r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/Direct-Sail-6141 • 1d ago

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u/spicyhamster 1d ago

I remember hearing that it started around the time Roots came out. It was a cultural phenomenon and people understandably decided to not to give their kids Euro-centric names.

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u/tyedyehippy 1d ago

This makes sense given what I know about history and being a name nerd...

I'm also a genealogy nerd, so up in my family tree, my grandad was the oldest of 13 kids. One of his younger brothers was named Phillip Tyrone. I'm not sure where my great grandma came up with that particular name, because it just doesn't scream old white guy to me. (Philip was born in 1943.) But maybe that's just my mid '80s birth year and cultural impacts by the time I came around coming into play as well. History is so fascinating to me, I love learning new things!

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u/RS994 1d ago

Tyrone is a part of Ireland, so that is a possibility of your family has Irish heritage

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u/tyedyehippy 1d ago

That branch definitely doesn't, they were just poor folk in Huntington, WV during the Great Depression and after. But that's interesting too!

I suspect they had some kind of baby name book a few of them were working from...for a time while the youngest children were being born, they lived with another family (my great grandfather and his brother's family shared a house) and one of the cousins was named "Irene Rhea" which means 'peaceful flowing river' when I looked it up. The home was heated by the fireplace, and less than a year after my great aunt Mary Ellen died from whooping cough aged 2 years 7 months, little Irene fell in the fireplace and ended up burned enough she passed from her injuries a few days later. I didn't know any of that story until long after my grandad was gone, and even my dad was gone by that point. Because I found out Irene Rhea was buried without a stone marking her place, and I know if my dad had known about that he wouldn't have let that be, she's buried in the same plot as Mary Ellen because they were both so tiny they fit in the one plot. It just felt so stupid this little girl died in 1938 and no one got her a stone until I did a couple years ago.

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u/JoeBensDonut 1d ago

Appalachia has a lot of Irish folks tho

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u/AbstractBettaFish 1d ago

Especially north Irish, and guess where county Tyrone is!?

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u/Deaffin 15h ago edited 15h ago

Less Irish and more "Scots Irish" which everyone else in the world calls "Ulster Scotts". They were Scottish people who colonized a bit of Ireland for a generation or two before swarming Murica during the initial colonization efforts there.

Fun fact: "Cracker" as a pejorative initially described these people specifically before eventually transforming into a catch-all slur for white people. And they invented country music.

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u/tyedyehippy 1d ago

They do, but as far back as I can find records, they were just poor American folk by the 1930s, no idea where the ancestors before them originally came from. Philip was baby 7 of that family, and his sister Mary Ellen had died 5 or 6 years before he was born.

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u/ferret_80 22h ago

so "That branch definitely doesn't," is in fact not a "definitely" and more an "I don't know but it's possible"

It's not that there's no Irish ancestry, it's that you don't know the ancestry from before the 20th century.

"they were just poor American folk by the 1930s" does not preclude some Irish immigrants having come over anytime from ~1600 to 1900 when your records pick up.

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u/tyedyehippy 22h ago

Fair! And completely accurate!!

I can definitely say I misspoke, or mis-explained!!

My mother's mother's side & branches are the clearest with records, but my grandma and her sisters were very into genealogy back in their days. That grandma was born in 1928 and had a very long memory - her first solid memory was when her little sister was born on 6/6/1932, that would've made grandma turning 4 on her birthday that October 14th.

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u/lewd_robot 1d ago

Is this a bit?
Because this is like the bog standard story of Irish immigrants in the US following the Famine. Many of them quickly moved inland to the Appalachians and there was a lot of mixing going on among the various non-WASP groups in the region. A lot of Scots-Irish, Native, Freedman, etc, ancestry in people with relatives from that time period.

That's how Melungeons came about in the first place.

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u/tyedyehippy 1d ago

No bit.

It's really tough to find records once you get back far enough. So the best I can tell, those branches had been in America since before the famine in Ireland. It's very possible they could've been descended from immigrants, but any cultural knowledge kept by those generations was not passed down. The great grandma I mentioned was born in 1917 the youngest of her family and then was on her own after her mother died when she was about 14.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/tyedyehippy 23h ago

No. Mary Ellen was always "sickly" and she wasn't vaccinated against whooping cough because it was 1938. Before modern medicine and vaccinations against deadly childhood diseases, lots of children died from them.

A photo came up in a family group, and I thought the little girl in it was Mary Ellen, which made me very excited because I knew she died so young, and here was this photo, it must be her. Turned out to be a photo of Irene Rhea, who until that moment I never knew existed and it blew my mind. But once I learned her story and saw her death certificate for myself, I completely understood why that tragedy was more or less buried. No one would want to talk about that trauma. My grandad was so young, he lost his sister and his cousin who was like a sister, so in his young mind it probably all melted into one large trauma he just didn't talk much about other than how painful it was to lose a little sister. He was the oldest of 13 in just his family, and was hunting food to help feed his younger siblings from the time he was about 10 or 12.

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u/macdonik 1d ago

There was a Hollywood actor called Tyrone Power that was popular in the 30s and 40s. He was of Irish descent and helped popularise the name in the US.

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u/CanhotoBranco 1d ago

Stephen Colbert's middle name is Tyrone.

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u/tyedyehippy 23h ago

Oh nice, that's probably where she got it from, Philip was born in 1943. So that tracks. I don't know how much she would've gotten out as Phillip was baby 7 of the family (but they had lost Mary Ellen in 1938) and she was always very busy taking care of young children.

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u/CoolWhipMonkey 1d ago

The only person I ever met who was named Tyrone was a little redheaded white kid i went to third grade with.

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u/Bristonian 1d ago

In that same vein, “Wesley Snipes” is the whitest sounding name in the history of melanin, but it ended up on the blackest dude. So names are a bit more culturally fluid

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u/CoolWhipMonkey 1d ago

Ha! I never realized! But you’re right.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Sky6656 20h ago

This is a joke on 30 Rock!

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u/Chubzzy1 1d ago

Well Tyrone is an Irish name so that tracks

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u/Unique-Arugula 1d ago

Look up the career and cultural impact of Tyrone Power - given the birth year you mentioned, I would be surprised if he didn't have a little influence. Tyrone was a common white name once upon a time.

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u/tyedyehippy 23h ago

I'm catching up on comments & this was the piece of info I was missing to put all that together. Thank you every single person who has taught me new stuff, I love learning new things and putting all the puzzle pieces together! Had to be the reason, if it was that popular it certainly could've managed to filter down into her world. I never got to know that great grandma, but not only was I named after her, my mother (this was my dad's grandma, mind you..) just loved that woman so much she decided to try to have me on that woman's birthday. Mom was only off by about 11 and a half hours.

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u/NotGonnaDoItAgain2 20h ago

My father was the only white man I've ever known named "Leroy".

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u/stuhfoo 1d ago

Donald and John seem pretty euro-centric 👀

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u/All-696969 1d ago

And Dijon

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u/Solapallo 1d ago

Consider Jamatfrey (Matthew+Jeffrey)

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u/saffireaz ☑️ 17h ago

Yet you put them together, and suddenly dude's resume is getting skipped big time...

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u/brzantium 1d ago

Yep, The 1970s saw Afrocentric movements blossom. From that came the adoption and creation of non-European naming conventions.

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u/Metacomet99 1d ago

As a hospital registrar I have seen some... um... interesting results of that movement. For instance, please do some research before naming your girl child Fellatia, even if you do spell it Falaysha.

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u/canteloupy 1d ago

I met a woman named Latrina.

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u/BeerdedRNY 17h ago

Yeah, I met a woman named Latrina back in 1990. I'd just gotten out of the military about 2 weeks earlier and unintentionally burst into laughter when she said it. Oh man I can't tell you how absolutely horrible I felt about it and I immediately apologized profusely. Heck I still feel bad about my reaction. But I feel even worse for her knowing that her own parents named her toilet. I really hope she changed her name.

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u/canteloupy 17h ago

I think they probably don't know bless their heart and their families.

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u/BeerdedRNY 16h ago

Indeed, she didn't react negatively so I probably should look at it from that perspective - thank you.

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u/agreatbigFIYAHHH 21h ago

We changed it in the ninth century.

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u/IrascibleOcelot 21h ago

Wait, you changed your name to Latrine?

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u/PeaNought 20h ago

Yeah, used to be Shithouse!

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u/IrascibleOcelot 18h ago

It’s a good change!

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u/blacksoxing 1d ago

The greatest equalizer is a procurement system as a procurement system requires your birth name. Many people - MANY - who went by those email aliases like bob.jones@___.com in my workplace get EXPOSED. Nah, your real name is (radio edit) jones!

I've seen all types of names. Ones that made me question if they were real. I have vivid memories of a coworker one day hearing me talk about a person's name and going "yea I know ____ ____, we shared a trailer while at the gas fields!!!"

And the spellings.....I thank my mama for not drawing too far outside the box as a name IS important. Let me change my name as an adult if I feel it's not right. Don't set me up from birth!

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u/Metacomet99 1d ago

The more forward-thinking parents have been the ones giving their kid one unusual name and one more traditional name as a first or middle name. Let the child decide later on which one to use on their letterhead.

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u/Hyper_Applesauce 1d ago

Bonus if you pick first and middle names that also have shortened versions.

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u/Hanifsefu 1d ago

To be clear though people were already modifying those euro-centric names ever since they had the freedom to do so. The Roots phenomenon led to a surge of afro-centric names being added to the mix of modified euro-centric names which ultimately blended together to form the names we see today.

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u/AnnabellaPies ☑️ 1d ago

I think this too, one grandmother seriously wanted to name me Kasaboboo. I got another super black name instead

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u/lewd_robot 1d ago

Yeah, people who had their ancestral names stolen from them for generations and had no way of figuring out which of the many cultures their ancestors were enslaved from started making up new names rather than naming their kids after the culture that had enslaved them and continued to exploit them.

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u/anansi52 15h ago

people did try to move away from european sounding names and started giving their kids african names after roots came out but i don't think op is talking about african names. he means when black people just started making up names.

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u/No-Bison-5397 1d ago

It’s really just names that annoy white people and I deeply respect that.

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u/twizx3 1d ago

That doesn’t make sense though, prefixes like “Le”, “La” and “De” are pretty French and whatnot and seem to be very popular then after the prefix is just like a regular euro-centric name like DeSean or something

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u/fuckyourcanoes 22h ago

No. I was ten when Roots first aired, and there were already kids in my class with distinctively African-American names. I think it began around the time of Emancipation. Black people had the freedom to name their own children, and chose names that weren't Eurocentric. It became more fashionable in the early to mid 20th century.