A story behind every name change

By Steve Kanigher

Sunday, Aug. 14, 2011 | 2 a.m.

For all the reasons people go to court, some go because they don’t like who they are.

Or at least, they don’t like their names.

A Clark County man named Rodriguez wants to change his name to Walker because, as he said in his court papers, “Rodriguez” subjects him to prejudice.

A Boulder City woman wants to change her first name “to be free of the burden” of carrying her mother’s name.

A Las Vegas woman wants to simply simplify her life by reducing her four names to two.

And a Las Vegas man wants a judge’s approval to add an “s” to his last name — Conner — because someone in his family had been using his good name to get credit. Adding the “s” would take care of that, Mr. Conner(s) hopes.

These are among 57 people who filed name-change petitions last month with Family Court. (Last year, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that Family Court judges weren’t given jurisdiction in state law to handle name changes. But the court reversed itself after later deciding that the Legislature can’t tell a court whether it can preside over particular topics. With that, the Family Court got back into the name-change game in June.)

Changing one’s name is almost a slam dunk — as long as you haven’t been convicted of a violent crime, which raises red flags. But for most people, once the forms are filled out and you have, well, signed your name, you don’t even have to be in court when the judge makes his ruling.

Most name changes are for mundane reasons — say, the divorcee who wants to return to her maiden name or the man who wants to clear up discrepancies between his birth certificate and other legal documents. Other reasons, though, are either quirky or deeply personal — including, say, the person who wanted a female first name after a sex-change operation.

Among the others awaiting new names:

• A North Las Vegas man who wants to change his first name from Marcus to Marco to reflect its Spanish spelling and wants to switch middle names to Angel to honor a grandfather.

• A Las Vegas resident who wanted to turn her middle name into her last name and drop her last name because it was too hard to pronounce.

• A Las Vegas woman who wanted to swap her ethnic first name with her popular middle name. “For work purposes, I want an American-sounding name that customers and co-workers recognize and can pronounce without asking,” she wrote.

• A Las Vegas woman who simply didn’t like her perfectly fine-sounding first name and wanted to change it to Pandora.

• A North Las Vegas woman who wants to combine her first and middle names into a new first name, and add a new middle name — Unicorn — for professional reasons.

We’re not quite sure of the profession but if you run into a Unicorn in town, that’s probably her.