Changing your name to something more Anglo-Saxon

[Aitch]

My Dad was always known by his second name. In hospital once, all the staff called him by his first name. The doctors had him down as a dementia patient because he never responded.

I have a not unusual surname but the Dutch can't handle it
"Can you spell that?"
- "Yes of course"
"Where do I put the T?"
- "There isn't one."
"So that's D, T is it?"
- "No, there is no T"
"OK, sir all done."
-"No you've spelt my name T,D"
"Sorry,sir, I'll start again Now, were did the T go?"

[Giggler]

We used to have a double-barrelled surname but we ditched half of it in the 1920s. I got enough shit at school for being posh with the one we stuck with, never mind if we'd stuck with the original.

[Guy Profumo]

I had a great-grandfather whose middle name was "Wardrobe".

We always used to think that it was because his father was a cabinet maker with a very, very limited imagination.

Turns out he was a cabinet maker who married a woman whose maiden name was Wardrobe.

[MsD]

Mine is also a Saxon bi-name.

I’ll just ponder amusingly to myself on that one.

[Eggchaser]

My surname is Hugenot and my first name has multiple ways to spell it. It's an absolute bugger as I get all manner of variations on either or both when being written to.

[The Inner Light]

The thing with surnames is there fluid. When my dad passed away my sister did some digging and it showed a journey from Donegal, via Glasgow. But the thing is when people arrived at a port in many instances they didn’t know the spelling of their name and were given the local equivalent. Fascinating stuff really

[Lang Spoon]

Loads of Gallaghers were registered as Gallacher when they arrived in Scotland.

[ursus arctos]

Who were of course not Gallaghers in Gaelic

[Lang Spoon]

Oh aye. Would probably been recorded on the census as that but.

[Femme Folle]

My Swiss ancestors changed their surname at some point after immigrating to the US from Rebsamen to Turnipseed. It's basically a translation to English, like if your surname was Käse and you changed it to Cheese.

[Femme Folle]

My surname is Hugenot and my first name has multiple ways to spell it. It's an absolute bugger as I get all manner of variations on either or both when being written to.

I've had emails this week from people within my company in which my first name was spelled two different incorrect ways--while these people had my name in front of their face while replying to my emails. It annoys me, possibly irrationally so, and people with names that are not commonly misspelled tell me that I need to get over it. Fuck them. If you misspell my name while it's right in front of you, it shows that you do not respect me as a human being. So fuck you too.

[Gerontophile]

A member of my family has spelled my name incorrectly for at least 45 years.

[elguapo4]

My surname is uncommon in Dublin,It's more common in Down and Antrim, its also close in spelling to a common Dublin surname so at this stage I automatically spell it out,people still generally think it's the other name anyway

[Sam]

My girlfriend's forebears had the spelling of their name altered when they arrived here. This isn't unusual among immigrants to the new world at the end of the 19th/start of the 20th century, of course. Most of the families here who share her surname seem to have ended up with the alternative spelling, which means we quite frequently get minor confusion (the cat is registered with my girlfriend's surname, and the other day the vet couldn't find her record on the computer until I spelt it out for him and he went, 'ah, with a Z. Okay, got it now').

I've had emails this week from people within my company in which my first name was spelled two different incorrect ways--while these people had my name in front of their face while replying to my emails. It annoys me, possibly irrationally so, and people with names that are not commonly misspelled tell me that I need to get over it. Fuck them. If you misspell my name while it's right in front of you, it shows that you do not respect me as a human being. So fuck you too.

Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs send me an annual reminder email when it's time to fill in my tax return, and until a couple of years ago they would put not one but two spelling errors into my middle name (which is six letters long) every single year. I have a slightly unusual middle name (it was my great-great-grandmother's maiden name) but it's not hard to spell and the way HMRC decided to spell it looks really properly weird, like 'what human being would ever go for that as the default spelling of this name?' weird.

And this, remember, is coming from a body who have only ever seen my name written down, by me, spelt the correct way. They've never been told it over the phone and had someone wrongly transcribe it.

My response, every single year, was to forward the email to their phishing department with a note to the effect that I know it must be fake because the actual HMRC have a record of how my name is spelt. Eventually they stopped doing it.

[Femme Folle]

The passive-aggressive approach is always the most satisfying.

[Various Artist]

People have weird blind-spots over names – they just see what they expect to see, I presume. I keep fielding e-mails from a whole range of different correspondents for someone – a farmer in Lincolnshire – who shares my name and who has the same @gmail.com address except that his includes his middle initial G, whereas mine is just my (our!) forename and surname. Considering how rarely I ever have to transcribe an e-mail address, as opposed to simply hitting 'reply' or at worst copy-and-pasting, I find it amazing that so many different people are a.) apparently copying it manually and b.) in doing so completely overlooking the G. My assumption is that they know what his name (forename and surname) is and therefore they just assume his address is the same thing, without paying proper attention to what it actually says.

[Benjm]

I keep fielding e-mails from a whole range of different correspondents for someone – a farmer in Lincolnshire – who shares my name and who has the same @gmail.com address except that his includes his middle initial G, whereas mine is just my (our!) forename and surname.

I've got two middle names, so initials + surname has worked quite well over the years for distinguishing myself from the fair number of other people with the same fore & surname combo. An ex was the only person in the UK with her fore/surname pairing, which always surprised me given the size of the population and her name not sounding massively unusual on the face of it.

[ad hoc]

My surname is not especially common but not that hard to spell either. However I do have a colleague in my world who is fairly well known and has the same name but spelled slightly differently (I have an "e" in mine, she doesn't) Because of this my name often gets spelled wrongly in my professional world, especially by people who know her. In other contexts it is rarely misspelled. In addition we both have first names that could be male or female, so we often get mistaken for each other at conferences. Someone will come up to me and "Ad hoc! I loved your book on Mobile Technology in the classroom". "Yeah, that wasn't actually me". She says it happens to her too the other way round.

My favourite story of surname changes was from my ex, who is Sicilian American. The whole village decamped en masse from near Palermo to California at the beginning of the 20th Century. I think her surname had basically been unwritten until that point, but they chose the most logical spelling (logical in Italian anyway, it gets mispronounced in English). One family member a few years in received a cheque from the government for something - but the name on the cheque was misspelled. But not really knowing how to handle that problem, he just went with the spelling on the cheque and so from that point on there are two different spellings of the same name depending on which branch of the family you're in.

[hobbes]

I've had emails this week from people within my company in which my first name was spelled two different incorrect ways--while these people had my name in front of their face while replying to my emails. It annoys me, possibly irrationally so, and people with names that are not commonly misspelled tell me that I need to get over it. Fuck them. If you misspell my name while it's right in front of you, it shows that you do not respect me as a human being. So fuck you too.

Amen, sister. Nothing irrational about it.

Them and people who truncate my name when they reply to emails when I've signed it off with my full name can get fucked n'all. It's only 2 more letters, the pricks.

[Guy Profumo]

Except of course, when during work you are given someone's name not included in an email chain, and want to contact them, you rely on "autofill" and get the wrong similarly named person.

Absolutely no fault whatsoever can be applied to the sender.

Oh no.

Not at all.

Ever.

[The Inner Light]

Oh aye. Would probably been recorded on the census as that but.

That’s what kinda happened I think. Cairns has so many different spellings and derivatives I had no idea.