I am not unique!

So, I have this weird spelling of my first name: Katharine.  With an A. Or two, really.  Growing up I found it irritating to always be correcting everyone.  (Everyone except my piano teacher, who said he was only going to learn one way to spell it, so he'd learn my way.)  I kept waiting for someone to give me a cool nickname that would stick.  Not much luck there.  Somewhere around college, though, I decided that I really liked the fact that my name was spelled differently.  It set me apart from most of the other Katherines and Catherines.  (My college registrar told me, by the way, that there are eleven different ways to spell this name, at least that she'd found.)  

Of course, I know that Katharine is not a completely unique spelling. After all, Katharine Hepburn spelled her name that way.  Katharine Kerr is an author who spells her name that way.  Katharine Graham of the Washington Post spells it the "right" way, too.  As you can see, I sort of collect Katharines.

However, all this time, I did at least think that my strangely-spelled first name and my middle name, Thayer, made an unmatched combination.  Imagine my surprise, then, to see in the Richmond Times-Dispatch recently, that there is a Katharine Thayer Bigelow (married to the brother of the Richmond guy who is going to marry George W.'s daughter, if you can follow that).

It was disconcerting.  I can't get it off my mind.  I'm not as unique as I thought I was.  Or at least my name isn't.  So now I want to write to Katharine Thayer Bigelow and find out where she got the combination.  Did she get it from each of her two great grandmothers?  Are we somehow related?   Of course, this means I should probably also write to the Katharine Thayer who is a photographer and the Katharine Thayer who is an obgyn.  (Google is a wonderful/scary thing.)  Are we related?  Do they have trouble getting people to spell their name right?  Have they ever found a mug or a rubber stamp with their name spelled correctly on it? (I actually did once, at Disney World.) 

I'm going to have to bring this up with my parents!  How dare they name me something so common?  Clearly the search for the cool nickname must continue.