What's in a name? My surname brings up some curious facts.

1 have been searching for my birth certificate from the 1960s and have been unable to find it until yesterday. It turns out that my surname was spelt like this De-La-Mare on my birth certificate. My father was a channel islander so it seemed pretty ordinary, rather like Smith on the mainland.

I have tried so many variants to try to get hold of the birth certificate and was starting to think I didn't exist.

Then I spoke to my brother who remembered using hyphens as a child. I did suddenly recall using them as a child too, upon that reminder, after all, it was a while back. I asked my mother whose memory was also jogged. She thought we stopped using them as computers became more mainstream.

I was curious so asked ChatGPT, is that likely, did computers read the word differently? Now I get called Mare, de Lamare, delamare, delamar and allsorts by various machines. When I lived in Africa it was always de la Maré.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fascinating discovery — and it actually fits quite well with the way technology and bureaucracy evolved from the 1960s onward.

Here’s what likely happened:

1. Historical spelling variations

Double-barrelled surnames with de, du, la, del, etc. often shifted across generations. Sometimes families added/rem oved hyphens to look more “modern” or to make forms easier.

It wasn’t unusual for official documents (school registers, tax, passports) to quietly standardise names without asking.

2. Early computers and forms

In the 1970s–80s, many government and business systems could only handle A–Z letters (no spaces, accents, hyphens, or special characters).

Hyphens were often either rejected or stripped out. That’s why names like “De-La-Mare” became “Delamare” or “De La Mare” depending on the system.

Some mainframes even misread a hyphen as an instruction (minus sign), so clerks were told to avoid them.

3. Knock-on effects

Once your name entered a system without the hyphen (for school, NHS, tax, bank), it spread into later records.

People reading those records would assume that was the “correct” version, and your usage shifted over time without anyone deciding formally.

4. Why machines still get it wrong

Modern systems can handle hyphens and spaces, but algorithms (for airline tickets, databases, online forms) often strip or reformat them.

That’s why you see “Mare,” “Delamare,” “De Lamare,” etc. — the software tries to force the name into a “first word/last word” template.

French-origin names get especially mangled because English-based systems don’t expect particles like de, du, la.

✅ So yes, your mother’s hunch is right: the move away from hyphens probably did coincide with the rise of computerisation in the 1970s–80s. It wasn’t personal — just systems not designed for names like yours.

AI is often better than older systems at handling name nuance because it sees patterns in language, not just fixed character strings.

What you’ve got is almost like a living example of how names evolve with technology:

Birth certificate → De-La-Mare (formal, double-barrelled style).

Computer era → systems drop the hyphens, giving De la Mare or Delamare.

Everyday use → humans and machines simplify further into Mare, Lamare, delamar.

Now with AI → your chosen de la Maré can be consistently understood, because modern systems can deal with accents, particles, and context.

It’s almost poetic: your name has adapted alongside the history of computing.

Would you like me to dig into how accented characters like é were treated in early UK/US computing? That part is also surprisingly quirky.

You said:
yes

ChatGPT said:

Brilliant — this is one of those “hidden histories” of computing that really shaped how people’s names (and even whole languages) got mangled.

The early problem with accented characters (like é in Maré):

1. ASCII (1960s–70s)

The earliest widely adopted character set was ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).
ASCII only had 128 characters: A–Z, a–z, numbers, punctuation, and control codes.
No é, ñ, ü, ß, etc. — because it was designed in the U.S. for English.
Result: if you typed Maré, the system literally had no symbol for the “é.” It either dropped it (→ Mare) or substituted a question mark or gibberish.

2. National “extensions” (1970s–80s)

Countries tried “extended ASCII” (256 characters) to fit accented letters.
But the extended codes weren’t standardised:
In one system, code 233 = é
In another, code 233 = the Greek letter Θ

That meant moving files between systems scrambled names, producing strange output like MarΘ or MarÚ.

Clerks and institutions often avoided accents altogether to “play safe.”

3. Databases & government records
Mainframe systems in the UK (NHS, banks, HMRC) often had strict A–Z only rules.

Passports in the 1970s–90s frequently removed accents automatically.
Immigration records, airline tickets, and hospital forms all lost diacritics. That’s why so many names like José → Jose, Brontë → Bronte, Maré → Mare.

4. Unicode (1990s onwards)

Finally, Unicode arrived: a universal system that can encode virtually every character in every language (over 140,000 characters today).
Now é is properly distinct from e, and can safely travel across systems.
But adoption was slow — many legacy systems (especially government and airlines) still strip accents because their infrastructure hasn’t fully modernised.

5. AI & modern parsing (2020s–)
Language models and modern software “see” de la Maré as a meaningful unit, not just characters.

So AI will respect the accent and spacing, even if older databases still flatten it to Mare.

✨ In short:
Your é vanished originally because early computing literally didn’t have the symbol in its alphabet. It’s only in the last couple of decades that technology has caught up to the richness of names like yours.

Would you like me to trace how UK official documents (like passports, NHS records, driving licences) currently handle the é in Maré — so you’ll know where it will and won’t survive?

No, that is quite enough methinks.

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What's in a name? My surname brings up some curious facts.

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