Change of name ?

[zetlander]

Been searching for this guy for a long time ..... first sighting is in 1885 when he got married .... gives his age as 32 and is a widower....(unable to trace his first marriage.)

Between 1885 and his death in 1910 he spent periods in prison so I wonder if he was in trouble with the law before 1885 and that was the reason for him changing his name.

My question is - if someone changed his name between 1853 and 1885 would  there be an official record of this - would he have had to apply to somewhere to do this - would he have had to re-register at his local Register Office - or did people simply take on a 'new' name ?
(His place of birth is the same on the 1891 and 1901 censuses.)

[Ayashi]

As far as I'm aware someone can call themselves whatever they like so long as it isn't done with intent to defraud. I'm sure a lot of us have people who swapped the order of their names, took on step-parent names, swapped between mother and father surnames if illegitimate, married several times... some people wanted to curry favour with a wealthy relative, others to remarry without divorcing, others running from the law... I don't think there was any actual impediment to him calling himself Joe Bloggs instead of John Smith. People weren't tracked in the same way we are now so I don't know how many people would have cared what he called himself. He was up front about being a widower... provided he was being honest, obviously.

I have one ancestor who was, like yours, dropped by aliens onto the 1881 census where he married shortly afterwards. It eventually turned out his birth was registered under his married mother's surname (her husband having died two years previously...) and was on his first census under her remarried surname before taking her maiden name for the rest of his life. Nothing dodgy there, but it certainly made it complicated to find!

[iolaus]

Give the details on here - they managed to find the birth and marriage and death of a child of my great grandfather and his first wife who was on one census with them - I think she was listed as Nellie but was actually Mary Ellen - and was born under a different surname and there was a typo on the index with her married name - but when I brought the marriage certificate it had her birth surname as her middle name

[Gail Johns]

Name changing was a very common thing in the past and it doesnt seem to have required any documentation at all. I learned this after searching for my maternal grandfathers origins for over 20 years. I started with his marriage cert from 1927 in NZ and knew that he was born in Northumberland. That cert gave full names of his parents so I thought I was well on the way but could never find any record of those parents or him.
Last year I stumbled across Rootschat and posted a query in the Northumberland forum. Within hours I had some very experienced searchers on the trail and within a week the mystery was solved and my family discovered that the name we have always known as ours, was false. It appears my Grandad changed his name sometime after he arrived in NZ about 1910. The parents names he gave on his marriage cert were not correct at all. The clue that solved it ( and I would never have known how to follow this up!) was a next of kin name given when he enlisted in the NZ army in WWI .
Absolutely ask on a forum on here for some help - the help I got was amazing! I now have certificates to back up all the research done and can trace back 4 generations before my Grandfather. I couldnt have found it alone.
So the short answer is - yes a change of name is not uncommon, probably wont be recorded anywhere  and yes, get some experts on the trail!  Good luck

[zetlander]

thanks Gail - I posted this guy's name on this site but we had no luck in tracing him before his marriage in 1885.
He had 5 children and none of them knew anything about his early life. (He was imprisoned in 1908 for a nasty offence against one of his children and this may well explain why the children kept quiet about things.)