Congratulations!

It'a Quebec, I googled it and found this article. Apparently you can use his name socially, but you can't legally change it on your paperwork.

I got married last year (I'm in Belgium) and I believe it's the same. No one calls me Mrs "his name". But I guess the day we have children (they'll have his name), I'll hear more of it.

This is a really interesting discussion, I have never really given it too much thought. I guess I would take my husband's name - its just unfortunate that my new name would be Hindley, which doesn't have the best links to it. Oh well. His family also has a family middle name - Lewis for a boy, Louise for a girl. No idea why, I've never got to the bottom of it... at least they're both nice names.

My friend got married earlier in the year and moved her maiden name to be another middle name and now uses her husbands name as her surname. She has a CRAZY long name now though!

I almost forgot - congratulations on your new name!

^Because of my relationship with my dad, I'd never considered anything else. I was changing my name, by hook or by crook. It was it, that was that.

And I definetly did wait long enough, pfft! I tried like crazy to get him to take me to the little white chapel in Vegas, and get married again in Vegas. Haha! He was like "Uh, you understand that we're in Vegas because we just got married, right?"

I'm like "Pfft, I waited 10 years for you, if I want to marry you twice in a week, I CAN."

No dice. So I told him at our one year anniversary, he's gotta marry me again, LOL!

As for the birth certificate thing - because we weren't married when James was born, Jim actually had to sign an affidavit, swearing that he was James' father, and that he waived his right to ever fight me on Child Support, and all of that stuff. Pretty impressive, right?

I've not seen it mentioned anywhere that I need to change my birth certificate. As far as everything I've read mentions, change the social security card, and you're legal.

Although go figure, the social security website says you don't need to get a new card, but almost every other agency says they're going to want to see the changed social security card before they update your stuff. So you kind of have to change the card.

It's really interesting to read all of this.

Does this mean that if you are not going to change your last name, you don't have to fill out any paperwork? Or do you actively have to take measures to keep your name the same? I'm definitely not changing my name when we get married next year, and I'm not sure what (if anything) I need to do to keep my name despite being married.

I married a Latin guy and I hyphenated. I wanted to keep my family name (rare name, HUGE clan), but I also wanted to take his name.

Jon, you're right; my husband's granddad's official name is Grandpa dad'sname-mom'sname. I know a lot of Latinos on paper that still do this.

So I married a Rusian who got adopted at age 16 by a family with a German name. On his green card he's hyphenated with his birth name and the adopted family name. He generally just goes by his adopted last name.

We talked a lot about the name thing before getting married. He doesn't feel particularly connected to his adopted family, he only lived there for 2 hrs before leaving for college and the starting his career, and the time he did live there he could barely speak English so not much chance to develop relationships. He told me he didn't care which name I used and he even said he'd take my name. At the time I was too worried about offending his adoptive parents ( very traditional people) So I hyphenated my maiden name and his adopted name.

Having been hyphenated for 6 hrs now, I wish I hadn't done it. It's such a pain in the butt! the ballerina in me really wishes I had taken his Russian name instead haha

congratulations! I just did the same a couple months ago. It's pretty exciting!