Legal surnames

Started by Erica Howton on yesterday
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Private User

This is the Colonial America (before 1781) project, so not the same as your question raised at https://www.geni.com/discussions/272643?msg=1689744. But I thought it an interesting place to discuss surname evolution in the USA and “legality.”


You had written:

I tried to find any documentation regarding how many surnames one could legally have in the US, and so far this is the best I have found:

https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/12680na/can_my_us_born_...

It is definitely saying in US you can legally have two last names - separated by a space or a hyphen. Do you happen to have a reference for your statement that "American women had / have one surname at a time. That’s it. It’s the law of the land" Or do you view it as possible that "Smith Jones" is one legal surname, so not a contradiction to what you said (just as "Mary Lu" may be considered somebody's Legal First Name)?



I responded with a terse “yes” so as not to sidetrack the discussion.

I’ll start with a simple bullet point webpage from the US Government:

How to change your name and what government agencies to notify

You might change your name through marriage, divorce, or court. Update your new name with Social Security, the motor vehicle office, and other government agencies.

https://www.usa.gov/name-change#:~:text=file%20for%20divorce.-,Cour....

Of course one can change name to, or be born as:

Smith Jones
Smith-Jones

Im not sure on the automatic change on marriage rules anymore, but otherwise, if you want to add Jones to your born as name Smith, that’s a legal name change required. I think you’re presented with a choice at marriage, and a surprisingly high percentage of American women still change their surname. Legally. Children are named at birth or when adopted, and can certainly be named Smith Jones or Smith-Jones.

One of the more fun examples of legal, born as double surnames is the Baron Cohen family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacha_Baron_Cohen

You’ll notice he has cousins who hyphenate, and they’re all legal names.

I think she’s using legal language here:

That being said: yes, it is legal and possible to have multiple last names. No, you cannot choose multiple names that you only use some of the time. If you have seen this it is possibly for people that have had a name change (for example by getting married), so they can have a previous alias, but that is not the same as having 2 current legal names.

(I would call it a compound surname and not “multiple” to be clearer)

I think SS calls other names aliases on some of their records but I’d have to look.

Mary may have been known socially as Mrs. Jones-Smith - we see it in newspapers, for example. But unless it’s written out chronologically and punctuation differentiated, we don’t know the ordering. So, as with any other record we glean, it goes in AKA.

Published articles describing Colonial American women in the journals such as “New England Historical Genealogical Register” seem to use this convention or similar in narrative:

Mary (unknown) (Smith) Jones

In other words, they encapsulate each of her known surnames within parentheses, chronologically, left to right. That’s to accommodate the various aliases by which she may have been known.

It’s often a challenge for us if we rely on the marriage record only, as if she was previously married, that’s the name on the record. Which is why we want those previous names in the AKA field, as well as the biography.

However, members may wish to export their family tree as a GED file, and it could be punctuation within the field such a slash (to show different surnames used) could corrupt the field data. So, in that case, a display name is better. But that over rides a members view preferences!

So what do we do?

In the current Geni program, use what we have.

Surname at birth, surname at death. (Either can be compound names.)

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