In Russia, your middle name is your father’s name plus ovich or evich if you’re male, ovna or evna if you’re female. So it’s not her last name that’s the big deal – obviously, they don’t know that she should be Tanya Yurievna “Fatherless”. So what’s her patronym?
For example, my Russian professor’s father’s name was Alexei, so he was Igor Alexievich (Last Name). My name is Kathleen Sutter, and my father’s name is William. In Russian, that would be Ekaterina Vasillievna Sutter.
Bulgarians also have patronyms as their middle name (it’s a little different from the Russian style, though, they tack on -ov for makes and -ova for females) and I once asked my counterpart what you’d use as a middle name if the father of the child ran off, or was an unfit parent or something. She thought about it and finally admitted she didn’t know. She’d never heard of anyone using anything but a patronym. (Bulgarians were weirded out by the idea that not everyone does this…that my parents just picked a middle name at random for me was crazy. BTW, non-Slavic Bulgarians, like the ethnic Turks and Roma just use their father’s name without the -ov or -ova as their patronym.)
IIRC, a rather famous literature foundling in France was dropped off on Quasimodo’s day, and took his name from that.
And speaking of famous literary, I had dear Leela in mind (though do remember that Simpsons episode).
That’s not really relevant though because the French don’t use patronyms.
I did find a book called Across Russia: from the Baltic to the Danube (1892) by Charles Augustus Stoddard, editor of the New York Observer. There’s a chapter in which he describes visiting Vospitatelny Dom, the foundling hospital of Moscow. He describes seeing the infants (whom he proclaims are as well-cared for as “infants of respectable parentage anywhere”) and claims the hospital took in 1,200 infants a month.
According to Stoddard, the mothers came to the hospital’s waiting-room with their baby, or send a female friend to surrender it. There they were asked (by nurses or a priest? Stoddard doesn’t say) “Has the child been baptized?” and if so, “By what name?” They registered the child under it’s baptismal name if given one. If not, the next morning the priest would baptize the baby with the name of the saint who’s day it was on the Russian calendar. The priest then gave his own name for the child’s patronymic: So a child baptized by a priest named Mikhail on St. Kyrill’s Day would be baptized Kyrill Mikhailovich.
Tell me about it. I am American, and I use my father’s last name, as most of us do. I attended university in Spain, and endured no small amount of confusion and strange looks when I turned in forms with the space for second last name left blank. I could have tacked my mother’s last name on there, but I was afraid that I would then have to endure confusion with the American university system when I tried to transfer my grades.