COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Long before Tyrone, Jermaine and Darnell came along, there were Isaac, Abe and Prince. 

A new study from Ohio State University reveals the earliest evidence of distinctively Black first names in the United States, finding them arising in the early 1700s and then becoming increasingly common in the late 1700s and early 1800s. 

The results confirm previous work that shows the use of Black names didn’t start during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as some scholars have argued, said Trevon Logan, co-author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University, according to a press release from OSU.

This research is a follow-up to a 2014 study by the same researchers that found distinctive Black names were being used in the period following the Civil War. It was more difficult to find records that document the names of enslaved people, Logan said. Many official records list them as numbers without names. 

The researchers found three sources that did contain the names of enslaved people in the United States. Two of the three sources also included the names of the buyers or sellers, which allowed comparisons between the names of Black and white people. The researchers supplemented the evidence of racial name distinctiveness by analyzing white names in the 1850 Census, the release said.

The names given to Black children in the United States were distinctively African American, Logan said. None of them had roots in Africa. Many of them had Biblical origins, like Abraham and Isaac. Other Black names that appeared more frequently in one or more of the data sets included Titus and Prince.

Results showed a clear increase in the use of Black names over the period of the study. In one data set, 3.17% of enslaved babies born between 1770 to 1790 were likely to hold a Black name, but that increased to 4.5% of those born between 1810 and 1830. And they were truly distinctive from white people.

“The actions of both Black and white people fed into the process that resulted in distinctive Black names.” For white people born before 1770, more than 4.75% held Black names, but that declined to less than 2% for those born from 1810 to 1830, the press release concluded.