A personal name can become a federally registered trademark, but the Lanham Act treats surnames with more suspicion than any coined word. This UpLaw analysis works through the two statutory obstacles that stand between a founder and a registration certificate: the "primarily merely a surname" bar of Section 2(e)(4), applied through the five Benthin factors and the primary-significance test, and the Section 2(c) rule that no living person's name registers without written consent, recently upheld by the Supreme Court in Vidal v. Elster. It maps the escape hatch of acquired distinctiveness under Section 2(f), from the five-year presumption to survey evidence and the Supplemental Register, and separates trademark rights from the parallel state-law right of publicity. Worked examples, a step-by-step filing roadmap, a surname-refusal response playbook, and extensive cross-references to related UpLaw resources round out a research-grade treatment for founders, designers, celebrities, and their counsel.