Surnames

So, yeah. I grew up with an uncommon surname. How uncommon? How Many of Me suggests that there are 115 or fewer people with it in the United States. Geogen suggests fewer than 50 in Germany, where it originated.

Which leads to the pondering. I changed my name when I got married, without really thinking much about it (other than, woohoo, my name will fit in standardized bubble forms now!). My married name (Brent, if you haven't figured that out) is more common than my maiden name, but not terribly common. (It is not, in fact, my husband's family's original name, nor was the name they had before that. A fascinating evolution in self-identity, but not one I was involved in. My great-great-grandfather, on the other hand, got pissed off at relatives and flipped two vowels in the name so that he would somehow no longer be related to them. Similar, I suppose, to how the Donner I am named after was from a family who pronounced it "Dunner" to somehow not be associated with the (reputedly distant cousins) Donners who met with misfortune in the Sierra Nevada.)

Anywho, nine years later, I ran into Blizzard's RealID/real names on their forums brouhaha (having, of course, a World of Warcraft account and occasionally posting on the forums). My name isn't terribly common - you wouldn't have to go through a lot of people with my name to eventually find me. But with my maiden name? You don't need to guess. And then if you know that I have relatives who play, they're not too hard to extrapolate.

So that leads to the thinking... how identifiable does one want to be, online or otherwise? If I'm going to publish, would it have been better to do so under my maiden name, which will be immediately and unmistakably identifiable? On the other hand, is having that buffer of a dozen or so people if someone psychotic tries to look me up more valuable? (And the flip side - which is more likely: publishing something, or having a psychotic stalker?)