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Message: [QUOTE="Dave Gittins, post: 436165, member: 139025"] Some immigrants freely changed their names, just to simplify life. I knew some Greeks who knocked a few syllables off their name for that reason. A famous example was the father of Vice-President Spiro Agnew. He began as Theophrastos Anagnostopoulos but became Theodore Agnew after migrating to the USA. Some immigrants have to change their names to avoid hopeless confusion when their national tradition is drastically different from the ways of their new land. Many lands put the family name first. Some even have extra words that indicate status in the family, rather than being names. I've seen problems in medical records caused by a combination of foreign practices and our ignorance of them. Imagine a maternity ward full of women called Thi Nguyen. It's not just a matter of discrimination. [/QUOTE]