Tina Knowles-Lawson is one of my favorite people. Her kids are grown and they have babies of their own, so Tina gets to be the fun grandma. Tina left Beyonce and Solange’s father, Mathew Knowles, in 2009 and their divorce was finalized in 2011. Tina then remarried in 2015, to a nice guy named Richard Lawson. Tina has become a celebrity in her own right and she seems to enjoy that. She posts funny stuff and memes on Instagram all the time and she gives interviews and all of that. I’ve heard some stuff here and there about how Tina and Beyonce have some relatives with the name “Beyince,” and I really didn’t know what to think. Turns out, Tina has a really interesting explanation:
Tina Knowles-Lawson is opening up about the origin of Beyoncé’s name. The fashion designer and businesswoman, 66, spoke about the unique moniker during Tuesday’s inaugural episode of In My Head with Heather Thomson podcast, sharing that “Beyoncé” is actually her maiden name even though it’s now a handle widely associated with her famous daughter.
“A lot of people don’t know that Beyoncé is my last name. It’s my maiden name,” she said. “My name was Celestine Beyoncé, which at that time was not a cool thing to have that weird name. I wanted my name to be Linda Smith because those were the cool names.”
The matriarch, who is also mom to singer Solange, went on to say that only several people in her family have the “Beyoncé” last name. Due to a clerical error, others — such as her brother and his children — now have “Beyincé” as their surname, according to Knowles-Lawson.
“I think me and my brother Skip were the only two that had B-E-Y-O-N-C-E,” she said, before explaining why some family members spell the name differently. “It’s interesting — and it shows you the times — because we asked my mother when I was grown. I was like, ‘Why is my brother’s name spelled B-E-Y-I-N-C-E? You know, it’s all these different spellings.’ And my mom’s reply to me was like, ‘That’s what they put on your birth certificate.’ So I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you argue and make them correct it?’ And she said, ‘I did one time. The first time, and I was told be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate because, at one time, Black people didn’t get birth certificates.”
Knowles-Lawson added that it “must’ve been horrible” for her own mother to “not to even be able to have her children’s names spelled correctly.”
“So we all have different spellings,” she said. “People don’t even put the two together and know that’s the same name.”
Those kinds of clerical errors do happen – my father’s legal birthday in America was different than his actual birthday because of a clerical error with his citizenship/green card. It’s weird when it’s a damn birth certificate though! You would think that the hospital would take pains to, you know, at least double-check the spelling. “Oh the kid’s last name is Beyonce? No, I got it, I know how to spell it, two Es and an I.” Anyway, no, I totally didn’t know that Beyonce was Tina’s maiden name.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Tina’s husband, Richard Lawson, is an actor with a very long career. I still remember the first movie I saw him in which was “Poltergeist”
Beat me to it Bluesky.
When I saw their wedding photo I was surprised to learn they were dating.
Oh, wow, I had no idea either that they were married. My son has been obsessed with Poltergeist, he just loves that movie, and I LOVED the 80’s mini series V when I was as a kid!
I actually have a clerical error on my birth certificate and so does my husband. My last name has an unattended space in it that I didn’t realize until I got my passport. It is supposed to be MyName and shows up My Name. My husband’s error is that his name is missing a letter.
Both my grandmothers did as well – one was the wrong birthdate so my grandma fully took advantage and claimed whatever day you called her on her birthday was “actually” the other day. 😂
My other grandma they spelled her name Jeane on her birth certificate even though it was meant to be Jean. And the family just went with it, lol! In both cases I was like – can’t you get that changed? Or at least just go by whatever you want and not by what the birth certificate says? I guess not tho.
My name has a space as well, and capitalization in it, and it is inconsistent across all documents, mostly because the birth certificate gives zero indication of capitals (its ALL caps!) so people just type it up kinda any which way they want, and some people arent fond of spaces also.. lol
Now I dont know what my own name should be. 😛
A relative of mine, who has since passed, had his name printed one way on his birth certificate but on later paperwork his first and middle names were swapped. To this day we don’t which way was the “correct” name.
My great aunt is like this. My great grandparents wanted A B and when naming her the godmother named her B A. Everyone refers to her by a completely different name, hah.
Unattended??? You mean unintended??
My dad forgot one of the “l”s in my middle name Michelle. I thought he was trying to be French and sophisticated for years when he finally told me he misspelled it. Thankfully, I looked at the paperwork after giving birth and corrected my husband’s spelling of my son’s name. Otherwise he would have been Rayn instead of Ryan.
We did end up having to re-do his birth certificate 3 times because he was born at a military hospital that wrote 00:00 (midnight) as his birth time. They kept putting 12:00pm on his birth certificate. The last time we went down in person. It was fun watching my Navy husband’s head explode listening to this lady tell him that 00:00 is military time for noon.
My BC lists “None” as my middle name, because my mom couldn’t leave the damned space blank. So while I tell people I have no middle name, technically it is “None”. SMDH
I have a clerical error on mine too. I was born in Spain which has a different name system to us.
In Spain, everyone has two last names, their father’s paternal surname and their mother’s paternal surname. When they get married, no one changes their name. Then the children of couples take their names from both of their parents and so on.
My parents’ only having one surname each, which was the same as each others’, really confused them. So they made it sound like my parents were related, siblings I think.
And It’s not a birth certificate in the sense of a form with filled in blanks, it’s like a story / long paragraph written about me. It was WAY too hard to get fixed at the time, so it stayed.
It’s rare in Australia for people who need to see my birth certificate to be fluent in Spanish, so it mostly goes unnoticed; but every now and then someone picks up on it and gets a strange look on their face. It’s pretty funny.
Mine is the story of cultural misunderstanding and corrupt, disorganised and ineffectual bureaucracy. Tina’s is the story of racism. Not the same at all; but since we were on the topic!
On another note, Celestine Beyoncé is a beautiful name!
i wonder what happened to Tina’s mother happened in my family, too. My grandmother was a home birth and the midwife who registered the birth didn’t like my grandmother’s first name and changed it from Ellen to Helen, a fact that was unnoticed for 65 years. It may not have been a hospital birth.
If I remember correctly Oprah’s name was misspelled on her birth certificate too.
Yes it’s supposed to be Orpah, which is a biblical name!
Same, my friends parents are from the late 40s-50s South.
Her father name was to be NOAH. Birth certificate says Norah.
Her mom was supposed to be Joanne. The hospital listed it as Joe Ann on her birth certificate.
My marriage license has the wrong date on it. We got married on May 31, 2008 and I guess the pastor who filled out the marriage certificate wrote the wrong date. When we got our marriage license in the mail it has May 30, 2008. We joke that we’re not legally married.
We have a Tyler in the family whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate as Myler and no one realized it for years. He got it corrected. We’ve had some laughs over it though.
Tyler Myler 😂
He should have kept it as Myler, lol!
I think Keira Knightley also mentioned that her parents spelled her name wrong on the certificate. I think it should be Kiera.
The Beyhive has known this for twenty years.😁
I was thinking “how is this new news to people?” 🙂
The clerical error info is new, seeing as how there are articles, as recently as last yr, saying Tina was born Celestine Beyince, when she wasn’t, but even if that part wasn’t included, everybody doesn’t follow celebs as closely as their stan groups do. People learn things at their own pace every day, and that’s okay.
I knew it was her mom’s maiden name! But this actually happened to us when we went to get our marriage license. The woman already clearly hated her job (nice one government, sticking a sourpuss in charge of helping soon to be newlyweds get married), so we made sure to be extra nice to her. So when she spelled our name wrong (after we both wrote it down correctly in all block caps and she had my husband’s drivers license and spelled it out loud for her), I was afraid to go back and tell her it needed correction. She actually ROLLED HER EYES AT ME when I said “excuse me but there’s no T in our name.” She fixed it but I’ll never forget that. People get so shitty when you correct them about names. Like it wouldn’t bother them if you got theirs wrong. 🙃
One of my grandparents’ families immigrated from Russia, and the last name has been spelled a million different ways. In researching I came to realize it’s probably not even close, in spelling or pronunciation,to the original name.
Celestine is such a pretty name, I have one several generations back too. I didn’t realize that was Tina’s full name.
My grandpa’s middle name is supposed to be Harrison but the nurse only wrote H on the birth certificate. Same on my dad’s said my grandpa was supposed to be Walter Jerry, they just put W.J. He now says that his mom internet to name him initials all along lol.
My grandmother was born in 1921. Her birthday is actually 10 days before what is stated on her birth certificate. The doctor who traveled around to black families to deliver their babies didn’t file her birth certificate until the 11th. So that became her official birthday, even though, she was born on the 1st. She was lucky to even have a birth certificate.
Huh. I thought it was common knowledge that Beyonce was her maiden name. They always told everyone that when Destiny’s Child was just hitting it big. I remember reading/seeing it in several interviews.
Tina only recently started discussing the clerical error bit regarding the spelling this year, after fans in IG comments tried to correct her, saying why did you spell it Beyoncé when it’s Beyince? All she ever said before was it is her maiden name, and fans assumed, due to the spelling of her niece’s last name, that Tina herself changed the I to the O when spelling her daughter’s name, so she is correcting that belief. Her wiki was only recently changed to reflect that her surname is spelled with an O, you can still find articles on the web spelling it Beyince. A lot of the Beyhive have even debated how Beyince is pronounced, thinking it’s Bee-YEN-something when it’s said just like Beyoncé.
I remember reading about this a long time ago actually! Not the clerical error bit, but the fact that Beyince/Beyonce was Tina Lawson’s maiden name. I distinctly remember her saying at one point that her husband actually scoffed at the idea of naming their kid that, because he thought it would be stupid to give a last name as a first name to a child, and that Beyonce would get made fun of in school or something. Welp. Jokes on him. Beyonce is a fantastic first name (as is Solange, for that matter). Even Carter is objectively a great last name as a first name option. Meanwhile, no one is out here naming their kid “Knowles” because…well, why inflict *that* on your child?
Clerical errors though are really fascinating. I’m Indian, and I don’t know where your father is from specifically, but, in a lot of instances, the first real piece of paperwork that people of his generation would get would be their school registration certificate. The name, birth date and spellings used in those would then be the “official” one that gets carried over to any other documentation. It’s not that birth certificates didn’t exist, or that you couldn’t get one, but just that they weren’t exactly the most common pieces of documentation to have on hand.
My dad was registered for school in a different state to the one where his family was from, and that affected how his name was spelled. It’s a localized English rendition of the spelling of his name, vs how people tend to spell it in English in the actual state where they speak his language. He switches back and forth on the spellings informally, but the official one is rather different to the somewhat more common version people use.
And inaccurate birth dates are also incredibly common. My grandma’s is off as well, but only by a few days. There are also parents who, because the school registration certificate was self-completed, would, ahem, fudge the dates even more than that by a factor of a few months. A lot of the time, this was because their kid had a birthday really late in the year (November, December), and that would have meant they’d only be able to register them for school a year later. So a lot of parents would want to avoid that by bumping up their kids’ birth dates to March/April/May so they would be eligible for school registration.
This is really interesting, thanks A! My best friend was born in Punjab in 1988, so not TOO long ago and I believe record keeping was getting better by then. But we’re both into astrology and there’s no birth time or location listed on her birth certificate, so no chance of doing a complete birth chart for her.
Sounds minor I know, but it’s interesting to compare that to even my father’s 1933 California birth certificate that lists the hospital and the exact time. And I’m an immigration lawyer who comes across international birth certificates all the time, with a wide range of accuracy and detail.
My birth certificate doesn’t list that information either. But the person who does know this stuff is my grandma. I’d encourage your friend to get in touch with her family. It’s quite likely that she already has an (Eastern) horoscope that was drawn up for her, in which case someone in her immediate family would have to know the exact time of birth.
If that’s not an option, well, congratulations to her. Some of us only get but one horoscope. She gets all the possible ones for that date, because any of those times could be her time of birth, haha.
I don’t recall her saying Mathew had a problem, but maybe I missed it. I do remember in Rolling Stone, circa 2004, she said her father, as in Bey’s grandpa, thought it was silly. And it’s funny you mention Carter as a first name, because I was thinking this morning maybe Blue Ivy or Rumi will pass it on. lol.
Might not be a case of them guessing the spelling wrong but rather a case of the “I” and “O” being side by side on a typewriter.
I thought Beyince was her maiden name and that Beyonce was the clerical error.
I’m really glad she cleared that up, I’ve been looking stupid to the rest of the Beygency.
I cringe every time I see Cara Delevingne name. I’m convinced it’s a name of French origin that has been misspelt.
It should be: Delavigne (meaning, “de la vigne”, from the vineyard) And what seems to confirm it is the way it is pronounced.
I found out when I applied for a passport in the 1980’s that my only legal name was ‘Williams’, I was told Sandra was added long after the county seal was affixed to my birth certificate. The reason was racism in rural Arkansas in the 1950’s. The clinic wanted my mom out as quickly as possible because they didn’t admit or take care of “coloreds.” They took her in because she was in active labor but did not want them there when the sun came up. So they threw on my fathers last name and sent them on their way. Later they went to complain that there was only one name and they added Sandra, but at that point it wasn’t legal.
Wow, my mom’s maiden name is Williams and I always wondered if it could work as a first, but just figured I was crazy for even thinking it. I’m happy to know that a girl named Williams exists, despite the cruel way it came about.