Why is it when a child is born in a hospital the nurse always comes in to get the baby’s name when the father is away and the mother is drugged?
We wanted to give our son the word ‘I’ for his middle name. (Yes, we did live in Berkeley. How did you know?) It’s not an initial because it doesn’t stand for another name, and thus it has no period.
When we got his birth certificate it (of course) had a period. We insisted that it didn’t and they were able to produce the form from the hospital showing that it did. We paid a $25 fee to have it changed. But they don’t actually change the certificate–they attach a rider. So, now, if we need a copy of his certificate we have to pay, in addition to the normal $10 charge, $15 for a copy of the rider.
According to genealogical research done by an uncle who converted to Mormonism (they seem to be obsessed by genealogy for some reason I’ve never bothered to investigate) our surname is ‘wrong’.
My father had a different name from my grandfather and he and my great-grandfather had a different name from my great-great-grandfather.
It was apparently the result of the way the census was done in rural areas in the past. The assumption was that a farmer was illiterate and so the census-taker filled out the form for them. I still don’t understand why or how a mistake on the form meant that your name was changed, but that is the story I’ve been given.
I have honored my ancestor’s surname by using it for my username: Mann
“How do you misspell ‘Mann’”, you ask? The intermediate step (my grampa’s name) was ‘Mannen’.
My brother was born prematurely, at a time when my parents hadn’t decided on what name to give him. He was delivered by means of a caesarian and then rushed to intensive care. When my dad arrived, he was told they needed a name to put on his file, so he gave them one of the two names they were still considering. When my mom came to after the operation, she overruled him and told him it had to be the other name. So my dad went and changed my brother’s name.
My Father had four first names, and was variously known as all four of them through his life by different people. At his funeral, it was strange to meet all these people from throughout his life who all referred to him by different names. All his official documents have AKAs all the way through them.
When Uncle Chester retired, he had to get a copy of his birth certificate to apply for Social Security benefits. That’s when he found out his name wasn’t Chester but John. No where on his birth certificate is the name Chester.
Apparently Great Grandma liked Chester but Great Grandpa didn’t, so he filled in the birth certificate with the name of his preference. We’re not sure if Great Grandma knew of the switcheroo or not.
My father does as well. My grandmother insisted that the doctor was drunk and wrote down the wrong date. The army apparently sided with the doctor’s record, so my father had two birthdays - the “real one” and the “official one”. Frankly, I forget which was which now.
I believe this was quite common in days gone by - my housemate from student days had a double barreled surname because some immigration official had written both his great-grandfather’s middle name and surname in the surname square on his form.
I also believe (no cite) that this is why the surname Cohen is so common amongst Jewish people - immigration officials, when faced with weird and wonderful Eastern European surnames would just write “Cohen” because they knew they could spell that one…
That seemed to be the conclusion she and her (new) husband had drawn. I guess they had no copy of the certificate so there was no proof of marriage. She seemed pretty pissed off about the whole thing…
ETA: I should have added that if that is the case, I can understand her anger…
ETA take two: Yes, I guess legally they weren’t married but obviously considered themselves to be.
I phoned the DVLA and pointed out that my paper licence is in the name Paul and I couldn’t see any reason why they couldn’t issue me a photocard in the same name.
A very helpful person told me that it’s no problem and that obviously my earlier application had been handled by a moron.
That’s the case with my maternal grandfather’s second lastname. The spelling in Mom and Aunt’s paperwork matches his; the spelling in Mom’s Cousin’s paperwork matches my Great-Aunt’s, but GA’s and Gramps’ don’t match, nor do they match their mother’s. He says that he was able to do some research in parish records in great-grandma’s town of birth during the war and found a string of people with a shared lastname very similar to their three. According to the oldest reference and the memories of the people in the town, the ancestor who brought it there was a French soldier with a German lastname, during the Napoleonic war.
When birth records were kept by priests, the priest would either ask “how do you spell it” (they knew which parishioners could write, even if it was only their sign) or look up the previous appearance by the same family. Then when the Civil Registry was created, the clerks didn’t bother with the first and often didn’t have access to historic information. Now things have stabilized again… except for people like me, whose name gets changed by the government in an aperiodic basis. My full firstname, as written in the birth certificate, is four words, but at some point the Guvmint has decided to drop two of them, so my ID only shows the other two (it looks as if I have two separate names, instead of a complex but single name). Let’s not get started on the many butcherings of my three-word lastname.
I know several people who got saddled with the saint of the day as their firstname, with the name chosen by their mother as a second name. One of them found out on the first day of his military service, it almost landed him in the pen.
Great news, you’ll be able to drive over to a Man U match in living color now.
Although I have a question: Are paper licenses common in the UK and elsewhere? AFAIK the US went to the photo license back in the '70s, at least Indiana did. I guess I just kind of assumed, given today’s technology and security issues that photo ID was standard.
If I understand correctly, and I’m sure someone better informed will come by soon, British licenses didn’t have a picture until recently. Now they have two parts, one with the picture and one without. At rental places there’s signs reminding people that they must bring “both parts of the license if it’s a British one.”
I have an incorrect birthday. I only just realized it this year too.
I called the IRS helpline for fun (no, actually I didn’t have last year’s paperwork and needed by gross income), and the rep who answered and verfied my ID asked me about 20 different questions. He started with “where was your last tax filing from” to “where did you work in 1997, what was your address, who were you a dependant of” etc. Basically I gave this man my entire work history including all past addresses and phone numbers. Finally he was satisfied and answered my tax question.
Then he laughed a bit and explained that he had to go through all that to verify that I was me because the birth date I gave him was incorrect. He told me that the birth date attached to my SSN was totally different than what I gave him. My actual birthday is March 11 and I think he said that I was listed for March 22.
I hung up with him but now I’m kind of pissed. See, I just got married last year (not even 8 months ago) and in October I KNOW my birth certificate had my correct birthday on it. I have a drivers license and passport and now a marriage cert. all with March 11 as my birthday. Some computer glitch has messed up the date in the IRS and Social Security computers and it’s all wrong. I have no idea what trouble this might cause in the future. Apparently, to fix it, I have to get a new copy of my birth certificate and take it down to the social security office to file a correction. Which will probably cost me money. And during their convenience 9-4 office hours.
My birth certificate lists my mothers husband as my father, they met when I was 3 1/2 and married when I was 4. I asked her about this one day and she explained that they changed it since he legally adopted me. (I think this practice is bullshit by the way)
Then she told me that it didn’t really matter because my birth certificate had NEVER been correct. She had listed her first husbands name as being my father when I was born even though they had been divorced for several years. My bio dad has never been noted on official paperwork as being my dad.
I too just found out my Birth Certificate has the wrong name. I always thought my name was Christina. I go by Tina. I have Christina on all my legal documents because growing up I always used my hospital birth certificate. It lists my name as Christina. Somewhere along the way I lost the hospital certificate and my social security card, so when I went to records to get a copy of my birth certificate, they could not find a Christina and asked if I was adopted. I was pretty upset and left empty handed. A few month later I was picking up a birth certificate for my daughter, and I thought I would try again to see if the last person who looked for my certificate was just blind.
The clerk came back and told me, that she shouldn’t give this to me, but because all the other info matched (mothers maiden name, birthday etc ) she was pretty sure the birth certificate for baby Tina was me. So hence my legal name is Tina, not Christina. What bites is the fact that if I knew this earlier I would have had my SSN and marriage and any other legal document in the name of Tina. At this point I think it probably easier to change Tina to Christina on my Birth Certificate than changing all the other documents.
