Filius Nullius

I was given the name Daniel when I was born. It was a love name from my mom’s favorite song. A good way to begin this life. Names are important things. Many scholarly articles have been written about the close association between name and identity which are so closely aligned that when we introduce ourselves we most commonly say, “Hi, I am ___________” rather than say “Hi, my name is ________”.

One day after I was born, my name was erased from my birth certificate to hide my identity.
I was told my name was Bob. At school, I became known as Bob the slob. I was lost.

And so I left home at the age of 13, looking for who I might be. At the age of 20, I took vows, of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. But, I was still called Bob, and I was still lost.

By age 21 I left my vows and went to the University Theatre Department, the home of broken toys. Here I found something, but a very short time later I was drafted for the war I had to leave the theatre behind. I did know one thing about my actual self: I did not believe in war. I became a conscientious objector and did two years of community service. It was a step in the right direction.

At the age of 26 I was organizing a mass civil disobedience against the Trident Nuclear Submarine. I had just completed days of non-violence training for those who would climb the fence at the Submarine base when my older friend mentioned that most of the people who had taken the training did not even know who they were. And I thought at the time: “I don’t know who I am, either. I shouldn’t be training these people”. I was still called Bob.

A year later while I was visiting my mom, she brought out my birth certificate. She had told me before that her name for me was Daniel, but I thought, well it is not unusual for people to change their minds. But, here on the birth certificate was evidence of more. The name Daniel was there. The evidence of my erasure was clear. Over the years, the ink eradicator fluid which had made my name disappear, made it reappear in brown, in my mother’s handwriting. She told me the story of how my father had eradicated it and I decided that it was time for me to take it back. And that is what I did. Then I made an oath to myself: I would find out who I was and who I was supposed to be. I would no longer be a Bob.

This would mean therapy. It would mean accepting a small unaccomplished self, a tiny light of truth.

When I found the love of my life, we decided to hyphenate our last names. We wanted to share the same name without either of us giving up our own “identities.” It all felt like a resolution until, at the age of 68 I found out that the man who had erased my name; the man whose last name I shared, was not my dad. I already knew I was not Bob, but now my last name was wrong as well, and my oath to myself kicked back in. I found out the name of the man who was my biological father. I traced ancestors on both sides back to the 1500s. I learned my ancestors were all Scotch, Irish, and English.

I decided it was too late to change my name again. My kids grew up with this hyphenated hodgepodge and what would I change my last name to anyway? I was a Filius Nullius, the Latin legal term for a bastard. It literally means Son of Noone, to indicate that he was not able to inherit anything from either the mother or the father.

For a few years, I fell into an identity rabbit hole. I studied naming rituals. I studied genealogy. I met new family members. All of it was good but the more I learned about name and identity, the more I wanted a complete name that felt as close as I could come to my sense of self.

One of the more famous Filius Nullius was called Leonardo DaVinci. It was the custom in those days to give the Fillus Nullius the last name of the town that he was born in as he was not entitled to his biological father’s name or inheritance. This struck a chord in my identity-obsessed soul and so I decided that if I ever wrote something, the name I would use would be this: Daniel Southgate. It is a name that tells the story of where I come from and who I am and I like it. It feels like I’m keeping my oath.

— DanielSouthGate