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.
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 have very uncommon first and last names. We apparently both go to the same national bank. And my parents met his parents when the traveled on vacation.
It's a small world. And even worse if you have common names.
Because nearly everything in the US shoehorns things into three boxes, virtually every place my name is recorded on something important is different.
I could've been consistent in using two or three out of four, but when I was younger I was intimidated by forms that say you must enter your "full legal name", so I would, and they would mangle it unpredictably.
Checking account, credit card, drivers license, and property deed, each one different.
Well, in fact, my social security card and my birth certificate don't match, so I was doomed from the start.
It gives me some sympathy for places that try to regulate names to avoid parents doing something too goofy.
I sometimes wonder if there will come a day when all the databases will stop allowing discrepancies, and it won't matter to the powers that be, because it's such a tiny percentage of the population that becomes "unpersons".
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).
My wife has the same maiden name as her mom, with a middle initial that is one letter apart.
This flags more corrective correlation, so despite having a different last name for 19 years, insurance companies and Bank of America get them confused. The insurance is worse because you cannot appeal insurance data.
> It is possible that when you encounter a new document, you have to drop some of your assumptions, because, for example, it does occasionally happen that a person with a same (or similar) name is born on the same date in the same city.
Good grief yes. Families with the same surname, with kids born in the same order and in the same years. I had a 3 pack of that in one NJ town.
Man marries 3x, all named Lilly. Siblings Smith marrying Siblings Jones. Second wife adopts first wife's name as their nickname. Siblings swapping spouses (divorcing first). Parents who reuse the name of a dead child, multiple times. Aging dad who remarries daughter-in-law's mom. Women marrying men with same surname (some related, some not).
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.
A family friend had this problem when he immigrated to the UK from India. He just repeated his single name as it was both his forename and his surname.
I have a coworker whose last name is the same as his mother's maiden name and a form asked him his mother's maiden name but would not allow the answer to be the same as his current name, for "security reasons". He had quite a field day showing that around to every programmer at the company.
There are downsides to that. For example, this is how me, my parents and my siblings ended up with different surnames on our passports. They all started as the same surname, but then got mangled independently during translation...
Indeed we haven't run into many problems. Maybe an annoyance now and then such as a relative (usually one of hers, ironically) that assumes she has my last name and sends cards or letters to Mrs XXX. In fact some of them know she kept her maiden name but are conservative enough to find this somehow offensive enough that they give her my last name. (Again, weird, what's wrong with the last name she shares with them.)
(The only reason we sometimes wish she'd change her name is that hers is extremely common, and so she's constantly getting mixups with other people with the same name and has to sign things every time we buy a house or get a loan, etc. to say she isn't that other XXX YYY that has the bad credit rating or outstanding loan or criminal record, etc.)
My grandmother has a double-barrelled surname (Forename name1-name2), and it seems to be entirely random whether she gets name1-name2, name1name2, name1 name2, just name2, or on a few occasions name1/name2 from various companies.
My name is very unusual, so unusual that other family members haven't been able to sign-up with our surname for the three or four years as it's "too fake".
Without wanting to sound negative, you've assumed that family names represent families.
This might have been true 50 or 100 years ago, but now many families are non-nuclear. It isn't unusual for a family to include three different last names. By overlooking this, you're alienating your potentials.
People in my family changed names as they moved to a new country in this generation, I wasn't suggesting any association or guilt - just an amusing label (apparently not that amusing).
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