As others said, in the USA you can name your kid anything as long as it is spelled out.
You can’t name your kid “5” for example, but you could name him “five.” You can’t name him “&” but you could name him “ampersand”
My mother was a nurse and handled the newborns. She said, they always told mothers they were required to name the baby before they left the hospital. She also told me it was all bull. They’d say that but there was nothing they could do to stop the mother from leaving with the baby if they wanted to. Bascially it was a bluff.
Social security says you don’t have to register your kid, but you need a SS# to claim him as a dependent. So you need a birth certificate that is properly registered to get that SS#.
You could also have a baby outside a hospital, so you wouldn’t necessarily have someone breathing down you neck.
I imagine the longer you go without a birth certificate, the harder it will be to back register the birth. Eventually your kid is gonna need that for something.
So just get a SS# for “Baby Boy Jones.” If anyone asks, you can say, “That’s not his real name. He doesn’t have a real name yet.” Only Social Security will care, and even then, not much. If and when the kid gets a “real” name, go back to Social Security and tell them.
The present King of Thailand was shown simply as “Baby Songkla” on his Birth Certificate from Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts. Of course no one expected him to become King at the time: neither he nor his father was a first-born son.
The reason for the delay in naming is revealed by his mother’s telegraph to his grandmother: “My son was born today. Both of us are healthy. Could you please send his name by telegraph to me.” An auspicious name was needed from the royal astrologer: “Bhumibala Aduladeja” was chosen and agreed by the King. (His name has evolved with his evolving rank and is now “Phrabat Somdej Phra Paramindra Maha Bhumibol Adulyadej Mahitaladhibet Ramadhibodi Chakrinarubodindara Sayamindaradhiraj Boromanatbophit.”)
(Since the present King of Thailand was born in the U.S.A., he may be eligible for citizenship, and even the Presidency itself. IANAL, but had his father been King, I think Bhumibol would be ineligible for U.S. citizenship, but it was his uncle who was King at Bhumibol’s birth.)
Indeed, my brother in law’s birth certificate says “Baby Boy” <lastname>. His parents hadn’t decided what to name him by the time they applied for his birth certificate. It doesn’t seem to have affected his life negatively in any way. He has a normal name which his parents gave him a few weeks later, and with that name he got all the usual items: SSN, passport, etc.
In the UK you legally have to register the name within six weeks. You can change the name within a year of the child’s birth. Google just keeps telling me about paid-for ancestral tracing sites, but I know this was the law 4 weeks ago.
Our current Queen is also supposed to have been named a little too late, so her Dad had to pay a fine. Google is no more help on this one, especially since her Dad is the one who had to submit her birth cert and his name at the time was Prince Albert.
In Norway you have six months to register a child’s name. It’s entirely possible to get a birth certificate without a given name - we needed one when our eldest son was born - and then get another one issued later with the name.
The nephew that I mentioned didn’t go six months without a name but we were all beginning to wonder!
There’s an American journalist named Jennifer 8. Lee, but she added the middle name later on; it was not given to her at birth. Make of this what you will.
My sister once worked as an eligibility worker for an California county. The first two lines on the application were Name and Address. She claims she saw the following:
Name: 1154 South First Street
Address: same as Name
I wonder if that is new. Neither I nor my siblings ever had a social until I was 15.
We had insurance and all the usual family paperwork, but not until my mom needed to file for state help was it ever required.
This was about 30 years ago, so I wonder if things have changed.
Seeing as we’re talking about documentation on paper, what about a name that is for all practical purposes unpronounceable?
At the end of one summer–as a joke–I went into the office of my high school and told them I was a new student, there to register. I wrote down the name “Franklin Wjbzzc.” When the secretary asked me how to pronounce it, I said, “Oh, you don’t speak it. You can only write it.”
According to my mother, when I was born (mid-1940s), she was not allowed to leave the hospital with me until the birth certificate was completely filled out, including my name. My brother had turned 3 the day before I was born, and he was really into Winnie the Pooh. So my mother was going to name me Christopher Robin. The last minute she decided the name was too long, so she picked something else entirely . . . something very mundane and uninspiring.
I guess I should be grateful I wasn’t named Eeyore or Heffalump.
Wait so your telling me I can just start using a different name out of nowhere and slowly change that to my legal name? Showing someone with a Birth Certificate for Baby Boy Lastname when you Drivers ID says something else? I always assumed the marriage last name change thing was taken care of with the marriage certificate but it is basically women just using their husbands last name from then on?
I dont know Europe seems to have it done right and stuff. Because with the US system I can see it easy with changing your identity
Not exactly. It is much both simpler and more complicated than that. You can use whatever name(s) you want as long as both parties agree and there is no intent to commit fraud. You can use those forever without a legal name change. A legal name change isn’t necessarily the goal although you can do that too if you want. A legal name change gets some government agencies to use that name on official documents but that is usually just a rubber stamp from a judge and a simple legal process. It isn’t something you work towards like moving through a sex change operation. You can generally mix and match names depending on what you choose to use them for. You can just ask for a legal name change out of the blue if you want as well without ever using it before although establishing a precedent may help depending on the judge.
It makes sense. There are lots of people than use various versions of their names and no one thinks anything of it. Females generally get a free legal name change if they want at marriage but they can still use their maiden name as when or any variation of their married and maiden name. Some couples pick a completely new last name at marriage because they want to stick it to the man or their families and that is fine. Lots of immigrants have done the same. There is no way to standardize these things under U.S. rules so your name is generally whatever you say it is and you can have multiple ones.
You can’t give a SS#, you have to apply for one from the Social Security Administration. And part of the application form asks for the birthdate, if you leave that blank (or put in a future date) your application will be rejected. So you can’t get a SS# until after the child is born.
So while an unborn child may be dependent, it is NOT a dependent for IRS Tax purposes. For example, any medical procedures (even specifically for the fetus) are listed for tax purposes as medical expenses for the mother.
The simple rule is - in law, you are not a person until you are born. This is what drives the anti-aborion crowd mad. The current legality(AFAIK, IANAL) is that the baby must draw at least one breath to be considered to be born alive. The ban on late term abortions is becaue there is the risk the child may draw at least one breath before dying. If it does, then that is murder.
Before that, the “person” is not one, hence not entitled to an SSN, etc. under law. Medical procedures are done on/for the mother.
The thread has morphed in part into name changes, so I will tell my story. The name on my birth certificate has never appeared on any document except the birth certificate and my first passport application in 1964. In order to get a passport for the name I have always used, I needed to get affadavits from two people who knew me under both names. That was pretty much limited to my parents. My father died five years later and I don’t know what I could have done then. When my brother joined the Air Force, they made him use the name on his birth certificate. This is really odd for when I registered for the draft several years earlier they told me I would be forced, when drafted, to choose a middle name; otherwise my name was too common and would cause confusion.
Be that as it may, when I got to retirement age, my pension administrator told me I would need to produce a birth certificate in order for the actuaries to determine my annuity. So I wrote to the Registrar in Harrisburg, explaining that I was born on such and such date in Philadelphia under the following name and asking for a copy of it. Instead they sent me a letter stating that if I could demonstrate having used the new name for at least ten years, then would issue the document in my new name. I sent them photocopies of my 1959 AB degree, my 1962 PhD, my 1964 and subsequent passports and got the new birth certificate immediately. My brother who had gone to some expense to get a legal name change and get his military records changed, was very jealous.
Another name change story. Some relatives of my wife’s, refugees from Austria named Reicenbein (with the c pronounced as ts) tried to change their name to Rice. The judge simply refused. He had a long Italian name and simply said that if people could learn to pronounce his name, they could learn to pronounce theirs. So a judge can refuse a name change on any grounds or none. I very strongly suspect that his real reason was that he didn’t think it right that they could conceal the fact that they were Jewish. (That was, to be sure, the reason my father discarded his name: he was jobless in 1937 and thought it would help–it didn’t).
