Interviews with women and men who agreed to speak to me about their memories of the 1930s were crucial windows into understanding the many facets of the way the Surname Law was received. For the memory slices they shared with me in their older years, I thank my interviewees with all my heart. I do not claim that this book is a comprehensive coverage of all demographic groups’ experiences of the Surname Law; rather, this study reveals patterns of experience, paths of internalization, and corridors of remembering of Turkish citizens residing in Western Turkey. Though I contemplated collecting additional data encompass a broader demographic base, I decided to leave that step to a later project, since it would also be informed by a dramatically different present and would be conducted with a different generation. In its earlier incarnation, this book was a dissertation submitted to the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife. In the following pages, I have expanded the manuscript with additional archival documentation from the Prime Ministry Archives, unpublished documents from the population registry, updated to reflect more recent work, and woven through conceptual strands from law and narrative and sociolinguistics.