What's in a name

I presume you all know the joke of how Chinese name their new born, no offence meant,
this is a little extension to that. It’s pretty nice when you travel in a cab & the kind of conversations you pickup with the drivers, and today happens to be one such day. I got into the car and wanted to him to drive me to the temple near my office on the same road. He had a wired look on his face. Are you not going to office kinds, since it was around 8 in the morning? What ever I was thinking what’s your problem and suddenly some thing caught my attention in his car. The dashboard had a lot of badges that belong to various marathons that are held in South East Asia and Pacific regions. Then slowly the chat drifted and we started talking about lot of people and then slowly the conversation slipped into how the Chinese names are spelt.
It seems the people in Singapore were asked to register themselves after the independence, to accept their registration there were British people in the registers who were on job,
the Britsh people wrote spelling in their own way. Since those people were illiterate at that point of time accepted that this is their spelling and continued to use them in the same manner. So as a result now all these variants for just one family name: tham, than, chan, chen, ton, tan.
I was told there were close to 10 family names now there are so much. Not sure how far this is true but its acceptable when u hear them saying their names.