I was rather surprised that the southern custom was to add
another initial; my Louisiana relatives never mentioned it.
But of course the old folks were married before they moved
down there, and I'd lost touch by the time the kids married.
On the other hand, I've always known that I was entitled to
all four names; I just never use more than two at a time. I
stuck a "B" after the initials on things I'd had before
marriage, but when I initial new things, I don't quite use
two letters -- the "J" and the "B" share a downstroke.
In the parts of the States that came to my attention, the
custom used to be that the bride would drop her father's
name and replace it with her husband's name. But then the
custom used to be for a girl to marry as soon as she
finished school. When later marriages came into style,
keeping your old name or adopting a double-barreled name
came into style.
I first noticed it when commentators complained that all the
female bike racers had hyphenated names: criterium racing
is a young man's game; by the time a bike racer was old
enough to marry, she was halfway through her career.
It's always been the custom for colleges to append the
maiden name when talking about alumnae. But this was
usually in parentheses.
My mother had no middle name -- which was normal for the
era; my father's family was unusual in giving every child a
spare name in case he didn't like the first one. When she
went to nursing school, they insisted that she have a middle
name, so she used her mother's maiden name and her uniforms
were embroidered "PLB". When she married Dad, she dropped
her mother's name, kept her father's, and signed her letters
"PBL".
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line:
unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
