Surname Saturday: Le Goff

Today, we continue with the Smith theme moving from the East back to the West.  So far, we have seen Germanic Smith and Slavic Kowatch.  Now, let's turn to the Western edge of Europe and the Celtic language family.

At one time, speakers of Celtic languages were spread across Europe over France, Spain and Central  Europe (see map here).  Celts settled as far away as Asia Minor (Turkey), where they are known as Galatians (as in Paul's Epistle to the Galatians). However, with the Roman conquest and later movements of people, including Germanic and Slavic peoples, the languages of the continental Celts were replaced by other languages, like the precursors of Romance languages, such French, Spanish, and Italian.  The Celtic languages survived only in the British Isles, where they were threatened by another invasion, that of the Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples.  Speakers of British Celtic were pushed to the West surviving in Wales and Cornwall.  Another group left Great Britain and settled in what is now Brittany.  The similarity between the names Britain and Brittany is not a coincident.  The Breton language has close ties to its British cousins, Welsh and Cornish.

To this day, the Breton language continues in Brittany, although it has rapidly lost ground to French over the last two centuries.  The language survives in many place names and surnames.  One common surname of Breton origin is that of my 7th great grandmother, Catherine Le Goff, the wife of François Marquer and the daughter of Pierre Le Goff and Marie Perrot.  The name Le Goff comes from the Breton word for blacksmith, gov.  Like many Breton surnames, it is formed by adding the French article Le before the Breton element, perhaps translating the original Breton article Ar.  Also, as is common with languages which were not standardized or used in written form until relatively late, the spelling of names often diverges significantly from the modern standard. 

Surname Saturday - Le Bourhis

Genealogy rarely provides simple answers to the question of who our ancestors were. We want something that we can hold on to, something that changes the way we see ourselves. We often embrace part of our ancestry. We try some recipes, take a dance class or start learning a new language. At the same time, we ignore the complexity that is there. We may downplay other parts of our family's past. Even in those cases that seem most clear cut, you may find surprises.

These complexities are sometime found even in the names of our ancestors. For all of human history, people have been moving around and mixing. Evidence for this is written in to our DNA and often displayed in surnames. Most names cannot be simply described by phrases like "an English name" or "a Russian name". Sometimes, names will even combine elements from more than one language.

One such surname is that of my second great grandmother, Marie Eugénie Le Bourhis. Marie Eugénie was born in Nantes, France on August 26, 1879. Her parents were from the department of Côtes-du-Nord (now Côtes d'Armor). Her father was born in Plouguernével, where many generations of Le Bourhis had lived before him.

The origin of the name is complicated. The name in its current form is clearly French; it includes the French definite article Le "the" and the name follows French orthography (spelling conventions). The name itself, however, has its origin in the Breton language, the Celtic language of Brittany. The area these ancestors were from was Breton-speaking. Bourhis comes from the Breton word bourc'hiz ['burxis], which means "people who live in a small market town". The word bourc'h by itself is the word for "village" or "small market town". Notice the combination c-apostrophe-h. It is used to indicate a velar fricative like the German ch in Bach. Without the apostophy ch is pronounced like English sh.

There is a suffix -ad in Breton which is used to indicate an inhabitant of a place. For example, Brittany is Breizh and so breizhad is one way of referring to a person from Brittany. In the plural, -ad is replaced by -iz and so breizhiz means Bretons. Bourc'hiz follows this same pattern with the singular form bourc'had, and thus means "inhabitants of a small market town". Bourc'hiz can also have the meaning of "middle-class" or "bourgeois".

There is one further layer to this name. The Breton word for a small market town is a Germanic borrowing. This word is related to the -burg of Hamburg and the -bury of Kingsbury (discussed here). This borrowing occurred long ago, perhaps before the Bretons migrated to France from Great Britain. The same Anglo-Saxons invasions that brought this word may have also caused the migration.

So, when someone asks what kind of name Le Bourhis is, you can simply state that it is Franco-Germano-Celtic.

Surname Saturday - Gardahaut

One of the ironies of my own research is that the great-grandparent who I knew the best is the one whose ancestry I know the least about. Suzanne Jeanne Gardahaut was born on Nov. 9, 1900 in Nantes, France and lived actively into her nineties. She was my one connection to something exotic in my own family background. Not only was she French, but she was something more, she was a Breton, from the culturally distinct region of Brittany in northwest France. This fascinated me, largely because it was something that made me feel unique. When it came time to make a display for French night, I proudly did it on Brittany. When I had the chance, I even took a course on Breton, the wonderful Celtic language of Brittany, which is related to Welsh and Cornish.

Along with this unusual heritage (at least where I lived), she also had an unusual surname. The name is absent from US Census (my great-grandmother married soon after she immigrated and is listed under her husband's name). The only historical record for the name on FamilySearch.org is my great-grandmother's ship record. The only place left to look is in France. One useful tool is the La France de noms on the genealogie.com website which can give you an idea of the distribution of surnames in France. The Gardahauts, few that there are, are clustered in or near Brittany in the northwest corner of France on the map for the period 1891-1915.

The meaning of the names is fairly obscure. One theory put forward on the GeneaNet (here) holds that the name is from the phrase garde à eau referring to a reservoir or mill race or is related to a place name Gardehaut in Côtes d'Armor. The evidence seems mainly speculative in either case.