Her name is Ku’uleialohaoka’alakalama Young. Remember it.

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Friday, July 20, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

This is a story about how many letters fit on a birth certificate.

(Clue: 100 is too many, especially if that's just your middle name.)

It's also about how not to say "Katethong" and about how coming to the United States can change a name, something millions once discovered at Ellis Island.

And it's about how, finally, a family turned to the courts to simplify a name that marriages, divorces and migration have expanded, clipped and garbled.

You could say it began 39 years ago when a boy named Thanakorn was born in Lampang, Thailand.

His single mother called him "Ott," a nickname. After she met and married a U.S. solider named Wells, they traveled the world, including Germany.

A German teacher couldn't say "Ott" and called the boy Otto.

"That sounds cool," the 8-year-old thought. He became Otto Thanakorn Katethong.

As a teen filling out paperwork to become a U.S. citizen, he decided to call himself Otto Wells. Later, he joined the Marines as Otto Wells and traveled the world some more.

He landed in Honolulu, fell in love with one Sarah Ku'uleialohaoka'alakalama Young and married her.

She was simply Sarah most of the time, except when she danced hula at the Hilton , where she was called Ku'uleialohaoka'alakalama, her Hawaiian middle name.

After Otto's mother divorced Wells, he became Otto Katethong.

He left the Marines and became a police officer.

The young couple moved into a house on Oahu and had four children - creating six opportunities to mispronounce Katethong on a daily basis. The correct pronunciation is "ga-dong."

Sometimes, Sarah said, people would get only halfway through the name, bailing after two syllables.

After 12 years of this, the family faced a predicament.

"I was tired of people killing my last name," Otto said, shaking his head while sitting on a leather couch in his North Las Vegas living room, a painting of a Hawaiian sunset filled by four surfboards behind him.

"What should we call ourselves?" the two wondered.

Otto didn't want to return to Wells because it was no longer in his family. Sarah suggested her maiden name, Young, because it solved the pronunciation problem, and "we wanted to go back to something Asian."

How "Young" became "something Asian" is a story in itself.

When Sarah looked into her family tree, she discovered that her grandfather on her father's side also made some changes along the way, going from "Yong" to "Young" when he joined the military and didn't want his Chinese background to stand out.

Which brings us to the Ku'uleialohaoka'alakalama part of the story.

Sarah's middle name, passed down in her family, once was longer - more than 100 letters.

Several generations back, Sarah's people "had to shorten it because it didn't fit on the birth certificate," she said.

Once, Sarah tried to find out what her middle name means - but no one recalled the longer version. The shorter one, she said, has something to do with "my beloved child walking."

Speaking of children, the four boys all have English, even Western-sounding - as in Wild West - first names: Joshua, Cody, Logan and Noah. Two also have Hawaiian middle names and two have Thai middle names.

They'll keep those, although they never use them, as another tie to roots, Otto and Sarah said.

The family is looking forward to having daily life become a little easier when the legal process of becoming the Youngs is completed, perhaps in about three weeks.

Except for Joshua, who's 12 and goes to Findlay Middle School.

Although he's glad that teachers will no longer butcher his last name, he's not happy about going from a last name that begins with the 11th letter of the alphabet to one that bumps him next to "Z."

Why?

Because if you're last in line when the lunch bell rings, you may find that the cafeteria has run out of that most American of foods - pizza.