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keeping maiden name as middle name?


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I kept my maiden name as my middle name for various reasons. One is that I never liked my middle name as my parents' broke tradition when they named me. Also, my father does not have any sons, and I thought it would be special for him that I kept my maiden name.

 

My mom HATES this. She feels like I should have kept the name she named me. Nobody I know has done the same thing. I had actually never heard of doing it when I chose to.

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Didn't it used to be that the woman kept her maiden name as a middle name when she got married. For example, Susie May Smith became Susie Smith Jones upon her marriage to Bob Jones.

 

Very few women I know are doing this anymore. They are dropping their maiden name entirely and keeping their original middle name. So, Susie would be Susie May Jones. Is this a new trend or has it been around awhile I just missed it?

 

I have always thought it was an American only thing. I have never heard of it happening anywhere else in the world.

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My family did the traditional "take the husband's name, drop the maiden name" thing. I felt VERY pressured to do this - not from DH, but from my FIL who was quite the big, loud, butt head about it, and my own dad. It was a disaster. My degrees were in my maiden name and I had done a LOT of performing as Faith X, so suddenly being Faith Y was a nightmare professionally.

 

Frankly, it still is. I still meetpeople in my field that do not have a clue who I am as Faith Y, but if I say Faith X, the light bulb comes on and they'll respond, "Oh yah...you played at 'event A' back in 1987" or whatever. I really lost a huge piece of my identity when I took dh's name.

 

If I had it to do over again, I would not move y maiden name to middle nor would I add dh's name. I would have remained Faith X and we would have had different last names or Dh, who didn't really have much of a career yet when we got married so not as much to lose, could have become Mr. X though I'm sure his traditionalist friends would have found that bizarre and his father probably would have had a stroke!

 

I'm encouraging dd to keep her maiden name and NOT take hubby's or hyphenate. She loves her middle name and does not want to replace it.

 

Dh's mom is a nurse and way back in the day female medical professionals in some states apparently had their maiden name moved to their middle and husband's name tacked onto the end. The state did it without consent...just a done deal. I think this was because before computers, it was easier to track their professional licenses & medical degrees/continuing education courses, etc. and of course check records for complaints and offenses.

 

Faith

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Also, my father does not have any sons, and I thought it would be special for him that I kept my maiden name.

 

 

I posted earlier, but this reminded me -- this is also part of the reason I like using my maiden name as my middle name. I'm the middle of three girls; no sons. I like continuing our family name in this branch of the family tree. We gave one of our sons a name that includes my maiden name.

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I never heard of keeping your maiden name as a middle name. My dh's family uses maiden names for their children's middle names, but that's all. His family is English and Scottish, so many of the last names work just fine as middle names. My mother's family is Italian, and I can't imagine an Italian last name working as a middle name. :lol:

 

My father was Irish descent, and I did keep my maiden name as a middle name, but that's because I don't have a middle name. My parents couldn't think of anything they thought sounded good, so they just didn't give me one. My maiden name (May) sounds like a first (or middle) name. In fact, when I was a kid and told people my full name, they often asked me what my last name is. They just didn't get it.

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Didn't it used to be that the woman kept her maiden name as a middle name when she got married. For example, Susie May Smith became Susie Smith Jones upon her marriage to Bob Jones.

 

 

:lol: I read over your OP quickly and didn't pay attention to your example. As you can see by my previous post, I was Kathy May, not Kathy May Smith. Since I have no middle name, when I married I became Kathy May Jones. :D

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how often do you ever ask someone's middle name? I can't even say for sure what some of my best friends have done, except for those who really like using all their names on correspondence, and I do know a couple of those. Mentally checking through a list of my better girl friends, I honestly don't know how they handled this in terms of a legal name. I think after the first year or two of marriage, people probably don't remember or care, unless you use that name a lot. I am in the south, and I think most southern women keep their maiden name as a middle, and a good number of them actually use that name as much as they can squeeze it in, but most women I know .. I really have no idea. Remembering their first and last name alone seems like a feat:)

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My paternal grandmother only gave her daughters first names, assuming that their maiden name would become their middle name. One never married, and one married late in life after becoming and MD and kept her name for professional reasons :D This was in the late 40s/early 50s.

 

Interestingly, my MIL did the same for her daughter (early 80s), and said daughter gave herself a middle name (NOT her maiden name) when she got married. :D

 

I'm happily First Maiden Married Name, but then again, my middle name was "Foote". A family name that often required explantation and one that I looked forward to shedding my whole life!

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I never heard of that either. I'm also from the midwest.

 

:iagree: I have never ever heard of this either and never have come across any friends/family from multiple states/generations that have done this. Weird. I would never think to drop a given middle name and change it. If anything, more people I have come across just don't take their dh's last name at all and keep their full maiden name.

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I think it is a southern thing. I got something monogrammed at a bridal shower. It was supposed to be my initials. Without asking the person used my maiden name as my middle name. That was never going to happen because my maiden name is an adjective! Mrs. Chucki Sparkling Snow was not going to happen. :D

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Everyone in my generation (married in the 1980's) dropped their maiden name and kept their middle name. My own mother (married in the 1950's) did the same, although I do know some women from her generation (including my MIL) who kept their maiden name as their middle name.

 

I encouraged my daughter to keep her maiden name at least as her middle name, since her husband is Latin American and it just seemed like it might be helpful down the road of one of them has an American-sounding name. She hasn't changed anything yet, but plans to eventually. However, she wants to keep her real middle name because she says that's the name we gave her.

 

Some family members who are very anti-"changing your name to your husband's after marriage" refuse to address mail to my name of 29 years, which is my husband's last name. :) haha They always write my first name and maiden name. Oh well.

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I posted earlier, but this reminded me -- this is also part of the reason I like using my maiden name as my middle name. I'm the middle of three girls; no sons. I like continuing our family name in this branch of the family tree. We gave one of our sons a name that includes my maiden name.

I thought briefly of hyphenating the family name to my maiden name and dh's last name because the family name stops with my dad. All of his father's grandkids are girls except for my brother who will never have children of his own to carry the name. But I didn't want dd to be Little Sparkling-Snow.

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I've never heard of this either. Everyone I know dropped the maiden name, kept the middle name and took the husbands last name.

 

This is how it was done in my family too, for at least the 6 generations that my Aunt has researched, nobody kept their maiden name as the middle name, maybe it has to do with them all being Polish names. Those get butchered all the time, so only having one of them to get hacked apart when someone pronounces it is probably enough.

 

My generation is the first of my family to marry someone without Polish origin.

 

I also don't have a middle name and was more than happy to get rid of my hard to pronounce maiden name. I'm perfectly happy not having a middle name although I did get a bit of grief about it when dh took me to get the military documents for him updated. I do use First-Maiden-Married on facebook, but that's incase long lost friends are looking for me. :)

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I'm from Tennessee & I dropped my middle. I thought legally that's the way it is.

 

FYI: My mother (married in 1954) & Grandmother (married in 1917) did the same. It connected them to who "their people" are in the small town.

 

Dh's family is from Tennessee too (near the Cumberland Gap) but they don't do that. Then again, where they're from is such a small town that everyone knows who everyone else's "people" are. We were all there for his grandmother's 100th birthday, and while touring around one afternoon, the car broke down on a country road. People from a nearby house came out to help and BIL said to us, "I'll bet we're related to them somehow." Sure enough, once they started talking they found a blood connection. :lol:

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My mother, grandmother, and my best friend all dropped middle names and used maiden names. My sister dropped her maiden name and kept her middle. That was a bit strange to everyone we knew.

 

DH and I went a different way. He added my maiden name and I added his last name so we both had four names (but not hyphenated). So we are both First Middle My Maiden His Last. We did that with our daughters too. Honestly I kind of regret it. It felt like taking this big stand at the time. But four names feels unwieldy to me. And my poor daughters! :lol::lol:

 

I wish I had just kept my maiden as a middle - oh, well. Live and learn.

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My mother and MIL and women in our families of that generation and older believe pretty strongly that it is the traditional thing (midwest, South, NE) to use the maiden name as the middle name. Some of the women in the extended family are extremely traditional and that is the way they do it. Keeping the maiden name as the middle name has zero to do with feminism.

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I didn't, but my maiden name is very german, very long, & always mispronounced & misspelled. My middle name is very plane, especially compared to my first name. So I simply kept my middle name.

 

My married last name is very simple, not hard to spell or say, & people still can't say it or spell it correctly. So when I get mail or phone calls & they can't say it right I like to say, "Since you can't say my name correctly I know that I don't know you & therefore won't accept your call. Thanks, have a nice day." I'm pure evil at times.

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I have always thought it was an American only thing. I have never heard of it happening anywhere else in the world.

:iagree: I had never heard of it [ETA: "it" being dropping one's middle name and replacing it with the maiden name; I'm not sure if this is the same thing Melissa meant] before I came to the United States. But a search of Google Books turned up several mentions of the practice in American magazines and books, going back over 100 years. It wasn't presented as a universal thing, though -- just an option that some women preferred.

 

Here's what I don't understand. If it's such an "established tradition" -- and it sounds as if it is, in some families -- then why bother giving girls middle names at all? It just seems odd to choose a name with the attitude that it's disposable.

Edited by Eleanor
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Here's what I don't understand. If it's such an "established tradition" -- and it sounds as if it is, in some families -- then why bother giving girls middle names at all? It just seems odd to choose a name with the attitude that it's disposable.

 

If I'd kept my maiden name as my second name legally, I'd still think of my middle name as part of my name. Even if the legal paperwork said my name was Milovany MaidenName HusbandsName, if someone asked me what my middle name was, I'd say the name my mom had put in between my first and last name (in my case, Dawn).

Edited by milovaný
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My maiden name is my legal middle name, because I have many younger siblings (in some cases, much younger) and that way there's a connection if I have to take care of them in some way (e.g. picking up from school, emergency situation, etc.). My college diploma has all four names on it (I graduated almost a year after getting married).

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