Let me tell you the story of M.D.P.
M. well... let's call her "May" shall we? May was born in 1927 to a large family in a small house with dirt floors. Her mother had never been taught to read or write. She may have been the first generation of women in her family to even go to school.
Fast forward to the time May is 14. Her family is very poor, it's the middle of The Second World War. Her family lies about her age so she can drop out of school, falsifying what little records were kept at the time to change her birth year to 1925. She helps support her family for four years.
By the time she turns 18, she's looking to marry a man in New York, we'll call him Cal. They had met in show business. They never ended up getting married, however because they presented themselves as husband and wife, they were technically married under common law. After discovering his affair with a close friend of hers, she returned home and declared she was divorced.
A few years later she ended up marrying a man we'll call Sean. Sean was an alcoholic with a violent temper, so she divorced him quickly after that.
She remarried in 1957 and had a child, divorced a few years later.
Remarried shortly after that, and her husband died in 1967.
Around 1972 Maxine married a man we'll call Stan, who turned out to be a violent alcoholic. For years before that she was engaged to a man we'll call Rick, who kept calling off their wedding on account of a disapproving family and daughter. Her marriage to Stan lasted 6 short weeks. She divorced him quickly and married Rick after he begged her to reconsider. This time, he didn't call off the wedding. They married in July of 1972.
They were happily married until he died in 2001.
She hasn't remarried since.
Now let me explain what a bureaucratic nightmare this has been for her to merely renew her drivers license.
The name she was given was something similar to Dolly May Laurence. I can only imagine how much she must have hated the name Dolly, given that she went by May instead. Well given the fact she always went by May, that's what ended up on all of her paperwork.
The court house that had originally held her birth record flooded just a few years after she was born and all of the official records were lost. Try to remember that this was the 30's and they didn't require the documentation that we require today for things like voting or getting a job or getting married until decades later.
Eventually, some original records for her were found, but her name had been misspelled and no one had caught the error. So, meet Doller May Laurence.
So now, May is trying to get a drivers license renewed.
Many men reading this have absolutely no idea how hard it is to get a drivers license if you've ever changed your last name for any reason.
May has to provide the state with every single record of marriage. If her marriage ended in a divorce, she must provide proof. If it ended in the death of her spouse, she must provide proof. This is not true for a man unless he takes his wife's last name. Which rarely ever happens.
So she tracks everything down to account for every single solitary marriage.
But because of all the problems with this, her name, according to the state, is now Doller Laurence Thyme.
Her voter registration, bank accounts, her house, her cars, everything she has ever owned is under the name May D. Thyme, because that, by all accounts except the state's, was her name.
The whole ordeal cost $130 just for the documents, 4 months, and several trips to local and out of state record offices.
Our obsession with preventing fraud and record keeping has a habit of disenfranchising our elders, people of color, trans people, and basically every person who ever changes their last name for any reason. Our strict regulations are preventing millions from voting. From owning a home, a bank account, a credit card, having a license to drive!
These regulations don't even allow for people to be grandfathered in. To be excused from the requirements, considering that people of color in 1927 often weren't even given birth certificates, you would think it would make sense for them to be excused from the requirement. Or at the very least have the fees waved, considering.
There is truly a more efficient way of managing records. If only we would invest our efforts into it, because this is doing us more harm than good.
