Oh, dear, shouldn’t laugh, I suppose, but that gives me an image of a terrible murder committed with poisoned marmalade
I think I might want to change my name, but faced with the fuss and bother of telling people my new name, I probably wouldn’t.
FWIW, Yahoo People Search comes back with five people in the US with the surname Hitler. Probably many more who are unlisted.
My name isn’t associated with crimes exactly, but it SHOULD be. Nobody can spell it. NOBODY. I even have two different, completely honest, not trying to pull anything, birth certificates. My perfectly legal driver’s license has neither on it. There are so many ways one could misuse this…
I quit counting after 20, but I have so many identities, several of them female. If I ever bothered paying the court fees to change my name, it would for purposes of simplification.
ETA: These other identities required neither effort nor awareness on my part.
My middle name when I was born was “Ilyich,” shared with a Mr. Vladimir Lenin. My dad had it changed to “Ilya” when we immigrated to the US. I wondered why he thought it was a big deal when he told me he did it.
Back in the 1990s there was a rather heinous murder committed by someone with the same name as me. It gave me quite a jolt everytime that I heard the name mentioned on the news. But I’d never have considered changing my own name as a result.
Does anyone remember an old commercial with a kid in it who was named Freddy Krueger?
I went to elementary school with a girl whose last name was Nixon. This was in the '70s, so she did get some remarks from adults.
In the summer of '84, some entertainment magazine tracked down eight or ten guys named Michael Jackson and asked them basic questions like “How do people react when you introduce yourself? Ever think of changing your name? And what do you do for a living?” One guy spent summers as a camp counselor. “I don’t think he’d want my job,” he said. :o
Mr. Rilch has the same name as a fairly well-known cinematographer. He used to get calls, and once an invitation to a gala, for the other guy. Then the other guy died.
As for the OP, I wouldn’t change my name; I’ve already changed it once. But my level of irritation would depend on what the other person did. If they were in jail or executed because of it, I think I could take any jokes in stride, and perhaps make a few of my own. But if it was someone who was not a criminal, but rather a joke herself, I think I’d get tired pretty quick of saying “Jennifer Wilbanks…No, not THAT Jennifer Wilbanks!” Because the other “Rilchiam” would be walking around free, and some people might well react to the name first.
For that matter, I wonder what it’s like for people like Wilbanks, who have national or even worldwide reputations. Someone once told me that’s why the Manson family members will never be let out of prison: who’s going to give Susan Atkins a job? And I think Richard Jewell didn’t live long enough to rise above the stigma that he didn’t even deserve.
Yeah - Okay. That qualifies as “sleazy”.
To qualify my earlier answer: Only if it was first and last name both; I wouldn’t change just my first name. It’s very common, anyway. And I wouldn’t change just my last name. There’s already someone notorious with my last name.