not2old

A question from my daughter which I hope someone knows the answer to.

For a child born in Ontario to its married parents, can the child be registered with (take) the Mothers surname on the basis both parents sign the declaration?

Dorothy

Yes.

Dashie

The child can be registered with the name 'Peanut Butter McGee' if both parties agree

If you register the birth online, there's a box to check to say that both parents have agreed to the name, and that's it I believe. At least it was for my last two

ultrarunner

OP.....

It will absolutely have to be on mutual consent i.e. both parents agree (not hearsay) for this to really happen. Not saying this is the case here.....but it's not uncommon for a parent for self-satifying reasons like trying to cut the other out or spitefulness to want to register the kid in their own last name.

With everything family law relating to kids......"Child's Best Interest" is what really matters. The sooner people realize that, the better

orly

Be an interesting one for my wife and I if we're lucky enough to have kids somewhere down the line. My wife didn't take my surname as I think the idea is a bit silly and antiquated.

Maybe girls will take hers and boys will take mine or something. Double barrels would be a bit unwieldy for us.

Dashie

Friends of mine aren't married and have 2 girls, one has her surname , the other has his.

Shirtback

Yes.

I've been idly wondering on the double-barrelled* topic for a while: it seems to have become fairly standard practice here. I'm just starting to see quadruple-barrelled** names show up. Seems awkward & unwieldy, not to mention that most official forms don't have enough spaces ;-)

*My offspring are thus lumbered. Their (independent) decisions to use just 1 half of the barrel has caused varying degrees of family angst/recriminations ;-) Officialdom really doesn't care.

** "Charbonneau-Perreault-Sauve-Levesque" (fictional example, but I have encountered RL ones) is a bit rough on the kid, to my mind ;-)

Dashie

As an aside, I legally changed my name in Ontario last year. Overall not too painful, so if they don't like it, there's always that option down the road

Oakvillian

my brother-in-law married a Quebecoise who has a fantastic double-barrelled surname, since one parent is pure-laine and the other a second-generation Japanese immigrant. They've double-barrelled b-in-l's surname and the Japanese bit of hers for their kids. I guess they will be able to choose whether to keep both halves or discard one of them when they're older.

On the subject of double-barrelled names, and linking to the Olympic thread, it would be amusing if Marie-Michele Gagnon and her boyfriend Travis Ganong ever married. There can't be many double-barrelled names where one half is an anagram of the other...

ultrarunner

Must be intersting trying to navigate the world of CRA come tax time i.e. claiming a child as a dependent. On the flip side, if couples ever split up, then it will be easy to just prove entitlement to CCTB etc

How long did it take, how much and how are you finding changing all your documents over?

dbd33

My kids were friends with a Marie-Yves O'Reilly-Fromentan, which struck me as a gobfull.

cheeky_monkey

That's going to be a pain in the arse in 200 years time on Ancestry.com..no consideration.

Souvy

Officialdom in QC cares. You can only use your birth name on official stuff, regardless of where you got married.

montreal mike

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23665106


to sidetrack for an instant, how about 'messiah' as a first name?

Shirtback

Mine are lumbered with a (slightly) less tongue-tying version of the cross-cultural divide, but that one makes me smile :-) I should probably have considered the potential impact of unusual first names combined with D-B surname at the time of naming ;-)

The upside was that my boys learned spelling very early on in life :-)

The C-P-S-L example I mentioned has a hyphenated first name too.