Meet the Elliot's

As Laura and I were discussing marriage we had some usual questions you might expect:

• Where would we get married? ¹
• Who to invited? ²
• How many commerbunds is too many? ³

This post is about one aspect of starting our lives together. What last name would we take? Would I keep my last name, or would Laura hyphenate? Discussing it for a we came to a decision that neither of our last names was what we wanted to carry on. Laura grew up loving her last name but assuming her name would change after marriage. I never felt like my last name had a heritage I wanted to continue.

Let me explain. I love my family, but there are few males in my family tree I wish to emulate, or pass that heritage on. So the both of us set our minds to finding a name we could both agree to. Let me tell you this was not an easy process. I came up with HUGE spreadsheets. I wrote a program to take letters from our last names and recombine them into anagrams. I would find a name I liked only to discover Laura disliked the way it sounded with her first name. Or Laura would love a name that I never could just couldn't.

This topic has been one of our worst disagreements. No voices ever raised. There was a period of time where I felt like we would never find common ground. "The Militello's" might have just been on our mailbox forever.

The title of this post gives away the ultimate destination of this post. We in fact decided on "Elliot" as our last name. It is an anagram of our familial names. The name has a few meanings, yet most lend to "The Lord Is My God".

The purpose of our mutual name change has nothing to do with trying to rewrite history. Or to change the past. This marks a new beginning for the two of us. And the courts have agreed.

Have any questions? Hit us up.