If I may ask, how did you decide to do it that way, Leslie?
My ancestors came to this country in 1664 and with my father, the name would have ended (for this particular branch of the family) since I don't have any brothers. My husband's family has lots of boys so there were/are plenty of people with his last name.
Thus we decided (although it did take quite a bit of discussion) for the children to have my name. My son is named after my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. My daughter also has a family name. If she had been a boy, she would have been Samuel Benjamin, instead, she is named after Samuel's wife, Hannah Catherine.
In doing research on names, both when I got married and kept my name, and then when we were making the decision about the children, I discovered that there is a lot of misinformation on the subject. There are very few laws governing names. Most things are tradition. There is no law that a woman has to take her husband's name when she gets married. There is no law about what name you put on a birth certificate. A person has to go to court to legally change his/her name. The only exception is at the time of marriage--and that exception only exists for the woman. If a man wanted to take his wife's name, he'd have to go to court to have it legally changed.
Identifiers, such as Sr., Jr., and III are not part of a person's legal name. They are only used to identify the person while the person with the same name is living. If dad is John Smith, Sr., and his son is John Smith, Jr., when dad dies, the son can drop the Jr. and just be John Smith. My uncle did this and so did Barack Obama (even though Brokeplex insisted on calling him Barack Hussein Obama II all through the campaign. To my knowledge, Obama has never used a numeral with his name).
My father is a III (his father and grandfather were alive for much of his life). He never dropped it, by choice. When my son was born, we didn't add a IV to his name for a few reasons: 1) we had skipped a generation, so it seemed sort of pointless; 2) I thought IV looked a little bit ostentatious; and 3) since the only other person still alive with the same name was my father, who was still using his III, Lance didn't need anything as an identifier.
Probably the most confusing thing about Lance's name (and my father, grandfather and great-grandfather) is that they don't have a middle name! Just a first and last name, with unusual capitalization and spelling of his first name. Occasionally, when people have insisted on a middle initial (on a form, for example) he'll just put NMI for "no middle initial."
That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about names, isn't it? LOL
L