After filling in many forms, I am now Geoff van der Meer.
The paperwork part of the story is long, uninteresting, and never ending. Changing ones name as an Australian while living in Sweden just isn’t simple.
The why is shorter. My wife and I chose to use van der Meer, my mother-in-law’s maiden name, as the family name for our future children. van der Meer is a Dutch surname, and translates to English as “of the lake”.
My wife changed her name earlier this year. This left me with a few choices: either keep my current name and be different from my family, hyphenate things, or change my name.
The idea of having “Wilson-van der Meer” as a name didn’t resonate. Neither did having a different name from my immediate family.
So, a bunch of bureaucracy later, I have a new name.
I will still keep gmwils. That was allocated to me at university, and has been my username, email address, Twitter name and many other identifiers for more years than I care to count.