Shelby

I'm way older than all of you. I was born in 1947 in Philadelphia. My mother named me Shelby, which for a girl was pretty unique, since from what I came to understand was a boy's name, popular in the South. Like one poster said, there's Shelby, North Carolina; also, Shelby County, Georgia (Atlanta); and Shelbyville, Tennessee, etc. Shelby was a famous Confederate soldier who took his men and their families to Mexico instead of surrendering. God's honest truth! So why the ?$! Did my mother name me Shelby. It has haunted me all these years. I hated the name so much that on my first day of Kindergarten, when it was my turn to introduce myself to the class I said: "My name is Sally!" God's honest truth! And therein began a difficult, and erstwhile challenging relationship with my teachers until high school graduation. All I wanted was to be like all the other girls with a girl's name.

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Sooo, ever the researcher I looked up the history of the name Shelby last night after reading these comments and to my surprise the popularity of the moniker as a girl's name did not begin with Steel Magnolias. Amazingly, it became somewhat popular (more girls named than boys) in the mid-1930's because of Barbara Stanwyk's character, Shelby Barret in the movie, The Woman in Red (1935). I think my mother had the name already picked out in case my older brother had been a girl (he was born in 1940).

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Scroll forward to the present day, I kind of like my name as I matured, but I definitely don't like bastardizing the name with bizarre spellings just to be cute. I used to say I was named after Carroll Shelby, Mustang's creator--that is, until I went to Maui and I met another Shelby-- who really truly was named after him. He was her godfather!

As this is my name I can tell you that growing up "willow farm" was not what this name meant. The meaning that use to be in all the name books and the one I believe to be correct is "cliff dweller." It's funny how people tend to touch names up a bit when they become popular, willow farm is a bit nicer to swallow I suppose but it isn't correct.