Wednesday, January 9, 2008

INDIANA: Who To Blame in Name game? , January 8, 2008

More problems for those without "proper" birth certificates

GARY POST-TRIBUNE,
January 8, 2008



Who to blame in name game? Many caught in name game

BY KAREN SNELLING Post-Tribune staff writer

The state Bureau of Motor Vehicles is strictly enforcing rules that could drive scores of area residents into court.

People like Crown Point resident Illa Wallace Carstens say they have been forced to hire lawyers to get their names changed to what they've been all or most of their lives.

Carstens and other Northwest Indiana residents called the Post-Tribune on Monday to relay problems they've been having with the BMV when trying to get their driver's license renewed after reading a story in Monday's paper about a Lake Station man with a similar problem. All have different names on their Social Security cards than their birth certificate.

"I've been Illa Wallace Carstens since 1962. My lawyer said I could use that name. Now, 45 years later, the state license bureau says I can't," the retired payroll supervisor said.

The problem, according to the state, is that the name on Carstens' driver's license is different from the one on her original Social Security records.

But Carstens has two Social Security cards with identical information to the one on her driver's license.

The 77-year-old Crown Point woman took her ex-husband's last name as a middle name after they divorced in 1962 and she remarried.

Carstens changed her Social Security records to reflect the name change, but state officials are insisting that she petition a court to make the change legal.

"I don't know who is making up these rules, but they don't make any sense," said Carstens, who has spent more than $1,000 to get her name changed in Lake Superior Court.

BMV spokesman Dennis Rosebrough countered that the birth certificate is your name. "It's the ultimate identifier. But you can go to court and change your name," he said.

However, he added, BMV officials were meeting to research the law.

Rosebrough said in 2006 the BMV notified 206,000 Hoosiers that information on their driver's licenses didn't match the federal database and some 60,000 of those discrepancies were corrected.

In the meantime, Gary school teacher Link Reid is running into a similar bureaucratic wall. He lost his wallet containing his driver's license a couple of months ago and hasn't been able to get a replacement because of a mistake on his birth certificate.

Reid, 59, was born in Tennessee with the help of a midwife, who misspelled his name on the birth certificate. Although the error was crossed out and the correct name written in, Reid, who has taught at Gary schools for 35 years, said the Indiana license bureau refuses to recognize him by the corrected name.

"I've been Link Reid all my life. My college degree says Reid. All my bills and my mortgage are in the name Link Reid," a frustrated Reid said. He's waiting for a court date so he can get a judge to declare that his name is legally Link Reid.

Meanwhile, he hopes he isn't stopped driving without a license.

Contact Karen Snelling at or ksnelling@post-trib.com


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Geeee - people get so uptight about their names and identities. ;o) Welcome to our world.

The crossed out name is really a winner - the moron bureaucrats don't know that is what the LAW requires - you must have the correction shown AS a correction on the birth certificate.