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Uncle Jack, whose real name was Walter Alvin.  Even his daughter (the only 
one in his family living) doesn't know why he was called Jack.  In all 
censuses and other records he is known as Walter A.  If my dad hadn't 
casually dropped that piece of information about Uncle Jack's real name a 
few years ago (Dad is now dead), I would have had the devil of a time 
finding records.  A search by his wife's name would have finally done it, 
and thankfully his wife was known by her birth name.

And then there is my grandmother, who had the lovely 1881 name of Anna 
Laura.   Just arbitrarily sometime before 1920, she decided to be called 
Annie Ethel.  And so Anna L. of the 1910 census became Annie E. in the 1920 
census.    In 1936, she even signed my grandfather's death certificate as 
Annie E.  So, of course, others researching our family assumed my 
grandfather had a second wife.

A few years after my grandfather's death, my grandmother married again, and 
her second husband liked her birth name of Anna Laura better than Annie 
Ethel, so she compromised and used the name Annie Laura.  And that's how her 
tombstone reads.

By the way---off topic---  After her first husband had been dead for several 
years, **his sisters** decided that she needed a husband.  Decades before, 
they had married men who had come to Texas from the same Mississippi county. 
The sisters got together and decided that a man back in Mississippi that the 
men had grown up with was a good candidate.  The criteria:  clean, nice 
looking, hard working, no drinking or gambling, and no children to muddle up 
her estate.  My grandmother and this designated suitor (sight unseen) began 
a correspondence.  He came to Texas to visit his friends but was introduced 
to her respectably, and after further correspondence they married.  The 
courtship was rather brief, and was intended to be.

My grandmother knew that her children (particularly one son) did not want 
her to re-marry.  Therefore, the day her future husband came to Texas for 
the marriage, she met him at the train in Dallas, and they married there 
before going home, which was 30 miles away in another county.  So what was 
done was done, and the children couldn't say too much by way of objection. 
What a woman.  ----  And they both had chosen well; they were quite 
compatible and had a happy marriage of fifteen years before her death.  He 
was my very dear step-grandfather.

Warmest Regards,

Donna