I know of a family with three generations of people with same First Middle Last name, but since grandfather goes by First, father goes by First Middle and grandson goes by Middle, there's no actual confusion.
Very true. I've experienced a bit of this first-hand.
Growing up, I, my father, and my paternal grandfather all shared the same first name and last name, and all lived within a couple of miles of each other (my father and I obviously lived in the same residence a big chunk of my childhood, and grandpa lived just a short hop away). Our mail (and gosh knows what else) got mixed up all the time.
To make it even worse, I'm one of those people who chooses to use my middle name, not my first name, as my primary name. So while "legal" correspondence often comes addressed one way, sometimes even that gets mixed up, and phone calls are always weird when I answer "Hi, this is Phil" and the person on the other end goes "Oh, sorry, I was calling for $FIRST_NAME". <click>
And to make this whole story even weirder, my maternal grandfather's middle name (which is what he went by) was the same as the first name shared by me, my dad, and my paternal grand-father. So yeah, we had four family members in a very small area, sharing confusingly similar names.
I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at the counter will address me by my middle name, on the assumption that foreigners' names have the family name last, so that must be the right name to use.
Four generations of men in my family have the same name other than suffix. At times three of them lived at the same address. It has caused a number of issues over the years, including unintended cross access to bank accounts. Despite the problems it sometimes creates, they seem to be amused by the confusion.
It is an other fun cultural context. I have Firstname Middlename Lastname. This or Lastname Firstname Middlename appear on somethings like credit card, ID, passport and official legal documents. But in normal live like receiving normal letters and so on it is just Firstname Lastname or Lastname Firstname. Even the order is fluid with Lastname Firstname being more formal.
And then some people have First-Name firstnames where either part is also a name, but whole thing is one Firstname... So calling someone with just First is often wrong...
As the sibling comment says, yes she is sort-of correct. Our names are in the format:
<First name> <Middle name> <Grandmothers first name> <Grandfathers first name> <Surname>
So its kinda like a family name, but its not like everyone in our family will have the same family names. My cousins don't share any names with me as they are named after different people.
It causes trouble insisting they are all part of your surname. She recently had issues because the officials dealing with her medical exams assumed only the last name was a surname. So she had call and find someone with the necessary authority and present her birth certificate to get them to cancel the previous transcripts and issue new ones under the correct name.
It's quite usual to have two family names, one from your mother's side and another from your father's. Usually the father's family name comes last, but it's by no means a rule, more of a social norm (and somewhat fading).
Additionally, it's also perfectly reasonable to have two or more "first names".
The consequence of all of this, and having four names myself, is that I'm always confused what I'm supposed to fill in as my first and last names. I end up using just my very first and very last, but i always feel like I'm being disrespectful towards my mother's family for the omission.
I am the third person by my full name. My grandfather goes by our shared first given name; my father by our shared middle given name. When the distinction does not matter, I just use my first given name and surname. I never use the middle given name (if someone called me just by my middle given name, I would not respond).
If the distinction matters, then whatever system is in place had better be prepared to use my ordinal (III) as significant, but had better not put it as part of my last name.
So I will go by: "A-"; "A- Z-"; "A- H- Z-"; or "A- H- Z- III". I never go by "H-"; "H- Z-"; "H- Z- III"; or "A- Z- III".
My dad didn't have a middle name. In Canada that caused more problems than anything; forms would constantly be denied / sent back / whatever because whoever processed them would think he forgot to fully fill it out.
My family's tradition is that all the men share a middle name, and all the women share a middle name, so there's still name inheritance even for younger siblings! (There's an OOP joke in here somewhere.)
Amusingly, my wife also has the same middle name as the women in my family, so the tradition is likely to continue.
My dad also goes by his middle name - he has a first name that is incredibly common in his nation of origin, so it's almost useless as a way of referring to him. You're the first person i've ever heard suggest that he's wrong to do that, and you are mistaken to do so.
It's not at all clear it makes it easier. My great-great grandfathers children and the children of his brother have different last names. That's before dealing with the hassle of married names vs. maiden names for the women.
Most of my family is in Norway and Sweden, and used pretty much the same method as Iceland, except to throw an extra wrench in, a lot of the time people would either use the name of the farm they were born on in addition or or instead of the name derived from their father. Since that could often include extended family, and different owners over time, there might be a proliferation of people with the same last name as you with no close relationship, while someone with a completely different name might be your first cousin.
My last name only exists because one of my ancestors got tired of the name confusion and renamed his farm (changing one letter) because the local area were full of people with the same last name on farms with prefixes like little/large/upper/lower to separate them all, most of whom are not closely related to us due to purchases (the exact same change has happened two different places in Norway; as a result about 50% of people globally with the same last name as me are relatively closely related to me - the other roughly half we've not found a connection point to, but of course one will exist far enough back).
It isn't "at most American" because UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand also mostly use "Name Middle Family", just like the US does. There are still some differences in their naming practices, but those differences generally relate to subtler issues, not the big picture issue of name order.
I suspect that you are conflating first with given and last with family. Not everyone in the world does it that way. Icelanders use patronymics not family name anyway, the Spanish use something rather more complicated, Chinese names are family first, etc.
When my father was born, his parents gave him a normal given name, but endowed his middle initial as only a single letter. They said, when he grew up he could choose whatever name fit that initial.
The initial happened to match his father's given name, and when he was old enough, he reliably chose to take that name as his middle name. It is certainly an endearing story of filial devotion, and a distinct lack of finicky SQL databases or web input validation in the 1950s.
I actually assumed, well into my teenage years, that people's middle names were their mother's maiden name, as that's the case for me, my sister, and my cousins.
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