MORE ON NAMES
More evidence that there's no one best way to deal with the name game, from reader Stanley S. Forrester:
My wife choose to keep her last name after we were married. As an active duty service member (at the time) she had already gone through two name changes first for her first marriage and the ensuing divorce. No more of that.
We decided our child would carry both family names,
First Name: Timothy
Second Name: Frederich
Family Name: Gunechtel Forrester. (no hyphen)Society assumes Timmy's last name is Forrester and treats his matrilineal name as a middle name. Had my son been a daughter she could both bow to societal expectation by dropping Forrester at marriage and still maintain the matrilineal name. If he chooses Timmy can do something similar with Gnuechtel or come up with something even more bizarre.