My Name

My parents decided on my first name before they were married, way before I was ever born. Actually, it might have been before they even decided to get married. My mom told me once that she and my dad were talking about names for future children and both said that they loved the name Sara. And from then on, it was decided.

Sara(h) is a name I share with my maternal grandmother and her maternal grandmother as well, making an every-other-generation chain of Sara(h)s. Both my grandmother and my great-great grandmother spelled their name with an 'H' at the end, but my parents opted for the shorter spelling because they thought it looked more modern. The with-an-H vs. without-an-H debates are pretty epic among the Sara(h) population. I'm definitely partial to the H-less spelling, and as I was growing up, the name's Hebrew meaning -- princess -- meant a lot to me.

So when I was born, my name was Sara Staheli, my last name coming from my dad. Staheli is a Swiss name that probably originated with the word for steel (stahl) back in the olden-olden days.

When I was 8 months old (or thereabouts), my parents legally changed my name by adding Katherine as a middle name. Katherine is my paternal grandmother's name, and according to my mom, the change came about kind of as an "Oh duh!" moment, like they should've just had that as my middle name all along.

So I lived my life as Sara Katherine Staheli for many, many years, and when I was 21, I got married and added a fourth name -- Hanks. The decision to change my last name was something I went back-and-forth on for a while, and I had a lot of really intense feelings about it. I made my decision final about a year after getting married and became Sara Katherine Staheli Hanks. While four names is a little long compared to the names of most people I know, I think the sounds flow nicely together, and I actually enjoy having four names instead of just two or three. It's nice to have little tokens from my grandmothers, my ancestry, and my marriage to carry around with me all the time, and at the same time, the combination of those elements is totally unique. There's no one else out there named Sara Katherine Staheli Hanks. Pretty sure.