Birth Certificate and letters
 

Hi everyone. My daughter who was born on 9th April this year has a middle name Chloé but we just noticed that on her birth certificate and subsequent SS card that arrived today it seems to be recorded as Chloe'.

My questions are:
Is this going to be a problem when applying for passports and ID matching up in the future or just leave it?
Is it best to get it changed right now on the birth certificate and see the social security office about it?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

I suspect that Chloe' may well be the closest typographical representation of Chloé that a US government agency is capable of producing and I would not lose any sleep over it.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

US passports and other similar official documents do not support the use of diacritical characters e.g. ü or é.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Just for information I was told that to change a name on a birth certificate here in Chatham County, Georgia it takes 4 weeks to produce it and you sign an affadavit. To change a name on a social security card it will take two weeks .

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

If you're could contemplating a change, you might want to have the '/ accent removed completely.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Most names using foreign characters get transliterated in to English characters. Like Chinese names for example. There isn't an acute in English. You could use with day to day, without for officialdom*.

I do not see it as unreasonable for an English language system to only support English characters (if that is the case) Like Pulaski, I would opt for without, rather than the compromise you have at the moment, or for it to have an actual acute, as this problem may happen again at some point.

*My sisters first and middle names are reversed on official documentation, (and while I do not really know why my parents did not pick up on it early on) it has never caused her any difficulty or frustration, to have a day to day and an official syntax.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Roman (or Latin) characters. The English language uses the Roman alphabet.

Regards, JEff

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

English characters are based on Latin, but are in addition to Latin, as is French, so saying Latin (or Roman) just muddies the water.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

My wife's surname is French of the preceding article persuasion She prefers to spell it as a single word with the first letter of both parts capitalised, so like "LeClerc". Some of the various US government-issued documents she has spell it that way but others spell it like "Le Clerc" or like "Leclerc" or just like "LECLERC". She has never had any problems with it.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Which English characters are the ones that are in addition to the Roman characters? Just curious. Several western European languages use the Roman alphabet. Agreed that some of them have added various diacritical characters, but I don't think that saying all of use the Roman alphabet muddies the water. Transliteration of those written languages among each other isn't required as it is with Chinese characters, to use your example.Anyway ...

Regards, JEff

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Well I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.
I was, as I am sure you are aware, referring to the original latin alphabet with its 23 character set.
You will need to replace an acute e with an e for many systems; if you apply for ESTA as an example. It is an issue.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

I was just reading about this. Quite interesting.

The following link indicates accents are not allowed to be entered into ESTA and your name should match what is written in the machine readable zone of your passport.

https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/det...ta-application

So, specifications of the MRZ are available online too and confirm that the MRZ does not allow diacritical marks (the VIZ allows them).

http://www.icao.int/publications/Doc...v1_cons_en.pdf

Quite fascinating and much more interesting that what I should be looking at for work.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Congratulations :)

You would think with all the different spellings of names in the US they could get it right. To me, the name the name is spelt incorrectly. I am probably biased as one of my daughters is called Zoë not Zoe, Zoey, Zowie or any other concoction people come up with. On her birth certificate it's spelt correctly, on her passport and visa it's spelt ZOE :ohmy: We did call the passport office when we got her first one and they said it was because it was all done in capitals :thumbdown: Poor excuse if you ask me!

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

It's the MRZ information that is most important. If that does not match your airline ticket booking for instance it can cause problems. Most diacritical characters are removed automatically, but an umlaut in a name like Müller will be converted to MUELLER on the MRZ. If a flight is booked under Muller then that can be an issue as the names now won't match.

For what it's worth, British passports issued in the UK don't allow for accents, but passport issued overseas by embassies do due to the differing computer systems used.

Re: Birth Certificate and letters
 

Agreed.
And you expected me to be aware of this how? By reading you mind? It wasn't mentioned in your posts. And from what I've read the Latin alphabet was originally 21 characters, several of which varied over the course of time between roughly the 7th to 3rd centuries BC. It wasn't expanded to 23 characters until the 1st century BC. Regards, JEff