How about a variation of what the Spanish do? In Spain, children take one name from their father and one from their mother, every child is named using the patri

How about a variation of what the Spanish do? In Spain, children take one name from their father and one from their mother, every child is named using the patrilineal names of there two grandfathers. Of course this leads to information loss, as the name of the grandmothers gets dropped. You have to lose information obviously, otherwise you'd get unwieldy names. How about changing it so that for the children's names, the mother contributes the name she got from her mother and the father the name he got from his father. So John Smith-Davis and Mary Hill-Richards have children who have Smith-Richards as a last name and the name of John's mother and Mary's father get dropped. As someone with a Dutch last name, hyphenation would be quite hard. There are already plenty of systems, either old enough to be from an age where bits where precious or developed by incompetents that can't handle my last name because it has spaces in it. I shudder to think what would happen if I added a hyphen to that.