My experience: My father
When I was thirteen months old my father died in the crash of his Army Airforce fighter aircraft in Oklahoma in 1947. My mother and I lived with my Grandpa and Grandma Sanborn (maternal grandparents) just outside of Detroit Michigan. When my mother remarried two years later, my stepfather did not adopt me because my mother believed that I would not receive the military death benefits for attending college if he did. The result was that my last name was different from that of my mother, stepfather, and stepsister.
The experience of having a different last name from the rest of my family placed me in the role of being an outsider. Part of me is happy to have my father’s first and last name (even though it is Smith). But the public disenfranchisement I felt when my mother was addressed or introduced was often personally painful. With a different last name, did I really have a home in her family?