Lingering confusion about women’s names on REAL ID licenses

In late 2019 when the REAL ID system for driver’s licenses first came into force, there was a lot of confusion about strict rules for married women’s names.

Judging from the experience of one reader, that confusion hasn’t entirely gone away.

“We objected but were told: those are the rules,” said Robert Kamel of Peterborough, recalling how his wife of 52 years, Patricia, couldn’t use the name she preferred when applying for a REAL ID license in July. “Then I started thinking about it. All of our documents, they’re out of sync now. Checking account, savings account, credit cards, retirement accounts, will, trust … There’s a lot of them.”

That concern led him to call the Monitor, which called Michael Mercier, licensing bureau administrator in the state Division of Motor Vehicles.

He said the clerk’s ruling was a mistake. “She should have been able to get her name the way she wanted,” Mercier said.

The Kamels have since scheduled an appointment with the DMV in Keene to get a new license. If things don’t go well, Mercier said they could call him to sort it out.

The Kamels’ problem is the same that led to Monitor stories in December 2019 when REAL ID started to become required for taking airline flights. It involves middle names.

When she got married, Patricia took her husband’s last name and started using her maiden surname, Eaton, as her new middle name. She ignored the middle name listed on her birth certificate, which was Joyce.

This was a common practice at the time, to the point that some women were not even given middle names at birth on the assumption that wouldn’t need it when they got married.

This new name was accepted by credit cards, banks, and even the Division of Motor Vehicles until the Transportation Security Administration handed down new rules for REAL ID.

The problem is that the couple’s marriage certificate did not reflect Patricia’s preferred usage; it gave her middle name as Joyce.

When REAL ID was established, DMV clerks were told to depend only on marriage licenses and birth certificates when establishing a woman’s legal name. So even though Patricia Kagan brought other documents that used her maiden surname as a middle name – including her current New Hampshire driver’s license – a clerk at the Milford DMV office insisted that she had to use the middle name listed on her birth certificate.

Mercier said this strict adherence to names on birth certificates and marriage licenses was correct policy in the early days of REAL ID. Women who wanted another name were told to go to Probate Court and spend time and money to legally change their name to their preferred combination even if they had already been using that name for ages.

But as this policy became public, outrage quickly ensued. “They got a ton of blowback from people,” said Mercier.

Blowback was so extreme, in fact, that officialdom backed down.

“Since then, they have relaxed their rules,” Mercier said. “If people can show a continuous line of documents with their name written out as the way they want it, then they’re going to get a REAL ID in that name.”

It’s not clear whether other women are still encountering this issue. Mercier said he had not heard of any other complaints coming to the DMV office.

But just in case, here’s a reminder: If you’ve got years of paperwork saying something is your name, that’s is good enough for an ID, even a real one.