When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from
First: Jane
Middle: Ann
Last: Smith
to
First: Jane
Middle: Smith
Last: Mylastname
All was well and good until very recently when I was at the DMV with her and we were renewing her drivers license. We found out then that the person entering her name change form at the Social Security department had misentered it as
First: Jane
Middle: [none]
Last: Smith Mylastname (no hyphen, just a space)
For fun, her US passport shows it correctly, like:
Given names: Jane Smith
Last: Mylastname
So two federal agencies have her name in two different ways. Yay! The DMV lady was unhappy with this but we talked her into accepting the truth on her passport so we could renew her license, but obviously you can't count on the cheerful disposition of all future DMV clerks. The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally, which will cost about $400 all told. My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper, but that's just a plain templated text message that will read:
"Notice is given that Jane Smith Mylastname is changing her name to Jane Smith Mylastname"
> The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally
Are you sure?
SSA has administrative offices that deal with data errors. Generally in a GSA high rise in a big city. NOT the offices where you go to get benefits.
Someone doing data entry for the SSA fat fingered some info about me back when I was born, and I only found out in the 2010s thanks to the IRS rejecting a tax filing (I had to pay a 50 cent late fee!!!).
Went in-person to their office in the Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago and the lady spent a few minutes examining documents, typed on her computer for about 20 seconds, and that was that. All fixed.
> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper
For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state.
I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done.
Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.
>Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name
I know this pain.
What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.
I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.
Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.
Yeah, it's a total patchwork of laws and processes. It's enough of a pain in the neck here to make you have to be pretty sure you want to bother with it.
I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.
Many countries don't let you change your name at all unless you have an extremely strong reason to do so. Others have strict requirements on what an acceptable name is, and foreign-sounding names are often not allowed. Denmark straight up gives you a whitelist of allowed names to choose from.
My first name is an old family name. I’m the 8th to have it. My kid’s the 9th. I go by my middle name. My mom and dad and sisters call me that. My wife calls me that. My doctor calls me that. My first name would be an AKA, an alias. Literally no one calls me by that name.
And that’s why my credit union is one that would issue me a debit card in my legal name, which is to say my legal name. Other banks have strict rules to call me by my alias, so I don’t use them.
Side note: I’m way sympathetic to people who’ve changed their names and want to be called something else. Use my first name with me and I know you’re someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me. You’re a stranger. I don’t identify with it at all.
One of my friends recently did some logistics work with a bunch of pacific islanders, to organise them all to come to a conference in Australia.
In the local language of one of the countries, they say the family name first. For example, "Smith Mary". The passport & visa offices had gotten confused, and this poor guy ended up with a passport with their first and last names around the wrong way. And they got a visa to Australia with the names the right way around. The problem was only discovered a day or two before they travelled. And of course, you can't use a visa if the name on the visa doesn't match your passport. Even if the name on the visa is correct!
It was a huge headache. My friend managed to escalate the problem through DFAT (Australia's state department) and they managed to issue a new visa in time which matched their passport. Ie, they issued a visa which also had this guy's name wrong.
My favorite part of the whole thing is that their colleagues thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Apparently they kept making fun of the guy for it and started calling him the wrong name on purpose. Pacific islanders are the best. I think they were from Kiribati or Samoa.
When I moved to California and got a drivers license (easiest test process of my life, as a European, but that's another story), they dropped the space in my two word last name. Reads quite odd now. I always figured it was an all round America quirk to not have spaces in last names.
When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from
to All was well and good until very recently when I was at the DMV with her and we were renewing her drivers license. We found out then that the person entering her name change form at the Social Security department had misentered it as For fun, her US passport shows it correctly, like: So two federal agencies have her name in two different ways. Yay! The DMV lady was unhappy with this but we talked her into accepting the truth on her passport so we could renew her license, but obviously you can't count on the cheerful disposition of all future DMV clerks. The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally, which will cost about $400 all told. My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper, but that's just a plain templated text message that will read:"Notice is given that Jane Smith Mylastname is changing her name to Jane Smith Mylastname"
for which privilege we get to pay $75.
Good grief.