Um, How Did We Not Know Where Beyoncé’s Name Came From?

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Wait a sec...how did we miss this? On a podcast, business mogul and mother to Queen Beyoncé Knowles, Tina Knowles-Lawson, casually dropped that "Beyoncé" is actually her maiden name. And with that being public information, we're wondering how in the heck we didn't get that memo before just now.

Knowles-Lawson dropped this bomb on the first episode of the In My Head with Heather Thomson podcast, hosted by the entrepreneur and stylist, who has worked with Beyoncé.

"A lot of people don’t know that Beyoncé is my last name. It’s my maiden name," Knowles-Lawson said.

She continued, "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."

However, there's even more mystery surrounding the Beyoncé surname in this family. Due to clerical errors, specifically misspelled birth certificates, Knowles-Lawson is one of only a handful of family members to have this spelling of the Beyoncé last name.

"I think me and my brother Skip were the only two that had B-E-Y-O-N-C-E," she said, spelling out the last name. "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.'"

When her mother tried to have the misspelling corrected, she faced backlash from the hospital because she was Black. "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.'"

"So we all have different spellings," Knowles-Lawson said. "People don't even put the two together and know that's the same name."

When Knowles-Lawson married Beyoncé's father Matthew Knowles in 1980, she changed her name, and then did so again in 2015 when she remarried Richard Lawson. We feel like we fell asleep during this important Beyoncé history lesson, but at least we're all caught up now.