Our New Family Name: Ember

As a family we are The Embers. If we have kids, they will be Firstname Ember.

Since we had to get a court order for our name change, we get to have an extra anniversary! Our name change anniversary is January 25^th, 2016.

Why did you choose a new family name?

We didn't want to privilege one of our families over the other by choosing to take one of our last names for our new family. So then the logical choice might have been for both of us to hyphenate, but we thought what if we have a kid name Foo Sather-Miller and that kid marries someone named Bar Jones-Smith - what should our grandkid be named? Baz Sather-Miller-Smith-Jones? Madness! So we chose a new name for our family to keep our grandkids name sane. Thinking ahead!

Why "Ember"?

We both love fire. We first said I love you in front of fire. We spend a lot of time around fires. We were planning (and had) a fire themed wedding. We searched and searched for a fire related word that would sound natural as a last name. And finally landed on Ember. It seemed so perfect because we love watching the Embers dance in the heart of a big fire. And I learned that Ember means both the coals at the root of the fire but also the sparks that fly out and how all you have to do is add breath to Embers to make a new fire.

I know someone whose first name is Ember. Is this a tribute?

Nope. Totally coincidental! We know people with that first name too, but we choose the last name before we even thought about the fact that other people have it as a first name. We also learned later that some people have it as a last name referring to a town in England - that's also not a thing we intended to reference. We just really love fire.

What's up with the hyphenation mismatch?

We couldn't agree on how we wanted to do it so we decided to honor our respective individualities by having them be different. Maggie changed her old surname into her middle name (because she felt like having 4 names would be too long and it's a thing others in her family have done). Zach retained his original middle name (which is also his dad's middle name and his great grandfather's first name, so he didn't want to lose it) and hyphenated his surname. As an unintentional side effect it's kinda subversive to have a husband with the hyphenated name and a wife without it.