Maybe the most personal thing any of us owns is our name.
But when we started asking around for tales of people who went
through life with first names other than those they had been given,
we opened a whole closet full of folks who weren’t who they—
or others—always thought they were.

Sometimes a name change is a choice.

Sometimes it’s an accident.

Sometimes there is even a bit of subterfuge.

Or sometimes, it’s just faulty memory. Philip Crawford’s Uncle Victor started out life as Victor Charles Crawford—he was an adult before he learned that his birth certificate read Victor Woodrow Crawford. As the story goes, Victor’s mother sent her husband to take care of the birth certificate formalities. When Victor’s father forgot the middle name, he simply named his son Woodrow, after the current president. But he also made a point of not mentioning this change to his wife. Victor carried on his own version of the tradition by never getting around to telling the story to his own children, who knew their father as Victor Woodrow and were puzzled when they came across old documents in which their father had the middle name of Charles.