[WillowTheWhisp]

Good grief Mel. That's a horrendous saga and absolutely ludicrous on the part of the Passport Office.

How on earth can they have happily given your children their passports with you as their mother if they still don't believe you are you? Sheer, total, absolute, utter madness!

I can understand how you feel like you are bashing your head against an unrelenting brick wall.

Busman and I went through a similar ever decreasing circle when we got married. I didn't want to change my name to Mrs. Busman out of deference to my kids and their relationship with their deceased father but equally Busman didn't want to become Mr. Whisp. So we opted for a hyphen. We asked at the register office how we go about officially becoming Mr & Mrs Busman-Whisp (or Whisp-Busman) and were told that once we had signed the cert in our old names that was it - just tell the world that our new name was the double barrelled one and hey presto all would be well. Oh yeah? So we try to get it changed on the electoral roll and they want documentation from the Bank, so we try to get it changed at the Bank and they want documentation from the council! Aaaargh! Eventually I found one obscure storecard of mine which would simply accept my word for it and that started the ball rolling and eventually others followed on from that until eventually I think we got through to everybody but it took months.

Also it never ceases to amaze me how many organisations accept a birth certificate as proof of ID when I, as an amateur genealogist, know that it is no such thing. I have applied for umpty million birth, marriage and death certificates on behalf of people whose family trees I have been tracing and you don't even have to be related to the person never mind BE them!

I do wish you luck Mel and hope that you can get through this stupid mess and get somebody to see sense. Don't give up. When are you planning on going on holiday?

Here are contact details for Greg Pope if that helps.