Our resident genealogist explores big meanings in little words
People whose first language is not English frequently have trouble connecting written words with how they’re pronounced. Try explaining to a new English speaker the logic of the syllable “ough” as pronounced in bough, bought, cough and dough: ow, aw, off and o. Given this sort of chaos, you can’t be too surprised at how even little words can confuse us.
English is so filled with ambiguity you almost have to grow up with it to realize its many nuances, or double meanings. Which way we say “wind up” bestows a different meaning. We get the wind up when we’re upset, or we wind up someone to annoy them, or are we just concluding something?
English is replete with cover-up words. Think of heck, darn, gee, cripes, gosh, and what they were smoothing over for polite company. No adult needs a translation of our euphemisms. The expression “a four-letter word” has entered our vocabulary, whether it glosses over what Pierre Trudeau dubbed “fuddle duddle,” or something less offensive.
It’s no surprise then, that the world of genealogy is also full of misleading, but usually less offensive, cover-up words.
It is commonly believed that “de” in front of a name denotes nobility, or at least that someone is a cut above the crowd. If your name was De Vere, you might have had a claim to the long-extinct earldom of Oxford. Unfortunately, the truth is less glamorous most of the time.
The French “de,” on the other hand, may have been used in surnames in its literal sense of “from.” So DeBlois was the man who came from Blois in France. Delisle’s folks once came from an island.
My own family name used to end in the classy “de St. David.” But it wasn’t a noble title. It simply told people in Ireland that this Norman family had come there after living in St. Davids in Pembrokeshire, Wales. So I had to scrap those delusions of grandeur.
Dutch names also often have a “de” in them, which simply means “the,” and not nobility. A Dutch man named De Vos (which means “the fox”) wasn’t a lord—his ancestor most likely lived near an inn with a fox on its sign. A British person named Cox and a Dutch person named de Haan (meaning “the rooster”) would have gotten their names in a similar way: poultry figured on those inn signs in the days before there were street numbers to help people find addresses. Inn signs also explain how many important sounding family names like King, Prince, Bishop and Pope originated. Pictures of such dignitaries once adorned many a painted board over wayside taverns, alongside animals such as lions or wolves. DeJong or DeYoung was the young, and DeWitt was the white, just like their French equivalents, Lejeune and Leblanc, respectively. When the Dutch wanted to indicate where a person came from, they resorted to the three-letter word, “van.” Van Dyck lived near the dikes, and Van Buskirk (from “bos,” meaning woods, and “kerk,” meaning church) resided beside a church in the woods.
Some French surnames were also created using a three-letter prefix. For example, “dit,” which means “call” in English. Take Godin dit Bellefontaine, or Bastarche dit Basque for example, and you see the second part took on a new life as a new surname. This reminds us that not all surnames arrived here in Atlantic Canada in their present form. And that should be a warning to genealogists not to be too literal-minded.
After all, some Bennets and Benights may once have been called Benoît (which means “blessed”). Perhaps one of the Poujets lived near a prominent rock or on stony land. That could explain how he would have been dit (“called”) Lapierre (“the stone”).
Who needs four-letter words when fewer can prove to be more lasting?
Dr. Terrence M. Punch is a Member of the Order of Canada. His latest book, Montbéliard Immigrants to Nova Scotia, 1749 - 1752, was recently published and is available from genealogical.com