband’s family with his same first and last name. It’s a comedy of errors on a good day. They always talk about it being this old Italian “tradition" but when we actually did go to Italy as a family, some twenty years ago, customs didn’t know what the hell to make of us.
I once worked with two other pharmacists named Mike. Long story made short: They ended up being nicknamed “Good Mike” and “Bad Mike” and it got so we were even calling them that if the other one wasn’t there.
Shortly after I got a home computer and started exploring the internet I googled my own name and found someone with the same first and last name as myself. And just to see what would happen I sent him an email:
Dear X. L. Lent:
Hey! What are you doing with my name?
Sincerely, X. L. Lent
The next day I received a reply:
Dear X. L. Lent:
Not much.
Sincerely, X. L. Lent
When I was in grad school there were two students in my lab named Chris. One was a devout Christian with a wife and kids and the other was a radical atheist Communist. They were The Chris and the Anti-Chris.
Perfect. We had a John and a Republican John. Kind of a rare bird at the very liberal school we attended.
That is weird, but I wonder if it was a start at identity theft?
Shortly after my mother died, I started getting suggestions from LinkedIn that I connect with a person who had my mother’s name. Out of curiosity, I looked at the profile, and it was exactly what someone who wanted to fake a profile for my mother, but didn’t know her personally and was just cobbling information together from the internet, would create.
For example, it correctly identified my mother’s occupation and some of her past places of employment, but it gave her residence as Laredo, TX. She had never lived in Laredo, but she had a Mailboxes Etc. address there for many years.
I had a helluva time trying to convince LinkedIn to take down the profile. In fact, I kept getting suggestions that I connect with the profile for a year or so after her death. My initially polite notes gradually escalated in annoyance level, to no avail.
Finally I gave up, because I’d long since closed out all of my mother’s bank accounts so it didn/’t seem likely that I’d be personally affected by any fraudulent activity based on the fake profile.
The last time I bothered to check LinkedIn was probably a good 6 or 8 years after she died, and at that point the profile was FINALLY deleted. But it was there for years after I started complaining.
I have an uncommon last name (not in the top 1000 last names), so there were a few other people with my last name in the Salt Lake City phone book when I was growing up. I’ve only actually met one other person with the same last name who wasn’t a relative. Living in Asia has made that a little less likely, of course.
I have a really common first name for guys in my generation, and I’ve had a couple of encounters of sorts with someone having the same name.
The first was just before I moved again to Japan in 1990. I was gone for two weeks and came back to an answering machine that had blown up with calls looking for a deadbeat. I had a listed number and was the only person with that same name.
This was back when I was young and naïve, and under the false assumption that if you called people they would listen, without considering that the first thing deadbeats would say is that you have the wrong person.
It was interesting to hear people’s reactions when I told them I was moving the next week to Japan.
The second time was when I had subscribed to an English language magazine in Japan and paid by bank transfer. They hadn’t started sending the magazine, and after I contacted them I found out that there was another one living here. He had an alternative spelling, but the way it’s written in Japanese is the same. He had been credited for the subscription, but they sorted it out.
Another common first name, rare last name. Rare enough the only people I’ve actually met with the same last name are all close relatives. And yet there was someone with the same first and last name attending the same university at the same time I was. Never ran into him, but did have a few conversations with someone who mistook me for him. If I google my name I find what is probably (based on dates and locations) his linked in profile/company bio.
My sister once did a google search of her name and found an arrest record of a black woman in Cleveland. Searching Cleveland arrest records found many others with the same last name, all rather dark skinned based on the photo. Our branch of the family is white and has lived west of the Mississippi since the end of the 19th century. Everyone I know of with the last name is descended from one immigrant who came over in 1732. Would love to get with the Cleveland branch of the family and find out if we are related somehow.
Be prepared to find out that one of your ancestors “owned” one of theirs…
Yes, quite likely. Or at least a distant cousin.
That’s definitely the case for me; my name is common among African-Americans. Although I never confirmed the stories through any genealogical research, family lore had it that one branch of the family had a large Virginia plantation with many enslaved persons. That’s quite believable given the distribution of my surname.
Common first name, common surname for my ethnicity. When I was 7 we moved to a different neighborhood, a new development on the other side of town. There was a kid who lived two blocks over, same first and last name, same school, same class. Different middle names, I was younger by 2 months. Together with my brother, the three of us comprised 100% of the Asian students at our elementary school.