There's all sorts of stuff that can screw up names in databases. The university system runs into some minor problems with names with any kind of punctuation, so I always have to be careful entering grades for any class that has a D'Angelo or O'Malley or anything else that like in it, because different parts of the computer system will have them alphabetized differently, so I can't just copy and paste the list of grades like I can for other classes. Although, I almost never copy and paste anymore, because lately, just about every class has had at least one kid with a name that the system did something weird with.

My name is so often misspelled doctors don't find my chart anyway(people leave the H out)

It's interesting looking through some of the replies to these complaints.

One person simply notes that in Finland the SS# equivalent is the key and that's all that matters.

Another person responded to a complaint on the subject by saying:

Personally, I think it's disrespectful to a person to write his/her name as anything other than the way that person want's to see it. Smithbarney is not the same as Smith-Barney. If I was Mr. Smith-Barney and received a letter with my name improperly spelled like that I would not be favorably inclined towards whatever the letter was about.

You state that you are using 'Title Case' (StrConv I assume). Are you concerned with names like O'Brien and Smith-Barney being improperly capitalized as O'brien and Smith-barney? It's no problem to write a User Defined function to check for a hyphen within a name and capitalize the next character if that is your concern. A table of name exceptions does well with names like O'Brien (as well as McDonald and van den Steen).

Another notes that hyphenated names and multiple names are common in other parts of the world saying...

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You people need to crawl out of our little American ghetto and go visit the other 90% of the world sometime to get some perspective. Hyphenated names are extremely common.

But what's also common is dual surnames that are not hyphenated. And they are not just for women. In Spain it's quite normal for a man to use both his father's and mother's surname--and the father's comes first. This is less common but nonetheless quite proper in most Spanish-speaking countries.

Sometimes they will write their name as Enrique Meseguer y Correa, sometimes as Enrique Meseguer-Correa. But you're just as likely to see it as Enrique Meseguer Correa. You're expected to know that Meseguer is a surname, not a Christian name. (They don't name their children Madison and Taylor like we do. Those are last names.) So you'd better not commit the faux pas of calling him Mister Correa! It's okay in informal speech to use only one surname, but its the father's name, the first one.

Arguably the most famous Spanish language writer in the world (actually one of the four or five most famous writers period, the sun is setting on English literature) is Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. American newscasters continue to refer to him as Mister Márquez. That may have been okay fifty years ago when it was presumed that America was the center of the universe and we couldn't possibly be expected to master the conventions of other cultures, but it isn't okay any more.

Anyway, it's up to us computer people to make our stupid barely-functional virus-friendly user-hostile software conform to the real world, not vice versa. Millions of people have hyphenated names and it's not an affectation. It's reality. Software developers had better pull their heads out of their X-Boxes and pay attention.

It just isn't that difficult for a program to be designed to find Suzie Smith-Jones and Suzie Baker-Smith if you type in Suzie Smith, Suzie Jones, Suzie Baker, Suzie Jones-Smith, Suzie Smith-Baker, or Suzie Smith-Jones-Baker-Washington. It's called "requirements definition" and it's something that American software developers are proudly ignorant of. Draw a flowchart on the back of your Starbucks napkin then run back to your cubicle and start coding. Nonetheless, in places like Los Angeles County, where there are millions of people from other countries whose naming conventions are different, the municipal government software has no trouble finding people's records if they turn up in a public school, hospital, or sheriff's office, no matter how the clerk enters it. Computers are supposed to make stuff like that easy!

If you're software is so dysfunctional that it can't find something this easy, you should send it back for a refund. Or shoot the idiot programmer.

When I was using my maiden name, I would often get the wrong chart at doctor's offices because there were so many other people with my name, and I would practically make people who had to look up my name in a database cry. So, there were problems there too, they were just different problems.

If there's one thing that annoys me, it's women who hyphenate their names.

I find that reaction annoying. ETA: OK on reread I can see that you just were finding evidence, weren't necessarily agreeing with it. Revised this a bit.

PS, did you read that bit about how my DH's name change has been smooth and problem free? No problems with the doctor's office, no medical billing rejections, no credit cards with a different name, etc. He even can file taxes with his meddlesome hyphenated name and he's never had problems with it. Magically, it's only a problem for those annoying WOMEN who hyphenate their names. I guess men do it so rarely that it's assumed it was his given name and therefore it should be treated as his actual name.

Still, there are like 3 million hits when I Google query "hyphen name field problems."

Whether it's a problem with American programmers or database design or whatever, it does cause problems.

You do get that you aren't going to win an argument with me

I'm not trying to win the argument or persuade you to anything. I noted that it was difficult to deal with on the database side and just posted other people's complaints on the issue.

But I also posted ripostes and it may indeed be an odd bit of male privilege wrapped in delicious coat of Anglo culture and reticence on the coding side to bend to the real-life issues.

You do get that you aren't going to win an argument with me

Revised when I realized you weren't actually trying to convince me I'm an annoying woman for using my own name. You *could* have framed the quotation better, but I won't quibble with you over that.

And sometimes doctors don't pay attention to their charts because I've been addressed as LastName, as if it were my first name or Ms. Allison as if that were my last name.

It's stupid that hyphenated names are treated as being weird. It's common enough, people need to build computers systems that deal with reality not just what once was easy.

Burrell I bet your right.

Revised when I realized you weren't actually trying to convince me I'm an annoying woman for using my own name. You *could* have framed the quotation better, but I won't quibble with you over that.

I was sort of feeling it out as I compared my experience to various complainy people on the issue.

I do think you're right that there are lot of unexamined cultural biases which make it more of a problem than it should be.

But, I'll just note that lots of institutions use out-of-the-box type database setups and the way the name fields are constructed and the way Access and MySQL deal with hyphens seems to cause problems.

(I'd be curious to hear how high level users like ita or Scola or tommyrot have dealt with the issue.)

At least people who are choosing to hyphenate their names should understand that as things currently stand, it will likely be problematic in dealing with things like insurance and medical offices or HR.