On Aug 23, 2006, at 17:52, Alice Howell wrote:
Here in the USA, I'm more familiar with a woman adding
a married name to the end of the maiden name.
You don't know the half :)
When I got married (1973), my husband told me that "the custom" (which
I took to mean "the Southern custom") was for the woman to take on her
husband's surname, but to retain remnants of her maiden name via an
*added initial*. Thus, my original name -- Tamara Irena Przybyl --
became Tamara I.P. Duvall. I've long since dropped the I, because I
wasn't emotionally attached to it (my father thought it looked better
for a child to have two first names rather than one, and knew that my
chances of acquiring the second "first name" through confirmation were
nil. So. when he went to register me, he picked Irena, because she's
the saint for Oct 20, my birth date), so I'm now Tamara P. Duvall.
When my oldest stepson got married, he and his wife decided to combine
their names as well as their lives. But. She's Wong-Duvall and he's
Duvall-Wong, each of them adding the married name to the "maiden" one
:)
Back in Poland, the hyphenated names I encountered were of two kinds.
The first was the aristocracy (the few who survived the communist
rule). They combined the husbands surname (first) and the wife's maiden
name (second) but only if the cachet of the second name was worth the
effort (ie the second name added a second coat of arms to the
ensemble). So a name might have got hyphenated in 1600 and stayed that
way till 1968. Or, the name after the hyphen might have changed over
time. *Or*, in rare cases, the name *before the hyphen* changed :)
The second category of hyphenated names was a thoroughly modern
invention, necessitated by modern life. If a woman had established a
*professional* name for herself, taking on her husband's name meant
trying to re-climb the same "recognition ladder" all over again. So
they didn't.
The most vivid case was that of Irena Kirszenstein, a superb Olympic
runner and a winner of several gold medals. When she got married, the
press tried using "Szewinska" (her husband's name) first -- it had no
Jewish undertones to it and, as such, was more "acceptable". Everyone
reacted with "WHO???", and Kirszenstein came back. But it came back
with no consistency; when I googled it (Polish Google), I got:
Kirszenstein, Szewinska, Kirszenstein-Szewinska and
Szewinska-Kirszenstein. You pays your money, you takes your pick :)
Whatever the traditional rules might have been (if any <g>), they seem
to have gone by the board.
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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