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To our seven grandkids, I’m Granny Janny. At Congregation Beth  Am, I’m Janet Podell. And at j., I’m Janet Silver Ghent. Confusion abounds. Friends at Torah study who see my picture in a j. column have asked if I changed my name to Ghent.

“I didn’t realize you were the same person,” the rabbi’s secretary said.

Sometimes, neither do I. Years ago, when I interviewed Judith Martin, who writes the Miss Manners column, she distinguished between her two personae, noting that a particular response was that of Miss Manners, not Ms. Martin. Nonetheless, she added, the two of them were “very close.”

Janet Podell and Janet Silver Ghent are also very close. When I remarried 13 years ago, I moved from the East Bay to the Peninsula, where nobody knew Janet Silver Ghent. I changed my legal name, but I kept my professional name because Ghent has been my byline since the late ’60s. Besides, I didn’t want to be mistaken for another freelancer named Janet Podell who has written about the Jewish pro-life position.

I try to keep the two personae separate, but sometimes they overlap, unintentionally. A choir director once listed my name in a program as “Janet Ghent Podell,” a name that makes me cringe. My version of kosher is never to combine the name of my ex-husband with that of my current husband. Knowing that, she recently listed me as Janet Silver Ghent, who writes but doesn’t sing.

How did this dichotomy arise? Like many of my generation, I married young and divorced at midlife. In 1965, as a graduate student at University of Michigan, I became Janet Ghent. That was the protocol. While some of my friends returned to their maiden names after a divorce, things are more complicated for writers. Ask Erica Jong, née Mann, who has been married four times but wrote “Fear of Flying” while married to her second husband.

Some time after my divorce, a friend suggested that I add my maiden name to my byline. I’ve been Janet Silver Ghent in print since 1990, when I wrote my first guest column for what was then the Jewish Bulletin.

Adding the name Silver was my way of reaffirming my Jewish identity and my past, although not everyone who shares the name Silver is Jewish. Think Long John, or the Lone Ranger’s horse. When I spent my junior year at the University of Glasgow, I met a man whose surname was Silver who told me the Silvers were a sept (sub-family) of the Gordons of Aberdeenshire.

My heart may be in the Highlands, but not my ancestry. My great-grandfather Henry Silver was born in 1840 in the Prussian village of Adelnau, which is now Odolanów in Poland. Chances are he emigrated as Heinrich Silber, and that surname was purchased in the early 19th century by his forefathers, probably for a fair number of Prussian thalers. But by the time Henry registered for the Civil War draft in 1863, as a German-born “pedlar” in St. Louis, his surname was Silver.

Fortunately, I did not need to buy the name, but I decided to own it, along with the surname of my husband, Allen Podell. That name has its own saga. In the 1940s, Allen’s father changed their surname from Podolsky. Like many Jewish surnames, Podolsky is strictly generic, held by people who came from a particular region who may not be related. While looking for the plot of Allen’s ancestors in a Delaware cemetery, I spotted a cluster of Podolsky headstones. But his cousin demurred: “Those are not our Podolskys!”

My husband’s family believes their Podolskys came from Podolia, on the Ukraine-Polish border. While surfing the Web, I discovered that the Polish Podolskis have an impressive family crest, which I could purchase for $29.95. The coffee mug, emblazoned with “The Ancient Arms of Podolski,” is only $13.95. Maybe I’ll buy it for Father’s Day.

But if my husband is thinking about a novel Mother’s Day gift, “The Ancient Arms of Silver” coat of arms isn’t too shabby, and it has versions for both English and German descendants. Houseofnames.com, which markets such products, says we’re “a noble family with great influence, having many distinguished branches.” Who knew?