That Middle "T"...

Everyone asks. Everyone expects it to be "Thomas"—as if that would somehow be really neat. Or spooky.

Well, no. It's not "Thomas." One of my great-grandfathers was Thomas Obadiah Thurston, and I was named for him. So the middle name is "Thurston." That's a fact I quickly learned to hide in grade school, because the natural nickname is "Thursty." You can get tired of that pretty fast. Sometimes, I wished I'd gotten the "Obadiah" instead.

A note on name forms. Having the same first and last name is a common convention in Wales, and my parents knew this, as part of our ancestry is Welsh. In that country, the phone books are full of people named Thomas Thomas, John Johns, William Williams, and so on. In fact, if you live in the United States, your hometown phone book probably has more Thomas Thomases than names you might think were more common, like Sarah Brown.