what's in a name

[jmtorres]

I was probably... late teens? before it occurred to me that surnames frequently suggest ethnic or racial or at least family histories.

Probably at least one reason why this took so long to hit was that I was aware married women took their husbands' surnames, so a married woman's surname didn't say anything about her background. (This says interesting things about my presumption that married couples don't come from similar backgrounds.)

My middle name is my mother's maiden name. For many years I assumed that was totally normal, that of course you would preserve family history by giving a child both parents' surnames. I would have been about seven when I found out that wasn't so (in my culture, in others it is): I was seven when my mother was pregnant with my brother and my parents were arguing about what to name the baby. Funnily, boy name suggestions came with a first and a middle name, but girl name suggestions, we only considered the first name. So I learned that girls carry that secret matrilineal history in our middle names and boys are their father's sons. It felt like something precious, that hidden gift of a middle name.

(Until I figured out, from novels, I think, that sometimes girls have ordinary given names for middle names too. It was baffling and something of a disappointment.)

Comments

[viggorlijah]

ahaha, I did exactly that too! I remember sitting at the dinner table, baffled by the conversation about jews in hollywood, asking "but how can they tell they're jewish?" and having -stein and -vitz explained to me, and going "oh, like if they're scottish!"

We threw a coin to decide which of our surnames would come first for our children's double-barrelled, although Jim petitioned hard for inventing a new surname with some terrifying suggestions.

[merryish]

Yeah, I have both - an ordinary given name for a middle name, AND my mother's family name. It gave me a lot of options when I was going through my "call me anything but the first name my parents gave me" phase. =) But it made people look at me funny in elementary school, too, when every single teacher had to try to pronounce all four names...

[strina]

The women in my family actually went a different route: I'm Christina Katherine after my mom, Tracy Katherine, after her mom, Dena Katherine, after her aunt, Katie, after her mom, Kathy, after her aunt, Verena Katherine. Entirely matrilineal and goes back a ridiculous number of generations.

[sasha_feather]

The middle names in my immediate family are surnames from the grandparents or great-grandparents.

[azurelunatic]

My middle name is a given name, and is the first name that they'd planned for me, until I came out and I didn't match that first name. It also happens to be the given name of the woman who could have been my mother in another universe where Dad chose differently. My first name is a maternal aunt's.

[niqaeli]

I carry my mother in my surname. Culture has buried it over the years, as I go by just my father's surname rather than my full hyphenated last name for the convenience of it. It's simpler, it always has been. And bureaucracy has along the way reduced my proud and complicated last name to a single one, removed the hyphenation and made my mother's name a second middle name.

But it's still my name. It will always be my true name. I've always like being able to trace my history in my name.

I've always been sad that we don't have a true matrilineal name -- one that passes down from mother to daughter without being the mother's name given to her by her father. As though women were no more than their father's daughter, as if the history they carry is interrupted with each generation, as if the father's history is still the one in the end that truly matters.

I've never decided what to do about it for my own children. I won't inflict on my children the hyphenated monstrosity that combining my surname and my husband's surname would be. They can have his surname. But I do want their names to carry their mother in them somewhere too, so they have that history.

As a note, it's not just me that thinks boys should have that history too. My husband's middle name is his mother's first surname.

[viridian5]

Medicare has forced me and now Medicaid to use my mother's maiden name as part of my name when I never have in my life because my mother had my name on my Social Security card as "[My first name] [My middle (given) name] [Her original family name] [My dad's family name]." I wouldn't resent it quite so much if it didn't make it harder for me to spell my "last name" for doctors and phone systems--"now there's a space between the names!"--and if she hadn't become ever more aggressively nutbar in the last 15 or so years.

I never had an attachment to her original family name even when I'd believed her version of our life because I was ever aware that it was her father's name, and neither of us liked him.