Did your mother keep or change her name when she got married?

[angus]

Option 2, though I am under the impression that this forum has a disproportionate number of people having mothers who kept their name.

I've always been under the impression that this forum has a disproportionate number of people having mothers who moved the position of their original surname to become their middle name.

Those are the only two options in my family.  Like, if your name is Joan Alice Taylor and you marry Steven Walter Smith, you can still be Joan Alice Taylor or you can become Joan Alice Smith.  Those are pretty much your two options in my family.  Some choose to keep their original surname and some choose to change it.  My mother changed her name.  My wife kept her original surname.  My sister changed her surname in one of her marriages but kept it in another marriage.  None of them moved their original surname to the middle-name position.  That just isn't done in my family.

What always struck me about this forum is that there seems to be a large number who make their original surname their middle name after they're married.  Like, if your name is Joan Alice Taylor and you marry Steven Walter Smith, then you become Joan Taylor Smith.  As far as I know, no one in my family has ever done that.  They either stick with their original last name or they co-opt the husband's surname.  Nevertheless, it seems fairly common based not only on this forum but from what I've seen in general society.  I have always found the concept of co-opting the husband's last name and moving your original surname to the middle position very strange.  In fact, I'd never even heard of it till I was a teenager, and my mother explained to me that it was somewhat common in society.  Since I've been posting here, it seems to me that it is the norm on this forum, even though to my knowledge no one in my extended family has ever done that.  They either keep their last name original or they change it. 

[angus]

My situation is somewhat different. My wife's mother was given no middle name, so making her given last name into a middle name was more a matter of adding the new name to the end of a short list. My wife was given her mother's maiden name as her middle name and her father's last name. She kept that name.

My children were given a unique first name but their mother's middle name and my last name. If my daughter chooses to maintain that tradition then the same middle name would exist through four generations through female ancestors. In principle the pattern could be maintained through female descendents much as a patrilineal last name is through male descendents.

Interesting.  Was your wife's mother a foreigner?  My wife is a foreigner and she has no middle name.  We gave my son three names, which is the tradition in my family, and his last name is the same as mine, which is the tradition in my family, but neither his first or middle name is the same as mine.  That's also a tradition in my family.  (We don't do seconds and thirds, etc.)  My wife's family also has a tradition of not doing seconds or thirds or naming people after other family members.  It is her tradition not to change her name upon marriage, and neither she nor her sister nor her mother did this.  My own extended family really doesn't have a tradition in this regard, although I think most of the females did change their names upon marrying.  This is especially true if they married someone with an anglo-saxon name.  If they married a slav or a dutchman or someone whose name was even weirder and harder to spell than ours, then they generally kept the original.  One of my cousins married a Lakota man and changed her name to his:  Running Horse.  Very cool.  I'd probably change my name to Running Horse as well.

My sister changed her name when she married her first husband, since he had an easy, one-syllable, four-letter English name and it appealed to her.  She then kept that name even when she married a second husband.  Her son, however, has the same last name as I do, which was her original last name before she got married.  She also broke with tradition in another way, she gave him her middle name as a first name, and his middle name is my middle name, so she managed to name him after herself, myself, and our father in that way.