Inheritance, Marriage and Spelling

The family number raises in sharp form the question that runs through all name numerology: whether the birth surname or a later, married or adopted, name should be read. The convention taken here treats the birth surname as the inherited root and any assumed surname as an overlay, on the reasoning that the family number describes what is given rather than chosen. Like the rest of the apparatus it depends on the Latin-alphabet spelling of the name and derives from the American numerology of around 1900, so its results shift with transliteration and orthography and have no counterpart in scripts that assign no numeric values to letters.

Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition is the standard demonstration that no letter-value chart of this kind descends from Pythagoras himself; the chart used for the surname total, like the rest of the system, was drawn up in the United States after 1900. Underwood Dudley's critical survey, Numerology: Or What Pythagoras Wrought, treats the birth-versus-married-name question this article raises as exactly the sort of dispute a genuinely ancient system would not have needed to have, since no classical number-letter tradition assigns numbers by legal surname change.