The Endless Fascination of Names
There is a nice explanation of French Canadian names on Rootsweb from Fr. John Sullivan and Diane Szabo. They have also put together a list of name variations based on research they’ve done using records from various sources.
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March 16, 2008 - Posted by cheryljk | Names | Dit names, French Canadian Names, Name lists
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What’s in a name?
The first lesson of genealogy is that everyone has the same name. For those of us with French Canadian roots this statement rises to new heights. We’ve all seen that family…you know the one that has 17 children with what seem like a dozen girls named Marie and 5 boys named Jean! Then we follow them as they age through the census after census and record after record and see that no one is named either Marie or Jean but maybe something closely resembling what was their middle name if and only if the census taker has spelled it correctly or the priest didn’t turn it into francophonic latin on a marriage or birth certificate. As if that didn’t leave us lost in the landscape of the past, family and friends forget about last names and attach descriptive tags after whatever nom de chance the person is known by and proceed to act as if this new appellation was in fact the true surname of the person. Then, once you are completely confused they laugh in your face by marrying someone who looks to be totally different, only you can’t figure out who the spouse is until you’ve peeled back all the layers of names only to find… the couple are first cousins!
Well, you think maybe there was no one else to marry, and that does turn out to be true, because we only marry the marriageable and if everyone’s related we marry relatives or don’t marry. Someone said that every French Canadian is 8th cousin to every other (and to themself) the more I do this the more I believe it. After all there were a very limited number of French who settled here originally.
Some of the families have so many children that the kids span generations with uncles and aunts the same age as or younger than their nieces and nephews. Think about it… if you are the youngest of 17 children and your parent was the among the oldest ones in a family of 15 you could easily meet and fall in love with the grandchild of one of your parents’ cousins and after all the name changes never realize that you were first cousins once removed! It was the job of the parish priest to keep this from happening, but those guys were pragmatists and feared for the damnation of their parishioner if the couples engaged in extramarital sex and so were likely to seek dispensations for them after trying to persuade young lovers that their marital fate was elsewhere, and so the priests usually allowed the marriages and despite all that we worry about with inbreeding most families did just fine.
This blog is part of the Chazy Lake/Kings and Associated families website, and is dedicated to the name game. This is where to look if you are really confused about who is who when looking at one of the Lucys, Sullivans, or Jeans. Here is where you come to figure out how D’Amours De Courberon is related to Colburn and why the hell they aren’t Scottish with a name like that; or how it is that some guy with an angel’s name had a reputation as quite a devil.
This is also the place to write about how family history makes you feel, that charge that we all get from seeing some long gone ancestor gain a persona as we flesh out a life from the dusty records.
Welcome all ye who seek to bring order into confusion and are brave enough to know that you must certainly fail.
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Yes, the FC name game is fascinating. A person could write a good dissertation about these names, and maybe it has already been done several times. At one time I had thought that the old angel, Séraphim, anglicized his name to Sullivan because early on there were Irishmen who sought employment at the Dannemora prison, and he wanted to fit in. Now, I doubt that because I find that there are earlier Sullivans in the mix. Uncle Fil/Phil/Philamore/Thilamon, etc. once told me that he thought that his sister’s married name of Viens was ridiculous. “Who would want to be named Come?” Of course, there was also Cumm and Cummings. Dad always referred to his sister, Aunt Sadie, as Cider while a census report calls her Seder. Even less common names like Valeda/Valida/Valeta occur several times over the years. Shortly after brother Donald was born a Lyon Mountain priest asked me what name he had been given. The priest said that he should have a saint’s name. When I told him that it was Donald he was pleased because he considered that Donald was a variation of Daniel and that it was biblical. Notice how frequently the name François/Françoise shows up in our family tree starting with Françoise Bouet the wife of Jean Roy. This goes down to brother Corky, also know as Francis, and his daughter Franci. I think that the barbarian Franks were Germanic and founded the Carolingian line of kings. Let’s blame it all on them.