By PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writer

Marion resident Loretta Keazer hopes she won’t need to go to the extreme of having her name legally changed in order to get her Real ID driver’s license.

Keazer wants to fly to Alaska sometime later this year to visit her son, but can’t board an airplane without a Real ID driver’s license.

Her birth certificate, however, lists her name as “Infant Smith.”

“I took it to get my driver’s license a couple years ago and they said they couldn’t accept it because it didn’t have a proper name,” Keazer said.

According to law, if your name is not the same on all provided documents, you must show proof of a legal name change. So, Keazer got a driver’s license, but not the Real ID she needs to be able to fly.

If a driver’s license holder never plans to fly or enter a federal building, they have the option to get a state driver’s license that is not a Real ID license.

Keazer said she’s not sure if her mother didn’t tell the Colby hospital her chosen name or whether the hospital sent the state a record of her birth before her parents named her Loretta.

Keazer said she looked online to see how to get her birth certificate amended, but every document she needed to do that had been lost in a house fire.

When her husband retired, his Kansas Public Employees Retirement System fund administrators could not add her name to the account until she proved she really was the “Infant Smith” listed on her birth certificate. Since her mother was still alive, they accepted an affidavit from her mother.

“When I went to retire, I no longer had the affidavit because they had kept it, and my mother was no longer alive,” Keazer said.

Luckily, the retirement fund administrators accepted the records from her husband’s account.

Keazer said she might call the state retirement administrators and see if they will send her a copy of her mother’s affidavit. She will see if the division of vehicles will accept that. That would save her the hassle of getting the name changed on her birth certificate.

Either way, she has other matters to take care of before she’s ready to tackle getting a Real ID driver’s license.