Same for my Dad. To his horror, the official name on all his birth and Air Force records was Billie rather than the male version he had always used: Billy. He went by his initials after that.
My grandmother was nearly sixty the first time she saw her birth certificate and learned, to her horror, that she’d been going by her middle name her whole life. Her hated middle name was her real first name.
Eta: Fanny. Her name is Fanny. It has a slightly cruder meaning here.
My sixty-five-ish mother-in-law grew up in an ethnic minority that sometimes used English given names, but in a country where the ethnic majority (the ones running the bureaucracy) did not. So, her name was misspelled on her birth certificate, to conform to the phonetic expectations of some bureaucrat 65 years ago.
Which means its misspelled on her passport. Which means we had to be careful and remember this when we purchased a plane ticket for her just last month. Funny how these things can have ofd little long-term impacts!
My father and all his siblings had two middle names. My father’s names all start with H. His birth certicficate was amended to switch the order of his names, relegating Hubert to middle status. Dad was born in 1929 and folks outside the family thought he was being named for President Hoover, when he most definitely was not.
My in-laws came from India to the US in the late 60s, and my wife was born in 1973. At some point when my wife was very young, my in-laws legally changed their surname to something that was easier for Americans to spell and pronounce, but they never got around to amending my wife’s birth certificate or filing a legal name change for her. She used the “new” name all throughout her life, unaware that her parents ever used any other name. She only discovered it when we had to provide birth certificates for our marriage license.
I never saw my birth cert until about 12 yo, and it didn’t have the name I had used all my life, including school and church.
My parents hid the truth from me until I picked a lock in Mom’s desk and found a bank savings book with a strange name on it. Was it a sibling who didn’t live long, or who was given up for adoption? I couldn’t ask about this directly since it would reveal I had been snooping, but after agonizing over it for a while, finally blurted out at dinner, “Who’s X?”
Said Mom, after a pause, “You are.”
And the story came out. Apparently my grandfather, an eccentric, but somewhat successful inventor, had an obsession with carrying on the family line, and wanted his firstborn grandson to be named after him, as his firstborn son was. But my parents thought it was a terrible name to give a kid, and told him they had another name in mind.
So the old bastard laid down the law. “You’re going to name the kid after me, or I’ll cut him out of my will!”
What to do, what to do…so they put his name on the birth certificate, but called me what they wanted. In those days, a birth cert was required rarely, so I wonder how long my parents expected to keep it a secret, although by the time I reached driving age, the truth would have come out.
And the old bastard cut me out of his will anyway. I guess he had the last laugh.
I used one surname without ever seeing by birth certificate until I was around 16 when I was starting to look for work.
That’s when I found out my name was completely different, thing is, not one person around me had known my real name either.
Later I joined the navy using my alter-name, and it was never an issue.
Years and years later, long after my passport had expired, I had to apply for another. This seemed to me an insurmountable obstacle, but I was told to get some details as proof of my using the alter-name.
Well since I had used my alter-name in absolutely every transaction with the state, such as National Insurance, Tax, employment there was no problem.
I did have one small issue, I was part of a protest that refused to pay a certain tax, and the summons was in my alter-name. I turned up in court with my birth certificate, and got away without being fined - I still had to pay the tax eventually though - so that protest didn’t prove to be effective for me, but the protest did ultimately lead directly to the downfall of the Prime Minister, so that was nice.
My dad told me that my grandmother was groggy from his birth. Dad was to be named after his father. When the hospital staff came to ask the baby’s name, my groggy grandmother said, ‘Bobby Junior.’ The staff dutifully put that name down on his birth certificate. I don’t know if the story is true, as I have not seen his birth certificate, and I don’t know (if it’s true) if it was ever changed. Incidentally my mother’s second husband didn’t find out until he needed to get a passport to take his father’s ashes back to Finland, that he was not a U.S. citizen. Everyone assumed he was since he immigrated when he was young. Air Force, security clearances, and no one noticed.
I had a friend who was born in the mid 1960s in a small rural hospital. She was a late in life child, and in fact there had been considerable arguing back and forth between her mother and the doctor over whether she was expecting or going through the change. I’m not sure if the rabbit went into a coma or what. Anyway, the upshot of it was that her mother was something like 7 months along before the doctor finally confirmed the pregnancy.
In all the drama involved in preparing for a baby in a very short space of time, her parents neglected to discuss names. When a nurse asked her father what to put on the birth certificate, he said, somewhat randomly, “Molly.”* When the older of her two teenage sisters heard the name, she said, “Molly? That’s a terrible name.” She then secretly went to the nurse and explained that they had changed their minds. The baby was to be named Michelle (which would have been a much more fashionable name at the time). The younger of her two teenage sisters, upon hearing this, decided to be her 2 cents in. “We’ve changed our minds again,” she told the nurse. “Her name is Lisa,” (again a very popular name).
Eventually, my friends’s mom woke up from all the ether they gave delivering women in those days, and declared that the baby’s name was not Molly, Michelle, or Lisa.
So Karen, as she was now known, grew into childhood and went off to school. When she was 15 (and the aunt of a Michelle and a Lisa) she was in need of her birth certificate so she could get a social security card and her learner’s permit. She went to the courthouse…and that’s when it was discovered she had no birth certificate on file. Apparently the hospital had been waiting around to see if the family was going to change her name again, and they’d just never filed it. As she said, “I could have named myself anything at that point!” but she was used to Karen so she stayed Karen. (She herself admitted this was pretty anti-climactic.)
*All names changed to protect, blah blah blah
This reminds me of Catch 22, where it is explained that Major Major’s father named him Major Major Major as a joke.
My mom loves to tell the story that her name is legally *“Child: Female” *because that’s what’s written on her birth certificate. The doctor was told that the head of the hospital would write it on her birth certificate. Well, the head honcho forgot all about that… because he’d just had a baby (named “Child: Female”).
My grandfather discovered that though his parents meant for his middle name to be Adelbert, it was misspelled Adelfart by whoever filled it out at the hospital.
I know a guy who discovered his first name was Pío upon joining the Army for his draft duty, and many other people who didn’t know they actually had two names until they went to get married. Dude’s sergeant was calling “García Pío… García, Pío! García! Pío!!!” and he didn’t realize it was for him; almost got him sent to the cooler but the sergeant realized that it wasn’t intentional and that he really isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree.
In most cases, the priest who baptized them added the name of one of the day’s saints but did it in front of the name the mother had chosen rather than behind. The family always called the child by the name the mother had chosen, and apparently they hadn’t looked at their own ID very closely (those for whom it was already compulsory, such as the aforementioned Pío).
My mother wanted to call me Lucy, but Dad nixed it because there was already a Lucy Ourlastname on record, he preferred a unique name. My aunt wanted to call her daughter Lucy, but her husband went and registered the baby as Dee (like aunt). Years later, she wanted to name her son Javier but the husband again registered him as Ray (like himself); nobody has ever accused the guy of either having a lot of imagination or listening to the opinions of others. One thing I can tell you is that I’m very happy we didn’t end up having Lucy-the-brunette and Lucy-the-redhead!
Worse than the name problems listed here was the difficulties of the man whose birth date was registered and put on his birth certificate as 31st November. It took him literally months to get a passport.
A friend of mine found out several years ago, late into adulthood, that the birth date on his birth certificate was wrong. Or maybe he’d been celebrating it on the wrong day all his life, I forget. Thinking about it now, that must have been the case. The date was out by only a few days, but it put him in a different astrological sign, which was a source of some merriment for us skeptics.
Donald Drumpf, is that you?
My elder son applied for a copy of his birth certificate because it was required to get his marriage license. When it arrived, he called me and said “So who’s Paul?” I told him I had no idea and asked why he was asking. He replied “Well according to my birth certificate, he’s my dad.”
Sure enough, after I dug out the original birth certificate I was given when he was born, they had gotten my husband’s first name wrong. We’d never noticed.
Half way through this story, I assumed the “zinger” would be some kind of Battle Royal over the will or child custody. A “Susan v. Susan” stab-fest over David’s shit.
The sad thing is that she could have switched her name to Susan or anything else any time she wanted at least after she old enough to be autonomous from her parents if she disliked Eleanor that much. You can use whatever name you want in the U.S. without a legal name change as long as there is no intent to commit fraud. Lots of people do it so routinely that even people close to them don’t know what the name on their birth certificate really is. There is also the legal name change route which is usually pretty simple and just a rubber stamp to allow you to use your preferred name on all legal documents. I have always gone by my middle name but also variants of it and that is the one I consider my “real” name. I only have to break out my legal first name when getting things like passports and plane tickets.
I don’t think I ever looked at my birth certificate until I got my drivers license at 15. I think I have a copy of it in my safe now but I haven’t needed to look at it or use it for anything in many years.
Sorry, but it was Mundane and Pointless.