If you listen to Arthur Miller1, Giles Corey was pressed to death for the preservation of his “good name.2” He refused to sign a confession to something he hadn’t done.
But from the days of Mr. Corey, right up through the nightmare that is “Real ID,” the idea of a single “legal” name, bestowed at birth, eternal and unvarying — unless legal process is employed to change it — hasn’t been blessed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts3.
A lovely thing, for people like me — or approximately one third of my high school graduating class — who, for whatever reason, never or rarely use the name written on their birth certificate.
Shifting identities, though, does make it a bit difficult in investigations. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to be absolutely sure that any time the subject of your research appears in a court record, or newspaper story, or public records search, his name will be spelled completely consistently with the information already in your file.
It would also be nice if dishwashers emptied themselves, air conditioners didn’t drip strange water down the siding, and unicorns sharted ice cream on the hour and at predictable locations.
The key to operating in an imperfect world, of misspelled, abandoned, and forgotten names — as most research or investigation wouldn’t be required, in a perfect world — is maintaining an accurate list of other information, to cross-check against. We’ve discussed this previously, but knowing family relationships, addresses, and frequent aliases are key in determining whether a record that appears to fit, actually does fit4.
But what if the point of the investigation is to determine someone’s “real” name?
…
Last year, or the year before, I read quite a bit about a fourteen-year-old girl called, in press reports, Chauntae Renee Jones. She was killed in 1999, in Boston.
The men accused — who in fact, confessed — were acquitted.
Her family, boldly, sued prosecutors, police, and others, for failing to keep her safe. The suit continued for years, but ultimately, the rule familiar to first-year law students carried the day: Law enforcement has no duty to prevent harm.
Although I am not a religious person, I can’t help but be a grave visitor, stone-leaver, moment-of-silence-haver. There is a memorial garden over by Suffolk Superior Court, where Ms. Jones has a stone.
And where her name is written “Chauntal Renee Jones.”
A gut punch, isn’t it? The idea of a typo, carved into granite, a stone’s throw from the courthouse where her parents’ suit was lost, where the men responsible were acquitted.
I would have liked to find that it wasn’t the case; that I was wrong, and the designers of this memorial had taken care to make sure that the persons memorialized were, at least, given their own names.
But: Her family did not spell her name like that, in any of the filings in the lawsuit. The trial filings for the men who were ultimately acquitted of killing her did not use that spelling. The press did not spell her name like that, in the single report of her dissappearance, and the many accounts of her death.
There should be a concluding thought here. About the necessity of double-and triple checking; about care, and knowledge, and maybe even taking time on a spring day to think about someone you never met.
I don’t, however, have one.
Marilyn Monroe married him, so, I guess, that’s one point in his favor.
Mostly, though, it had to do with non-forfeiture of property, say present scholars.
Sec'y of Com. v. City Clerk of Lowell, 373 Mass. 178, 185 (1977) (city clerks recording birth and marriage certificates required to record the names people provide, not the names the clerks imagine people should have); see also Diplomat Prop. Manager, LLC v. Lozano, 102 Mass. App. Ct. 57, 64 (2022) (“Indeed, it is well settled that a person or corporation may assume or be known by different names.")
I think that people writ large don't realize how culturally specific pretty much every part of state-sanctioned identification of a person really is, or how recently they were introduced. Most people in my family have at least two names used for outsiders (in two, or three really but two written languages), and two birthdates, because the Communist Party of China decrees the Gregorian Calendar as the one calendar means nothing to most of the country who has been on the lunar calendar since god knows when and aren't about to change. As a result when I still used facebook I'd get a flood of happy birthdays on a date that isn't my birthday but thankfully all it ever led to was an excuse for someone else to buy my drinks for once. And I feel like everyone who's a minority or speaks with an accent that is clearly foreign gets asked "what's your real name" like "where are you really from" which is by this time a sort of joke since my mom decided to call me Jim and that was really that, which is how everyone pretty much gets named, except it's not endorsed on some official form, but even if you speak Chinese, Mandarin is essentially mutually untelligible from my native dialect which means that even the official manner of pronouncing my name is a foreign one, and not even all 80 million speakers of the language family speaks a version that is understandable to where I'm from specifically (maybe half that number can). And the manner by which one refers to each other is culturally specific so that the given-name surname construction is entirely unknown, full stop, but one never refers to another with just their given name unless they are at a level of family that is... not immediate, but within 2 degrees of removal (my cousins and second cousins, basically), and any other person using it would be gauche at least if not outright rude, but even that is a regionalism.
All that is to say that a fixed name like the concept of a fixed nation of people or fixed any label is in a sense an artifice, something the high modernist state would demand but in reality only exists insofar as official paperwork demands it. All of the patronyms used in Europe that is treated as permanent surnames today, which exists from the Anglo-Normans in Ireland to the west to Norwy and Sweden to the east, southwards to the Dutch and into some German speaking areas, turned what was temporarily useful into something quite useless - from a disambiguation into something that creates confusion. When a name like John Fitzgerald Kennedy still had the meaning of John, son of Gerald, Kennedy, it at least in the community the person lived in, probably signifies that it was necessary to demarcate that. FitzRoy might be a mark of bastardy but, at least for Charles II's offspring, titles and social standing, even though really they were commoners like everyone else. The creation and proliferation of fixed names is invented by states and bureaucracies that needed to make permanent something inherently in flux, and yet, somehow, even after hundreds of years it more or less haven't succeeded beyond a self-congratulatory veneer. The people will do what people do. I've spent 12 years living with someone who essentially never uses her legal first name, had her legal surname changed 4-5 times due to her mother's remarriages, and didn't settle on just reverting back to her (deceased) father's surname until she needed her driver's license. 12 years later my parents don't know her legal name, and it doesn't matter really, because she so seldom uses it in conversation. Hell, my cousin spent 6 years as "Pete Rose" and my family lives in Nevada. He doesn't even watch baseball, and I had to explain to him the irony. He goes by Bob now. I'm just glad that I ended up with my mom's surname out of an odd tradition in my family because the last thing I need is a last name that is two letters long that nobody can say, according to my cousin who grew up in Montreal with the name - Xu. The Anglos and the French do mispronounce it differently though, so there's that.