[jack-r-abbit]

I've never heard of someone taking both their given last name and their married last name together as their new last name but without a hyphen. This is a new one for me. Hyphenating is very common. But so is replacing your given middle name with your given last name and taking on your married last name. If I saw "Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack" written somewhere I would have just figured you did that. So technically you full name is "Tarah Marie Wheeler Van Vlack". Interesting.

Edit: I also have a female friend who I'd always known as Maggie Smith-Brown[1] and I always just assumed that she started as Maggie Smith and married Mr. Brown. Until I met her husband... Mr. Smith-Brown.

[1]not real name

[chimeracoder]

> I've never heard of someone taking both their given last name and their married last name together as their new last name but without a hyphen.

That's actually incredibly common in Spanish-speaking parts of the world.

It used to be that women would add "de Foo", where Foo is the last name of their husband, but nowadays it's fashionable to drop the "de", because that implies ownership ("de" is the Spanish equivalent of "'s")

It actually gets way, way more complicated, but that's a tl;dr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs

[Casseres]

From what I understand, the hyphen was introduced to last name of Spanish origin because spaces were not allowed in databases.

[greenyoda]

It's also possible that she started as Maggie Smith, married Mr. Brown, and then they both changed their last name to Smith-Brown.

[jack-r-abbit]

True, it was possible. But that seems even more rare. And in this case, not true. I didn't dig deeper but it seems he ended up with a hyphenated last name at some point in life... possibly at birth. That also seems rare since even when a woman hyphenates her last name with her husband's, the children usually get the father's last name.