Single letter surnames

[Redroger]

I worked on the railway for 40 years, often in positions with personnel records involvement.
During that time I came across one solitary instance of a person with a One letter surname which I shan't mention as it might breach confidence. The person involved had to have his surname extended to the way the letter itself is spelt to enable a record to be accepted by the computers used in producing pay, rosters etc etc.
Has anyone else encountered a case like this, and if possible without breaching data protection regulations what letters were involved please?

[GrahamSimons]

There was something in much older editions (1970s) of the Guinness Book of Records about this; if I remember the single-letter name was French.

[Erato]

"This article reports on the results of a telephone-directory search
for twenty- six undeniably rare U. S. surnames - - those consisting of a
single letter of the alphabet. Without identifying individual bearers of
the s e su rnames, or even the cities 0 r towns where they can be found,
Social Security in 1974 noted that there were a total of 221 such people
in the ir files, ranging from a high of 24 (A) to a low of 2 (Q, N, and X)."

https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=2660&context=wordways

[sonofthom]

A variation on this theme is single letter forenames. The first names of the great blues singer and guitarist J B Lenoir were these letters. they were not initials - this was his full name.

[Kiltpin]

A variation on this theme is single letter forenames. The first names of the great blues singer and guitarist J B Lenoir were these letters. they were not initials - this was his full name.

 

Wasn't there an American President with a single letter middle name?   

I once worked with a man with the surname Ao - pronounced just like the 2 letters. 

Regards 

Chas

[chris_49]

Harry S Truman apparently - there were two relatives vying to pass on their name as Harry's middle name, but both began with S so the single letter was the compromise.

If I remember the Guinness article correctly, there was at the time just one person in the Uk with a one-letter surname, but that was not revealed for confidentiality reasons. However, it was believed to be "O" - there are several such families in France.

Two-letter British surnames include By and On - but I've only encountered Bye and Onn (MPs). I studied under an Ng which is pronounced as the nasal sound, but he was happy to be called N G.

[pinefamily]

If you believe the transcription on Ancestry, Ye Roberts was baptized in 1734 in Ashleworth, Gloucestershire.
The actual record in the BT says "Ye son of". The first name was left out. In the register, it states John, son of....

[Redroger]

"This article reports on the results of a telephone-directory search
for twenty- six undeniably rare U. S. surnames - - those consisting of a
single letter of the alphabet. Without identifying individual bearers of
the s e su rnames, or even the cities 0 r towns where they can be found,
Social Security in 1974 noted that there were a total of 221 such people
in the ir files, ranging from a high of 24 (A) to a low of 2 (Q, N, and X)."

https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=2660&context=wordways

The person I met briefly was in the rarest category!