Fun with Surname Hyphenation

Before I even get started, I never use "Mother's Maiden Name" as a security question if I can avoid it, and if that's the only option, I generally lie because it's pretty easy to find out anyway. So, I'm hopefully not giving up anything that might facilitate identity theft in this post.

I've been digging in to my ancestry a bit, because, being Canadian, the topic of ones ancestral nationality sometimes comes up and to be honest, I didn't really know what mine was. I knew one line was primarily Scottish, but there was much still uncovered. As it turns out I'm a mixed bag of various western Europeans and my ancestors arrived in Canada a minimum of 4 generations ago depending on which line you follow so I'm going with "Canadian" as my nationality from here on out. It's the most accurate.

All this got me thinking, though, there are a lot of surnames in my ancestry that fell by the wayside because of the tradition of women taking their husband's name. But, I figure, one name is as good as the other, so my historically accurate (near as I can tell) full name, giving full credit to all* of the women and men who contributed to my genetic make up, is....