Re: CHAT: new names (was: Re: Bopomofo and pinyin)

> The general position in both the U.K. and the U.S. is that (absent fraud)
> you can change your name whenever you want, and you can use as many
> names as you want for different purposes.  What the $50 payment is
> about is getting a court to take judicial notice of the name change.
> This is not legally necessary, but has evidentiary value: it can be
> used to convince skeptics that the former Mr. Luxury Yacht is now
> Mr. Throatwarbler Mangrove.  Similarly with the newspaper advertisements:
> they are essentially evidence of your intent.
The beauty of the legal name change in Delaware is that you can
take that court document to the social security office and to the
bureau of vital statistics (to have your birth certificate
amended), and change all the documents that require you to have
some sort of ID that will have your old name on it.  In Delaware,
it is required that you run a notice for 3 consecutive weeks in a
newspaper before your court date-- the notice you run is put in
with all the Sheriff's sales and termination of parental rights
notices, and the text of it comes directly from the name change
application. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't really loathe
your name to the point that you wanted to wash your hands of it
entirely and never have to use it again for any purpose. I really
did loathe my name that badly, but I did take "Mia" for a good
test drive before I went through all the trouble to get it
changed.

--

Mia Soderquist (tuozin@dmv.com)
http://www.crosswinds.net/~ratnow/
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