mike mcquaid dot com

Marriage and Name Changes

September 18, 2010 at 12:55 by Mike McQuaid

Our wedding was absolutely amazing! It was a lovely and meaningful church service followed by a party with all of our best friends and family. We have so many people to thank for making it such a lovely day, far too many to name here. If you’re planning a wedding, I recommend Gareth Saunders (who married us) Teannaich (our ceilidh band) and Benjamin Arthur (who took our photographs). (which came out amazingly and you can see here: ). I can’t recommend Benjamin highly enough; if you’re looking for a wedding photographer, hire him! You can see the photographs from our wedding and some of his other work at his Picasa Web Albums page.

The more astute among you may have noticed that this site has changed from mikearthur.co.uk to mikemcquaid.com. This is due to my getting married in May and taking my wife’s surname.

I came up with the idea of changing due to a bunch of reasons that included my recent feminist awakenings causing my displeasure at the history of women taking their husband’s names and family who would keep on the Arthur name.

Interestingly, the process for a husband taking his wife’s name isn’t all that different; I simply needed to pay a small sum and provide documentation to the UK Deed Poll Service who then provided me with paperwork to sign and get countersigned. Legally, I can call myself whatever I like at any time and that is my name but this Deed Poll is required to provide some sort of formal documentation where the bride would normally provide a Marriage Certificate with her new name signed on it.

Today I received my new passport, pretty much the last piece of identification I’ve had to get changed. Every service I use now recognises me as Mike McQuaid, both online and offline. It is interesting how easy it was to do most of this. Most people assured me it would be much harder as a man but it’s all been very straightforward. My only remaining grumbles are online services that don’t allow you to change your username such as Steam and Last.fm where my username remains “mikearthur”, although my profile name is updated.

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