Names: This could not happen today

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A strange story taken from real life (that I have a remote connection to). Curious to know if it has any entertainment value.

Eleanor was born in the early thirties. I suspect her parents chose the name because they were fond of the woman who became the First Lady of the US, but Eleanor herself hated her name. At an appropriate age, she married, had a couple of children, divorced, married a second man, divorced him, remarried him briefly and divorced him again. Meanwhile, she developed a close relationship with one of her coworkers, David.

David began emotionally abusing his wife Susan (by her accounts) at Wednesday bible study meetings, accusing her of being a bad wife, in terms of what a proper christian wife ought to be. This seems to have been a calculated move, to get Susan to leave him, and it eventually worked: she moved out.

On the occasion of Eleanor’s third divorce, she needed to provide some documentation (this was now the mid 1970s), so she obtained a copy of her birth certificate which identified her as Susan. This was quite startling and a bit odd, because Susan was the name she had the greatest longing to have in place of Eleanor. Her father had to write a letter to the court explaining that they had decided after the fact that Susan’s name should be Eleanor but failed to amend the birth certificate.

Susan married David after his divorce from Susan and moved in with him. This led Susan (David’s first wife) to change her surname (“I had my father’s name for 20 years and my husband’s name for 20 years, so now I will take my mother’s maiden name”, but she used a fancy European spelling that makes her one-of-a-kind in the US, perhaps the world). There were surprisingly few incidents of old friends of Susan calling her at David’s number and talking to Susan for some while before realizing it was the other Susan they wanted to talk to, possibly because the first Susan only lived in that house for eight or nine years.

David and Susan-the-second’s marriage lasted for 25 years, until she abruptly exited with a massive stroke. He continued to take care of her two children, who had some mental/emotional issues making them unable to be fully independent. The other Susan became an avid feminist and abandoned religion as it had taken on the character of a spiky cudgel to her.

Today – even 20 years ago – it seems hard to imagine someone living a middle-class life and never seeing their own birth certificate, going through life using the wrong name.

2

My birth certificate has no first name. I was born in the 80’s in a hospital in the United States. When my children were born I asked the friendly registration ladies what would happen if we couldn’t choose a name and they verified it’s the same now - leave it blank and file an amendment later (or in my case, not).

3

Not quite as entertaining as your story but my mother always joked that her real name was Mary Jane Baby Girl because that’s what it said on her birth certificate.

4

When my dad joined the military was the first time it was discovered his first name was misspelled on the birth certificate.

5

Most people I know, and I was born in the late 60s, saw their birth certificate for the first time when they applied for a learner’s permit at age 15. Personally, I saw mine for the first time when I got a passport at age nine. These days, a birth certificate is generally needed for school enrollment in public school (and probably private as well), although I don’t know if that means a 5-year-old is going to see it. It does mean that most parents will have a certified copy around the house, because lots of things come up anymore.

When my son was a baby, and people wrote checks made out to him as gifts at his bris, in order to endorse them and deposit them in my bank account, I had to show a copy of his birth certificate to the bank. When I opened an account for him in his name, I had to show his birth certificate. When we moved, we closed his account, then opened a new one for him locally, and needed his BC again: that may be the first time he saw it, and was aware of what it was.

I would say that about every 18 months to 2 years something comes up that requires me to show the BC, and sometimes he is with me, sometimes he isn’t.

This mostly has to do with misplaced paranoia over someone having kidnapped a child, or having illegally adopted, although occasionally it has to do with a sort of identity theft where someone creates a person who either doesn’t actually exist, or creates a life for a child who died in infancy, and after building a credit rating for the “person,” gets some large loan, or runs up a lot of credit cards, then absconds.

Anyway, in regard to the driving, some people never learn to drive, but that was more common for people born in the 30s than now, and more common for women prior to the second wave of feminism than now. I had a grandmother who never drove, and I knew another woman, who was already probably in her fifties when I was a small child, who never drove. They just depended on their husbands to do all the driving.

That said, I don’t really know the history of licensing, except that it differed by state. It may be that someone who drove may still not have been required to produce a birth certificate for a license.

I do know that I was not required to produce one to register to vote in 1985, but that may not be true anymore. I was required to produce one to enlist in the military, but a woman born in the 1930s in unlikely to have enlisted. If she’d been 10 years older, she might have enlisted during WWII, but she was too young for that, and before the 70s, in was pretty unusual for women to join up during peace time.

So yeah, you are probably right that it is a situation that is unlikely to happen now.

More to the point, how common is it for parents to change their mind about what they want to name their child to the point of actually calling her something else?

6

This would be an older generation, born 1800’s but my great aunt knew a couple neighbors who were 2 of triplets, the other one having died in infancy, in a family with at 15 children who lived and at least 4 who died. I don’t remember their names but let’s call them Maria and Ethel, but they argued over whether the other triplet was name Margaret or Katharine. As they got older they arguments got more and more heated until they nearly stopped talking to each other. Eventually one of the grandkids decided to see once and for and went to their old farm village to see what he could find in church records.

Turned out that they were both wrong the dead and buried sister was Maria. The other old living one was Margaret. At some point with that many kids they either forgot which one had died, or they just shifted their top name choices to the living ones, nobody with any more clue was left around to ask.

7

My stepfather finally got around to officially adopting me when I was 17, mainly because I had been using his last name for about 15 years. My birth cert was changed to reflect the new last name, so that when I went out into the world there would be no confusion when dealing with the government, etc. It was a smart move, really, but it sure causes problems when trying to get copies of genealogy records on my birth father’s side that are restricted to family members and direct descendants.

8

The first time I ever saw my birth certificate was two years ago, when I moved to a different state and they demanded one before they would issue a driver’s license.

9

When my father joined the army, he learned that, on his birth certificate, the first name and the middle name were the opposite of what he had been using all his life.

I don’t know if the clerk got the names backwards, or if his parents deliberately used his middle name. But everyone who met him before the war used his middle name. Everyone who met him during the war used his initials. Everyone who met him after the war used his first name.
When I applied for my driver’s license, I learned that I had been misspelling my middle name for 16 years.

10

Friends of my parents had a baby girl and named her something lost to the sands of time, and my memory*. When she was about two, they decided her name was truly Oona, so they legally changed it.

*but I’m pretty sure it was something more conventional than Oona.

11

My great-aunt, born in the Chicago suburbs, had no birth certificate. When she filed for Medicare she needed church record and school records to get it.

My father-in-law, born in the city of Chicago, also had no birth certificate. He applied for a delayed one in he 1940s and his brother acted as the witness for the information.

12

But were you shocked to learn your name was really treetforbrains?

13

I saw my birth certificate in 1972 when my mom was registering me for kindergarten. Well, almost. She brought my sister’s birth certificate instead. Youngest child issues, sigh. Eventually someone found mine.

14

The first time I ever saw my birth certificate was when I applied for a passport at age 27 and the second time was when I retired and had to show it to the actuary for my annuity. Life has sure gotten more complicated these days.

15

When I went to get my learner’s permit in my birth state of New York at age 16, I took along something called a “certificate of birth registration,” which they accepted. However, that is apparently not the same thing as a legally valid birth certificate. When I was 25 and living in West Virginia the DMV refused to accept it. I had to order a “certificate of birth” from the registrar of the village where I was born. That was the first time I ever saw my real birth certificate, if I understand correctly. Later when I applied for a passport, I had to get yet another birth certificate (by then officially called a “certified transcript of birth”) because the old one, although still valid, was missing some information the State Department required.

16

My mother, born in 1913, didn’t see her birth certificate until the late '60s, when she needed it to get a passport. She then discovered that her official birthday was different than the one she had always celebrated. She figured that the doctor who delivered her had made the rounds, and eventually got around to registering all the neighborhood births on the same date. So she figured the date her family always celebrated was the correct one, not the one on her birth certificate.

17

My mother’s birth was never recorded. The boys in the family had their births recorded at the Catholic church office, but not the girls. By the time she died, she had documents with four different first names on them: Mary Ann, Mary D. (reflecting her maiden name), and Marian, the name by which she was known by everyone, to distinguish her from her daughter Mary, and a misspelled Marion. She also had two different birth dates, triangulating between her older and younger brother, with two possible years. She thinks she lied about her age to get drivers license when she was 15, but doesn’t remember for sure. Never graduated from high school, so no record of that. Census records from those days have wild guesses of ages of the family members, rarely with exactly ten years between their ages from one census to another.

She is pretty sure was born in the USA, a second child after a brother born in the old country, but there isn’t any way to verify that, either. Since I can’t prove my mother was a citizen, that makes me an anchor baby. Which I regard as rather an honor.

18

My grandmother was known to one and all as Alice - but when she pulled her birth certificate (probably for Social Security?), she found out her legal name was Elizabeth.

19

My mother has one spelling of her name on her birth certificate, another spelling on her baptismal record and used yet a third for her entire life. I do believe she got it officially changed in the 1990s to reflect the spelling she uses.

20

When my father was born (1914) they mis-spelled his surname on his birth certificate. He got all the way through college, married, and had one or two children (but not me), all using the original family name, before he discovered that. Both his college diploma and his wife’s (my mother’s) diploma have the name spelled the “old” way.

During the war, he moved to California and applied for work at Lockheed. There being a war on and all, that required a background check, which stalled because the investigators couldn’t find his birth certificate the way he spelled it on his application. Finally, the truth somehow got discovered.

As my father told the story, it was nigh impossible to get a birth certificate changed in those days. So he decided instead to get his drivers license changed to the “new” name and use that name. At some point, the two older children somehow got their names officially changed to the “new” name. (One of my brothers told me once that, at the time, he wasn’t happy about that.)

And that’s why my surname is what it is. (With the current spelling, it’s actually a not-terribly-uncommon German name, at least in Germany apparently. It’s fairly uncommon, but hardly unknown, in the USA.) The original spelling seems much less common.