--- title: Neva Rose's Debut Novel By Any Other Name Traces Family Secrets Back to a Crossed-Out Surname description: Debut novelist Neva Rose traces a crossed-out surname on a birth certificate through Houston family history in By Any Other Name. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-09-17T21:18:11.694Z updated: 2026-09-17T21:30:26.392Z canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/neva-rose-by-any-other-name-family-secrets image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/neva-rose-by-any-other-name-hero.webp categories: Authors & Writers, Fiction content_type: Spotlight region: Houston publication: Rich Books about: - type: Person name: Neva K Rose description: Neva K Rose is a debut novelist and a native Houstonian. She spent 40 years in nursing before retiring in 2021 and writing By Any Other Name, a novel about family secrets, inherited surnames and African American identity, set in the city she has lived in all her life. jobTitle: Author --- Rachel's mother was unmarried when her daughter was born. Rather than let the birth certificate show a child without her father's name, she crossed out the family name, Thompson, and wrote in his surname, Love. Rachel grows up with the name her mother gave her and does not think much about it, and it is her discovery of that altered certificate that opens Neva K Rose's debut novel, By Any Other Name. ### Book: By Any Other Name By Neva K Rose The story of a woman's journey into her family's history and discovery of her identity and truth at a time of turmoil and upheaval in our country. Our names, our histories, our roles can shape us in ways we don't always recognize. [Amazon](https://a.co/d/0gyRhnk0) Neva spent 40 years as a nurse before she wrote it. The family stories, rumors and history behind the novel had been gathering for years, and a busy working life left her only a few stolen hours at night to take notes, research the stories and work out who her characters were. When she retired in 2021 she finally had the days to herself, and she used them to turn everything she had collected into a novel. ## Family Secrets Behind Rachel's Surname > "I wanted to explore how the names we're given — or choose — carry a history most of us never stop to question, and how discovering that history can lead to real acceptance of who we are." > — Neva K Rose Rachel learns that her grandfather's name was inherited from the man who fathered her great-grandfather, his former slave owner. That name was still respected in the community, and it was passed down to Rachel's mother. Rachel's discovery of that birth certificate is the beginning of her search for her true identity. In the federal slave schedules of 1850 and 1860, enslaved people were listed under the slaveholder's name by age, sex and color only, and the [1870 census](https://www.archives.gov/files/calendar/genealogy-fair/2018/2-kluskens-handout.pdf) was the first to record most formerly enslaved people by their full names. Families often appear under one surname in 1870 and another in 1880. Martin Jackson, formerly enslaved and interviewed in San Antonio in 1937 for the Federal Writers' Project, told his interviewer, "The master's name was usually adopted by a slave after he was set free. This was done more because it was the logical thing to do and the easiest way to be identified than it was through affection for the master." Jackson himself refused the name Fitzpatrick and took Jackson after an African grandfather called Jeaceo. Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, traveled north as Stanley and then as Johnson, and took Douglass in New Bedford when his host Nathan Johnson, who had been reading Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, suggested it. The only thing Douglass insisted on keeping was Frederick. Other freed families took new names outright, Freeman or Washington among them. Neva sets the search at a time of turmoil and upheaval in the country, and Rachel's questions do not stay with one document. She questions the history of her family's origins and [the names African Americans have been given](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/how-courtney-buchanan-s-thrive-turns-black-wall-street-s-forgotten-history-into-a-warning-for), and the novel looks at the weight society puts on a name, and at the heritage and secrecy that run through one family's past. Neva has said the book grew from her interest in how personal histories can stay hidden until something unexpected forces them into the open, and in how identity is shaped by more than the choices a person makes for themselves. ## A Birth Certificate and a Mother's Choice Texas began statewide birth registration in 1903, and the standard Texas certificate carried a field that asked, in one word, "Legitimate?" By the 1930s almost every state in the country recorded legitimacy on the birth certificate. A number of states removed the item during the 1940s over confidentiality concerns, and by the mid-1960s 34 states and the District of Columbia still reported it, Texas among them. It is that stigma, written into the certificate itself, that Rachel's mother is answering when she strikes out Thompson and writes Love. ## Identity and Belonging in By Any Other Name The title is Juliet's, from Act 2 Scene 2 of [Romeo and Juliet](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/romeo-and-juliet/read/2/2/): "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet." The Folger text prints "word"; the familiar "by any other name" is the older Globe reading. The author's own surname, as it happens, is Rose. Once Rachel realizes the name she grew up with is complicated and has a story behind it, her search leads her to the Pan African Christian church and to her African roots. There she comes to accept the whole history behind the names we are given or the names we choose. Houston, where the book is set, has had a Pan African church tradition of its own since at least the 1980s. The Pan African Orthodox Christian Church was founded in Detroit on Easter Sunday 1967, when the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr. unveiled a painting of a Black Madonna and Child and renamed his congregation the Shrine of the Black Madonna; the denomination took its present name in 1970, and Cleage later took a new name himself, Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman. Shrines followed in Atlanta and Houston. Houston's Shrine of the Black Madonna Cultural Center and Bookstore on Martin Luther King Boulevard opened in December 1986 in a converted bowling alley beside the church, and it has since hosted Cornel West, Alice Walker and Betty Shabazz. Neva describes it as a quick, inspiring story with historical connections and family secrets, and it belongs with genealogy fiction and with [books about identity and belonging](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/how-to-preserve-your-identity-rediscovering-roots-in-a-story-of-loss-and-love). Published in July 2026 in paperback and hardcover, it runs to 132 pages. It leaves room for the bigger questions about who a person is and where they come from that Rachel's search raises. ## A Novel Set in Houston by a Native Houstonian Neva is a native Houstonian, and she set the novel in the city she loves, which she calls a comfort zone of familiarity. Houston will be the backdrop for the projects she has planned next. Juneteenth began in Galveston on 19 June 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger's General Order No. 3 announced that "all slaves are free". After emancipation thousands of freed people came into Houston, most of them settling in [Freedmen's Town](https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/fourth-ward-houston) in the Fourth Ward, north of the San Felipe road that led in from the Brazos plantations; the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. In July 1872 Black church leaders led by Richard Allen and the Rev. Jack Yates of Antioch Baptist bought ten acres in the Third Ward for $800 to hold Juneteenth celebrations, and the land became [Emancipation Park](https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/HistoricPres/landmarks/07PL46_Emancipation_Park_3018_Dowling_Street.pdf), for more than twenty years the only public park in Houston open to African Americans. Those are the years in which Houston's Black families first appear in the record under surnames of their own. Away from the page Neva paints, makes crafts, follows football and goes fishing, and she credits the support of her wife, Sharron, and their Cockapoo, Snowball, in bringing By Any Other Name to life. ## FAQ **Q: Is By Any Other Name based on a true story?** It is fiction. Neva drew on years of family stories, rumors and history gathered across her nursing career, and Rachel and her family are her own creation. The novel is not a memoir. **Q: How did Black families like Rachel's come by their surnames?** Before emancipation, enslaved people were recorded in the federal slave schedules only by age, sex and color under the slaveholder's name, and the 1870 census was the first to list most of them by full name. Many carried the former owner's surname, which Martin Jackson, interviewed in 1937, called the easiest way to be identified; others chose new names, as Jackson did. The novel follows one such inheritance. Rachel's grandfather's name came from the man who fathered her great-grandfather and had owned him, and it was still a respected name in the community by the time it reached Rachel's mother. **Q: Who is By Any Other Name for?** Readers who want a family secrets novel with historical connections, short enough to read in an evening, and readers of genealogy fiction or books set in Houston. It suits anyone who has wondered where their own name came from. **About Neva K Rose** Author Neva K Rose is a debut novelist and a native Houstonian. She spent 40 years in nursing before retiring in 2021 and writing By Any Other Name, a novel about family secrets, inherited surnames and African American identity, set in the city she has lived in all her life.