The story behind Kleingeld

Having a hypenated surname tends to be a bit of a pain at times... you have to decide whether or not to use your full name or a part and it all gets rather confusing.

Most of the time I just drop the Kleingeld bit, since I've only had it since 1993, as many people know me simply as "Tim MacKenzie".

In case you don't know, "Klein geld" means "small change", or "small money".

So where does it come from?

Well, when my father, a dutchman, came to Australia in 1963, attitudes where considerably different to what they are now. Many people changed their names to more anglo sounding names.

Kleingeld is reasonably hard to pronounce correctly for a native english speaker, as it has the soft "g" sound common in middle/north European languages (that's a sort of back of the throat gh... difficult to describe in text). It seems instead of changing pronounciation to Klein-geld (the natural english prononciation) he stuck with Clan-ghelt, which causes most people to say "whawathat??!".

When he was naturalized (neutralized) in 1968, my father Henk (or Hendrick) Kleingeld changed his name to Hank MacKenzie. My great-great-great-great-grandmother (there might be a couple more great's in there... I'll have to check my grandfather's family tree) was a Caterina MacKenzie and she travelled to Holland (from Scotland) while William of Orange (I'm not sure which one, probably V) was around. Anyway, she married a Kleingeld.

So why did you change back?

Hmmm. My father was feeling pretty guilty for changing his name, he feels he has somehow let down the family by dropping the name. Apparently there is only a single family of Kleingelds in Holland. So, he changed to Kleingeld-MacKenzie as did my brother (David Onno) and myself.

Tim MacKenzie <tym@cs.monash.edu.au>