My paternal grandfather, Francis Grombacher, was a German Jew. As the Nazis came to power in the late 1930s, he saw what was happening and decided to move to South Africa. This turned out to be a smart decision as most of his (our) family was subsequently murdered in the Holocaust.
Francis had met and married an Iowan who was working in Europe before the war, and after moving to Africa they had three children, one of whom was my father. They were happy there but Francis wanted to move again, to America this time. Maybe he was inspired by his wife's stories of amber waves of corn. In any case, when my father was a boy, the family of five took a steamer to New York and started their American dream.
I think Francis was worried about anti-German sentiment in postwar America, and decided to mess around with his last name a bit. His mother's maiden name was Ehrmann (another very German name) so after hyphenating the two together to Grombacher-Ehrmann, he anglicized it to Grombacher-Irwin. This is the name he gave the authorities at Ellis Island or wherever they were processed. Then he went about his daily life calling himself "Francis Irwin".
This was fine and dandy for many years. I was born in New Jersey in 1990 and inherited the monstrosity on my birth certificate, "Keith Grombacher-Irwin", but for all intents and purposes, I was Keith Irwin. This is how I was enrolled in school and my parents even had "Irwin" on their drivers' licenses. This was all fine until 2001. As with all things, everything changed on 9/11.
All of a sudden, the agencies gave a darn whether our IDs said "Irwin" or "Grombacher-Irwin". Suddenly, everything had to match, and my full last name awoke from its slumber and reared its ugly head. I wasn't actually affected until I started applying to colleges and they told me my high school transcript would need to match my birth certificate. So I had to change my name in the high school's computer system. Overnight, I went from being "Keith Irwin" to "Keith Grombacher-Irwin".
I remember it like it was yesterday. At the beginning of every class, my teacher would be quietly taking role on the computer. He/she'd squint at the screen, look up at me, look back at the screen, then look back at me. "Keith?" "Yeah?" "What the heck happened to your name!?" I had to explain the story in every class. By third period, I was preemptively telling my teachers that my name changed last night, just FYI.
This was only the start of my struggle. When I got my first driver's license, the clerk told me that the licensing machine had no hyphen, so I became KEITH GROMBACHERIRWIN. When I renewed my license after a few years, the next clerk told me that the machine did have a hyphen, but she'd have to make it match the old license. So the mistake persisted for many years. Whenever my ID was checked, I would be asked, "How do you pronounce your last name?" and I would have to explain, "Well, it's supposed to be hyphenated." I've told this story thousands of times and I'm obviously sick of it.
The pronunciation is nontrivial too. The German "ch" is soft like a hiss. The "-er" ending is also soft (like most romantic languages). It's a bit like saying "Gromba-HAIR". When I was in Germany, this was no problem because there's a well-known beer brand called "Krombacher", so I could just say, "Like the beer but with a G." Here in the USA, however, nobody can spell it from the pronunciation, so if anyone asks what my last name is, I say, "Uh... just let me spell it for you." Then I have to use the phonetic alphabet so there's no confusion ("M" as in "Michael", "B" as in "Bravo"). This takes forever and wastes everyone's time. Sometimes the secretary goes on lunch break before we even get to the hyphen.
And then there's the validations. You would think that hyphenated names are common enough to be accepted everywhere, but most web forms don't allow "special symbols". They also regularly cut off the length at 30 letters or so. Some of my credit cards are under "KEITH GROMBACHERIRWIN" and some say "KEITH GROMBACHER IRWI". So in the post-9/11 world where my name is supposed to match everywhere, it never does. And that often results in some clerk having to make a special case for me, after I've explained why my name doesn't match, followed by the usual small talk about the name's pronunciation and origin story. The wasted time can probably be measured in lost GDP.
Now that I've moved to Colorado and settled down, it's time to kill the beast. I'm legally changing my name to "Keith Irwin", the name I identify with and have always used whenever I could get away with it. Some people say, "How can you change your name like that, for convenience!? Your name is your heritage!" First of all, we're talking about only two generations of "heritage". Second of all, if you knew my struggle, you'd understand.
^ 2023/06