displaying a related field based on a global?

i have an archive database where i'm entering a variety of credits. a pop-up list appears with record ID's from a contacts file and the 'show display values from' option showing the actual name. once the selection is made, i'm looking up the actual name into a separate field. this field is on top of the ID field so that only the name shows. (i'm using the extra field mostly to be backwards compatible with an earlier version).

so far so good. because the same names are frequently entered, i have a preferences screen where the user can select default names. now that the relationship is based on ID's rather than names, preferences (which are stored in globals) cannot display the real name - only the ID, which looks ugly. i can think of some workarounds involving scripts and additional globals, but nothing really elegant. can i overlay the real name on top of the global ID field, so that a) the correct ID will be entered when a new record is created and the real name is shown in the preference screen?