Name Recognition

John Rester-Zodrow felt the power of the hyphen to pull him out of the pack when he appended Gina Rester’s name to his after their 1980 wedding. The government audited his taxes, accusing him of taking on an alias. His offense? “I got married,” says the former Mr. Zodrow, 51.

Their son, Joshua, who shares the hyphenated family name, was perplexed at first by a recurring question this year from classmates. “Are your parents divorced?” they’d ask, thinking the joined surnames meant neither parent wanted the seventh-grader to use the other’s name exclusively.

While people have been generally accepting of the Thousand Oaks couple’s hyphenated union, they say they have been criticized for passing the punctuation on to their two sons.

“People definitely seem to take real issue with it. I have found that men and women seem angry, as if I am placing a value on what they have done,” says Gina Rester-Zodrow, 40.

The Rester-Zodrows are part of a minuscule-and-shrinking minority of couples who have deviated from America’s patrilineal norm. The hyphenated name is being done in by a variety of societal changes, including a distaste for the cumbersome names it creates.

Cleveland Evans, who gives baby name advice on the Internet, thinks more women are moving away from the hyphen because professionals have the luxury of using one name at work and another at home. The “little bit of research” Evans has seen on the subject of family surnames caused him to declare that alternative naming patterns, especially hyphenation, “have gone backward.”

People tend to think that names outside the norm are more common than they are because of their wider use among celebrities, says Evans, an associate professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.

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The figure usually given for American women who retain their original name after marriage is 10%, but David Johnson, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska, says his research shows that a more accurate figure is fewer than 5%. Johnson and his wife, Laurie Scheuble, a sociology professor at Doane College, have investigated the names parents give their children.

In a study of a Midwestern university system they completed last year, the couple found that while about half the married women held nonconventional last names, 70% of those families passed along the father’s last name to their children. Typically, the mother’s last name became the child’s middle name. Only a few were hyphenated.

Hyphenation has waned in recent years partly because “society sort of beats it out of them,” says Roberta Lessor, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange. “Institutionalized mechanisms” such as computer forms don’t leave enough room for long last names, records can be filed under the wrong last name and some people refuse to acknowledge any last name but the husband’s.

Kim Beyer-Johnson, an Agoura screenwriter, says the only real problems with hyphenating the names of her three children is the “total confusion” when it comes to filing records and the mystified responses she gets when she mentions the phrase “hyphenated last name.”

“I really like hyphenating in principle. I’m proud my children have that name, but in reality, it’s a pain. People never get it,” says Beyer-Johnson, 37.

Within the small realm of alternative names, experts have identified two micro-trends. Some couples are choosing an entirely new family surname unrelated to either spouse’s original name, thus sharing a name without sexist overtones and avoiding saddling future children with a lengthy hyphenation. Others are engaging in “bi-lineal naming,” practiced routinely in other countries, where the first child is given one parent’s name, the second child the other, and so on.

Evans knows of some families who have agreed to split the children’s last names--all girls will have the father’s last name and all boys the mother’s, or vice versa. Rae Moses, a linguistics professor at Northwestern University, came across a set of twins in Illinois where one boy shared the father’s last name, the other the mother’s.

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Deborah Melcher of Seattle tried to get her partner to choose a new family name, even though they are not married, when their daughter was born, but he wanted to keep Lowry in honor of his deceased father. Their 5-month-old’s name is Sequoia Perpetua-Lowry. Melcher said she plans to change her last name to Perpetua--a name she said she chose because it is the name of a favorite spot on the Oregon coast and as “a sort of bid for immortality--perpetua, perpetuity.”

“I don’t like the idea of the name being passed down on the father’s side alone, because we moms are mighty important,” says Melcher, 28.

Lessor encountered a number of couples who had invented a new last name for themselves while she earned her doctorate from UC San Francisco. She often inquired about their motivation.

“Usually, there were very strong ideological reasons about women’s status, in terms of the consequences of taking a man’s name. It’s a sympathetic act for the man to take a new name,” she says.

On the former Jeff Stanley’s Web page, he tells why he and his bride, Laura, chose a new family name, Forrest.

“We considered keeping our original names or hyphenating, but we both felt strongly that we wanted to share one last name,” he writes on the Web site. “Also, if we hyphenated, and our future children met partners who were also hyphenated, our grandchildren’s last names would look like Web page addresses.”

Some who have passed down their hyphens say the next generation is on its own. “Some people say, ‘What will your girls do?’ ” Beyer-Johnson says. “I say, ‘They can figure it out. They will be big people by then.’ ”

At 13, Joshua Rester-Zodrow has already given some thought to name complications still years away. He asked his mother, “What will I do if I marry someone with the last name of Smith?” Would he add a third name? Would he drop one of his names and add her name?

The idea of having his wife take his name, Gina Rester-Zodrow says, never entered the conversation.