Hi fellow seniors, have you ever heard of 'Meshing'?

Never heard of this before, sounds dumb to me.

Family names have a long time tradition behind them, making a funny meshed name is like being an alien or something to me.

If I meshed my maiden name and my husbands name it would be something like, Pawassy, not good!

My maiden name is old Slavic which translates into meaning, "Son of Paul" and my husbands name is very old, comes from one of the 7 tribes of Hungary that united to form Hungary and elect the first Christan King, a very old noble family.

His father had to fight for the right to keep their spelling of their last name when the communists took over the country. It was too much of a noble name and didn't mesh with the thinking of communists.

He was actually called into the police station and told to change the spelling, he refused and they gave him a list of things to do to be able to keep the spelling in it's original form.

Not many people have to prove their names like that.

He spent a long time going all over the country into old church records etc.Having papers signed and going thru old books.

My SIL has what are called the family "dog tags" a letter of sorts written hundreds of years ago on dog skin with seals and such on it proving we have a right to the name and the spelling. My BIL and other SIL saw it themselves but not it is sealed away somewhere and no one seems to want to talk about it much.

MY FIL never was able to tell my husband much about their family history during the communist years because they all could of been put into a re education camp or worst.

Crazy but so true.

Now my husband has found out info on is own through research in the National Archives in Budapest.So far he has only gone back 500 years although the history goes back over 1,000 years!

Our son was always told by his father to be proud of their name because there was meaning and respect behind it. They family lost everything after WW11 except their good name. They fought for the name. Old country thinking maybe but we are traditional in that way.

Easy to lose a good name if there is nothing behind .It seems for these "meshers" they have no traditions.

They were allowed to keep the spelling after much research and documentation from his father.

It is a rare sounding name even here in Hungary, very short but with allot of meaning behind it.

Many people here give us a second look when we give out our last name, they know their history here.

My husband would never consider changing his last name after what his family did for Hungary and what his parents went through to keep the name clean and in intact.

He is far too proud of his family history to even think of dropping one letter from the spelling.

I have recently been in contact iwht "long lost cousins" with reseach of my father's surname.

I have found new family member living all over the world,planning on a family reunion in the summer in SE Poland.

Never could do that if we were meshers.

I also liked my maiden name because not many people pronounced it correctly and I enjoyed correcting my teachers when I was in school, bad me.

I heard about that this morning.

I suppose our use of surnames started somewhere. For example the son of John became Johnson and his wife became the Mistress of the Son of John, hence Mrs Johnson.

I don't mind the use of a hyphenated double barrelled name - if they must - but I'm not sure of shortening both.

As a lot of marriages seem to be short lived what happens when they divorce and remarry for the umpteenth time. Any offspring will be even more confused.

I hadn't heard of meshing either. As both my maiden name and married name have only 4 letters each, I would have ended up being Gemp, which I don't fancy at all, although it's not a kick in the backside away from my surname now. lol

Oh dear, mine sounds funny the variations. I know many young couples elect to keep their own. Many gals here such as Mary Smith marries John Brown , would be Mary Smith- Brown. No, meshing is a new word to me. They have what they call' starter marriages' meaning a first marriage, kind of like training wheels I guess.

That's a new one for me Lily.

Could be confusing though, big arguments about which spouse

got the front end or the back end.

I would have ended up as Loshire or Shirelo

depending on who got the front bit.

Makes a reasonable anagram : O relish !

I read in one paper that some folk are referring to "Starter Marriages"

these days, they must be pessimistic from day one, to do that.

Meshing, good grief it could become complicated, what ever happened to "KISS" I don;t mean the rock band. Keep It Simple Silly, Keep It Simple Stupid but if you insist in complicating you life have at it and just maybe you won't be sorry.

I've never heard it called meshing but I've met plenty of Latinos with 20 foot long names.

Hmmm, I would have the name of Fenconnell, or even worse, Fennel. I don't think so. I think in the future people should just keep the names they were born with and not do any of the name-changing bit. In my state, it's very easy to change your name back to your birth name - you just do it and make the necessary notifications.

I haven't heard of it being CALLED meshing, but i know a few people who have done exactly this.

If my husband and i could have found something that might have sounded good when meshed, we might have done it.

Personally, don't sound like a great idea to me -- I'm not crazy about US style hyphenated names either. But a name is just an identification label