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From: elle@midway.uchicago.EDU (Ellen Keyne Seebacher)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Name Change After Marriage
Message-ID: <1990Aug31.222425.23095@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 31 Aug 90 22:27:19 GMT
References: <220@sierra.STANFORD.EDU> <1990Aug27.193416.19394@tc.fluke.COM> <24693@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Organization: University of Chicago
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu
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In article <24693@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> bweiss@cs.arizona.edu
 (Beth Weiss) writes:

>I have a great dislike of the term "maiden name" and prefer to use
>"birth name" as the description of the name I've used since birth...

I'm not wild about "maiden name," but I prefer terms other than "birth
name" as the default -- not all of us are using our birth names!  My
birth certificate reads "Ellen Keyne Seebacher" only because I had my
name legally changed as an adult.  (For the curious, I dropped my
original first name and moved up my middle/confirmation names.)

I had this discussion recently on another topic: that of "chosen
family" (one's beloved friends and more pleasant relatives) vs. "?
family" (the one you grew up in).  I think people agreed with me that
"original" or "former" family was preferable to "birth family" (which,
for adopted children, is not true).

So how about "former name"?  "Unmarried name"?  And, in the cases where
one keeps one's own name, "own name"?  :-)

--
Ellen Keyne Seebacher                I didn't say that I didn't say it.
 elle@midway.uchicago.edu            I said that I didn't say that I said it.
The University of Chicago            I want to make that very clear.
 Academic/Public Computing              --former Mich. gov. George Romney