Question 1

What is your full name?  (Explain why your parents gave you that name.)

My full name on my birth certificate is Julie Hall.  When I married my husband, Darin Fred Duersch, I formally added Duersch as my last name and made Hall my middle name (in addition to being my maiden name).

My parents named me Julie just because they liked it.  (Julie and Jennifer were very popular names when I was a kid.)  But my dad likes to tease me that I'm named after Julius Caesar because I was born Caesarian-section.

I was the oldest child in the family and became the first of five children, all daughters.  My nickname was Julie Lou from a song that a family friend used to sing to their child ("Soolee, soolee, soolee lou...").  That became the first "boy" nickname in the family, and when each of my four younger sisters joined the family they got one too that went along with their feminine first names.

Interestingly, only one of us was actually given a formal middle name, but the rest were just given a first and last name like our mom and her mother who were only given a first and last name when they were born so that they wouldn't have too many names after they got married.  Later in life, my dad said he wished that he'd given all of us middle names in honor of some of our ancestors because taking your husband's name was only done as a cultural thing; on the records of The Church, our names always remain those given at birth.  Only one sister and I formally changed our last names to our husband's name when we got married; the other two kept their maiden name and only adopted the social convention of going by their husband's last name rather than making a formal change.