When Greta and I got married, we joked that we were going to merge our last names (Dohl and Seidel, respectively) into a portmanteau, “Seidohl”. With our wedding date approaching and no better ideas, we happily went forward with that idea and made it our legal last name. This isn’t a guide (there’s a good one here) but really just a story.

For posterity, and also to hopefully instruct anyone interested in doing the same, I’ve decided to write down the processes we’ve gone through. Please let me know in the comments if you’ve had similar or different experiences!

Family

To begin: my parents, The Seidels, took my mom’s maiden name when they were married. As far as I can gather, they did it mainly because of my dad’s strained relationship with my Grandfather. (Only one child – an adopted second cousin – still bears the Pizarro name that was handed down by my Grandfather). Still, they apparently faced some hardship in changing my dad’s name officially, so I was expecting a tough time of making up an entirely new name.

Telling my family was not hard. Most of them agreed that it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do and actively encouraged us. My maternal grandfather (rest in peace) seemed surprised, although he was in good humor about receiving the news that I would be likely the last Seidel on his side of the family. He mentioned one great aunt who would be “spinning in her grave” about the news. (Connect her to a turbine?). I never met her and, to date, have not been visited by her angry ghost. So I think I’m good there.

YMMV, of course, with your own family.

Marriage License

In the county where we were married, we could only change our names to a) one of our existing last names or b) hyphenate our last names. (I can no longer find a reference to this, but Michigan’s marriage laws being as backwards as they are I wouldn’t be surprised). So for our actual marriage, we just c) kept our own last names.

New York

We moved to NYC right after getting married, and changed our names through the NY state court system. This was relatively straightforward. We filled out some notarized paperwork and got a court date. Note that finding a Notary Public can be difficult, even in Manhattan! We needed our original Birth Certificates as well.

We dressed up nice and appeared in front of a judge. The main questions we were asked related to figuring out if we were doing this to get out of a debt, crime, or other obligation. I remember that the guy in front of us was changing his name for religious reasons and the judge approved that as well.

The details of this next part are a bit fuzzy, since this was so long ago. The judge approved our name change and sent us to get certified copies. There was a (IIRC) $65 charge to change the names, and then each notarized copy cost about $10. We ended up needing five (?) certified copies, one for our records, one for a couple of services like the Social Security office, debts (student loans companies), and more to publish in the newspaper. You must publish your name change in a public newspaper.

You can publish in the New York Times, if you want to shell out a boatload of money. I published in, I think, the Irish Echo, which cost about $35. You don’t need to be Irish to publish there! It’s one of the cheapest papers to publish in so I expect they do a brisk business on this.

Finally, we got certified copies of our completed name change documents for our records (another $6 per copy, I think?). We used that to do things like refresh our passports.

Problems

The only institution that really gave me any grief was my bank. They seemed perfectly happy to accept that my wife’s last name had changed through marriage without any documentation (this seems like a major security flaw???), but as soon as I told them that we’d changed it in front of a judge, suddenly they needed me to send documents for both of us. I did, and they changed the names promptly.

Trying to change my frequent filer miles name on Southwest also caused problems. Their online name change form simply didn’t work, and none of the phone support people could do anything but tell me to go fill out the form. I think I eventually got around it but it required some developer console hacking??

Changing emails, usernames and websites was also tricky. I still have my old last name in some usernames. I was very fortunate that I’d chosen ertysdl as my email username, since sdl stands for both Seidel and Seidohl! I promise I didn’t plan that. Some sites seem to use your username as a unique identifier, and why would that ever change?

Conclusion

Changing my last name wasn’t a difficult task, although it was made harder by state law in Michigan which didn’t allow us to change our name at the time of our wedding, which would have saved us a lot of time and expense. Only a few entities gave me trouble about updating my name, but otherwise it seems like a pretty common thing to do and most of the clerks didn’t blink an eye – in fact, it seems like several people change their name every day in NYC, so the process is pretty streamlined.

Postscript: Thinking thoughts

I didn’t grow up with any strong connection to the Seidel name. It’s generally a German surname, and I’ve always wondered if the anti-German sentiment of the 1940s led to my earlier family suppressing that aspect of my heritage. I have a much closer affinity for Sweden, since I was partially raised by my dad’s mom who was born to Swedish immigrants. That said, I don’t really consider myself Swedish or have any connection to the country and its people other than that.

There aren’t many other Ertys in the world! I used to come up on the first page of google results with just my first name, but that seems to not be the case any more. Unfortunately, unique names come with downsides as well. There’s some weird art out there with my name attached to it (I didn’t make it!). However, with a unique first and last name, I end up being very Googlable. That’s something I decided was good?

To me, changing my name like this is an expression of the individualism and emptiness of the modern “white american” culture. I don’t have a connection to any large family or lineage through my names. I’ve changed both my first name (from Erik to Erty) and my last name (from Seidel to Seidohl), and I rarely use my middle name (and have considered changing it at times as well). A name is an outward expression of self. It’s like a tattoo. I don’t not like my original names, I’ve just found new ways of expressing myself. I think this is a form of rebellion against previous generations that put so much caché into names – let’s discard that and refer to ourselves how we want, not just on the internet. I’ve been lucky to not have familial pressure back on these decisions, so they’ve been almost no work at all.