You Can Call Me What?

     In the United States, Elias Halmesaari married Sofia Keskimaki and they became Eli and Sofia Sampson.  We grew up learning that their children were Eli, Arnold, Eugene George, Sylvia, John Oliver, and Reynold Vake, but there was always something intriguing about  the family's having a "real" name, besides Sampson."     
     Poring over Eli's scrapbook and photo album, I find some other shifts:  I find photos labeled "Elias," "Arno," a very European "Eugen," and "Veikko," but never once a "Reynold" or "Vake." And what's this birth announcement on December 21, 2011? That had to be Johnnie. "A healthy baby!" it decrees, "to be called Merdsi Olivi."
     Dad told me once that he was named "Runo ("a poem") Veikko Sampson. I guess it's not too huge a phonetic stretch to anglicize "Runo" to "Reynold," but I asked about it once too often.  I asked Dad about his "real" name, and he said " I'm Rasputin the Mad Russian!" I was about 10 years old, old enough to be aware of the news of the cold war and to know that the last thing I would want to be was Russian, so I shut my mouth and never asked again, for fear that he was telling the truth. (As an adult, I learned that Rasputin had a first name, Gregori, and that seemed humanizing.)
    Now my grandson is a new Reynold Vake. "We'll call him 'Vake' until he's old enough to rebel and choose his own name," my son Eric Martin says.  That's fair enough.   It's in the family tradition. Eli seemed to have accepted the kids' shift toward English. And what would you do if you were christened "Merdsi"?