Because when databases record that information in different ways, you are now screwed.
So, the other reason your dad never had trouble is that actually, all of his records were in exactly the same name. Very few women have that luxury.
That’s probably the biggest reason he has no trouble - TSA couldn’t care less if everyone who knows you calls you “Bucky” as long as your ID and your plane ticket both say “Frank.” * And it’s one of the reasons I never changed my name - I knew that eventually it would be a problem if my college records and degree had a different name than the one I was using for work purposes and I didn’t want to have to show my marriage certificate every time I applied for a job.
* And even that didn’t matter until the 90s.
I did my legal name change in part because the entirety of the medical establishment, banker tellers, etc. all would address me by the first name on my birth certificate. Some people don’t give a fuck: good for them.
I, less evolved, would be irritated, and my interactions were often snappish and jerkish. Not okay. Since I changed my name, they mispronounce it to hell and gone, but at least they’re mispronouncing the right name. I’m much nicer.
My responses aren’t terribly logical, but and the psychology behind it is boring, but I preferred the misprounced correct name to the correctly pronounced birth name. I don’t worry when the accent gets left off, though.
My family surname, traced back to the 1600’s has an æ ligature in it. When my ancestors immigrated to the new world colonies in the mid 1700’s, it was eliminated, and was changed to only include standard english letters. I have no desire to change it back.
That is interesting because some ligatures are stylistic variants (e.g. I have a text processor that automatically turns f + f → ff unless I override it, but st is not automatic in the default font), while in some languages/scripts they are obligatory. Unless you told me (or I was familiar with the name), I would not know.
I once started a new job and they created a user account for me. There were multiple issues logging in and we tried to create it again to fix them. Same issue. Then I had the lightbulb event that maybe they should create my account without an apostrophe. Everything worked. Yes, it turns out that the part of the system that creates accounts has a character set that allows apostrophes, but they use a different set of allowable characters to do various functions.
Additionally, when I speak to a customer service agent, I’d much rather have them look me up by phone number or other info rather than name first, because I have no way of testing the spelling. For example, automated calls to pharmacies often spout off the first few letters of your name for confirmation, and it’s a gamble whether ’ is included or not.
I’m certainly not going to remove it from my own writing or typing, but it’s an important consideration to make when typing into forms etc. So if you choose to newly insert a “non-standard” character in your name, that’s perfectly reasonable, but be aware of the sacrifices you need to make every time someone asks your personal info.
Little Bobby Tables we call him.
My wife.
She goes by “Nickname Lastname” for 90% of her correspondence, but her real name is “Differentname Lastname.” So, yes - she only has one legal name, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t use another name for the majority of her public interactions.
Yes, I did that when I was married nearly 40 years ago. I used that name absolutely consistently for decades. I corrected mistakes wherever I could find them.
And then when Real ID came in I was told I didn’t actually know my own name, that what had been my legal name for decades wasn’t, and it took six months, several hundred dollars, and a day in court to straighten it out. Not my mistake, but still my problem and it cost me to fix it.
This is a particular problem in Indiana which has chosen a hyper-literal approach to Real ID. If I were still living in Illinois or Michigan or had moved to New York state to live closer to my sister it might not have been such a problem but in THIS state it very much is.
^ This.
There have also been problems in this state with women who did NOT change their names when they married but some clerk assumed they did. Same issue - “official” records now have a different name than the one they’ve used all their life. Not their mistake, but still their problem to fix and like me it costs them their money and time. So even if a woman never changes her name someone in the bureaucracy might change it for her.
This really does affect women more often than men.
Finally got around to locating a prior thread on this, link here.
My first name has a similar strange capitalization, but my country of residence “solves” it by putting a space in between.
When I next updated my US passport, I also made sure that they solved it the same way.
When I got married, I took my husband’s last name, and added my maiden name as a second first name. Social Security and US passport agree.
On the US passport, there is only fields for first name and last name.
For making plane reservations, my first name, when matches the field on my passport, is:
MC FIRST SECOND MAIDEN
Airlines have no issues with this, and TSA is happy.
Making the reservation for my current cruise, the requirement is that the cruise reservation has to match my passport.
Their system can’t fit my entire first name in the field designated as first name.
No special letters, just a disagreement about field lengths.
I recently had a flight from the us to Germany where my middle names didn’t match between my passport and the flight reservation. And it turned out the airline didn’t care. And the guy who checked me in said he never gave his middle name when he flew.
I have the same issue, with the “first name” on my passport being First Original-Middle Maiden. And now that’s the name on my driver’s license, as they had to change it to get real id. At least they just changed it, and didn’t give me grief over it. The name on my driver’s license had been First I Last (I = initial of maiden name) because when i first got the license, the state system couldn’t handle middle names. But i think my license actually shows First Middle Middle Last.
My gf’s nephew married his gf recently. Very cool wedding.
She changed her last name, but not to his. She didn’t want her last name, nor his, so her last name is now a name she pulled out of thin air.
There were problems with this, but she managed to work it all out.
My cousin’s kid married another woman, and they decided they didn’t like either of their names, so they both took the last name of my cousin’s father. They said it was because it’s easy to spell and pronounce (it is) but my cousin’s husband is a Trumpist, and her father did volunteer legal with for Dr Martin Luther King, along with leading a generally admirable life, and the kid is very socially liberal. I think they wanted to take the grandfather’s name because that’s the family heritage they most wanted to associate with. (I don’t know anything about the wife’s family, but she did have an awkward name that people got wrong.)
Anyway, they did both end up with a legal name change to a short name that is easy to spell and pronounce.
A paternal ancestor on arriving in the U.S. made the decision to shorten his Germanic last name by deleting the word for “foot” on the end of it (my father joked that he cut off his foot), giving himself and descendants a short, convenient and ethnically vague surname.
I suppose one or more of us could have re-appended “fuß” onto our last names, but no one ever bothered to go through that annoyance.
In the U.S., marriage is the one of the few times that’s possible to change a name and not get charged a fee for the service.
Almost 30 years ago two of my classmates got married. They made up a new last name that didn’t have any of the baggage from their families. I think it was the first time I knew a man who changed his name upon carriage
Just want to say, I’ve never read a sizeable thread on the Dope about a “Should I do this?” subject that is so amazingly unanimous.
As the possessor of a surname that is both hard to spell and to pronounce, let me add my “Don’t do it.” It’s a death by a thousand papercuts issue.
What makes you assume offhand that anybody can spell or pronounce my name? 
Also, even if you think your name is completely vanilla, you may be in for a surprise when you travel internationally.
Therefore, I have not changed my position that you should figure out what your name/s is/are and be consistent about it on official documentation, but not worry about what the non-existent Name Police thinks about “special” characters. Most, if not all, of the horror stories told in this thread were not caused by Scandinavian letters or accents, and leaving those out would not have mattered.
What I think you aren’t getting is that for some names/situations, it’s impossible to be consistent on official documentation with a special character. If I have a “special” character in my name , I probably have a way that I will write it in situations where that character is not available. If we are talking about a diacritic, “ö” will probably be seen as consistent with “o” and “ñ” with “n” and “è” with “e” . But “Weiß” may not be seen as consistent with “Weiss” or “Schäfer” with “Shaefer” - and it’s one thing to have to deal with that because you were born in Germany and your German documentation says “Weiß” and now you are getting a driver’s license in the US. It’s something different to sign up for it because your US birth certificate says “Weiss” but you have decided to change it to “Weiß” and write it that way and fill it in on your driver’s license application that way - but still end up with your driver’s license saying “Weiss” because that’s what your birth certificate says and DMV can’t handle “ß” . Only you had a bit of aggravation because you had to explain “Weiß” on your application and were then told to fill out a new one.
At that point, like the OP says , making the change will have been pointless - because you end up exactly where you started.