Ah the memories … I’m sorry I can’t help with your problem, but I can commiserate. My husband and I are American, but were living in Mozambique when I was pregnant, so my son was born in South Africa.
Our plan was to give our son my last name. Obnoxiously enough, South Africa has (or at least they did) a law that says “If the dad is listed on the birth certificate, the child’s last name is to be the same as the dad’s.” End of story. No amount of arguing or pleading moved the relevant SA bureaucrats - and they could care less that we weren’t even South African citizens! So our son’s birth certificate had the “wrong” last name, thanks to the forward-thinking South African government.
I then had to research how to make legal name changes, and it turns out that for Americans, if you want to change your child’s name you are supposed to do it through the state you live in. Obviously that wasn’t an option, since we didn’t reside in any US state, so I phoned the US State Department at my earliest opportunity, thinking “they can’t help me, but I’ll try.”
To my initially pleasant surprise, they were completely unfazed by my request to change a name while living abroad – turns out it happens all the time, thanks to marriage/divorce/adoption. So I was quickly put in touch with the correct department, where the fine gentleman there told me I could not change my son’s name because my reason was not “conventional.” (I guess if South Africa had forced us to give our son my name and we wanted him to have my husband’s, THAT would have been conventional, but since we wanted him to have his mother’s last name, Uncle Sam decided we weren’t entitled to help.) This was in 1998, by the way – not 1955 or anything.
Eventually, we paid an attorney to make the (somewhat specious) argument to a judge in New Hampshire, where my parents lived, that we were actually NH residents and therefore the NH court could take action and change our son’s name. We had to show up in court and everything! But, the judge was really nice (he clearly couldn’t believe that the system was so defective that all of us were having to take time with this rigamarole) and we left the courthouse with several notarized copies changing our son’s name.
Now we get to the Social Security number. He had gotten one at birth (I thought kids had to, these days … certainly when we registered him as a foreign birth at the US Embassy in South Africa, they wanted SS paperwork at the same time), but of course, his social security number was based on his original birth certificate, which did not have the name we wanted.
Once we finally had our son’s legal name straightened out, it took about A YEAR to get his SS records changed to reflect his proper name. I have never dealt with such an intransigent, slow, useless bureaucracy that managed to lose paperwork, claim I’d never sent it, invent new forms along the way that suddenly I had to fill out anew, etc. etc.
So, all my sympathies to anyone dealing with this stuff. Have fun.
