My grandmother hated her middle name, which was Laura. So sometime about 1920 she just arbitrarily began to use the middle name Ethel, possibly as a young woman's admiration for the then-popular Ethel Barrymore. She even named their first daughter Ethel. She continued the use of Ethel as a middle name until her first husband died and she married her second husband in the late 1940s. He preferred the name Laura, and that is the middle name she used when she commissioned her tombstone. Anything can happen with names---sometimes logical, sometimes not. Warmest Regards, Donna