Hello,
My fiancee and I are going to be dealing with a relatively confusing name change situation after our wedding. We'll say her name is Madeline Rose Smith-Johnson and my name is Brian Jones. Fake last names but it will work for this. We are getting married in PA. She is a resident of PA, but I've recently moved to TX and have changed all my IDs to be from TX. She's going to be moving to TX as well right after we get married.
Her desired name is Madeline Rose Smith Jones(Rose and Smith both being middle names). This is already complicated because from what I'm seeing PA requires you to go through a whole name change process to change your middle name instead of just accepting a marriage certificate for this. Also notice the omission of the second last name and her original middle name still being there. So it's not quite just making her maiden name into her middle name either.
This is potentially complicated by her leaving PA right after the wedding. I cannot find anything that tells me if TX will accept an out of state wedding certificate as an official name change. But the problem I expect to run into here is that she doesn't currently have a TX ID that can be changed. I doubt they would issue her a new driver's license with a brand new name. Unlike PA, TX does seem to allow you to change your middle name to your maiden name after marriage without a court order however, I'm not sure that the change she wants will be considered simply changing her middle name to her maiden name.
Does anyone have any advice for this situation? My two ideas about how to handle this are:
1. Have her move to TX. Change her IDs from PA to TX with her maiden name still on everything. Once we get those changed go back and have the IDs changed again using the PA marriage certificate as proof for the name change.
2. Go through the complete name change process in PA which probably means going through a whole court process. Get new IDs in PA with the new name and then move to Texas and use the new PA IDs to get TX IDs with the new name.
