Introductory Notes

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Return to Surnames in the Direct Line

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Structure and numbering system

          Each page for a surname in my direct line begins with the first ancestor to live in New Orleans.  In most cases, this is the immigrant ancestor. In a few cases, it is a descendant of a family that had lived elsewhere in the United States before coming to the Crescent City.  All known descendants born prior to 1907 are listed.  In the interest of privacy, those born in 1907 or later are not listed online; but I have information about them in my private files and shall gladly share it with other family members.  

          The second part of each surname page contains the ancestry of the original New Orleanian as far back as research has taken me.  In the case of the families who had settled in other states before arriving in New Orleans, this part will have two subsections: one for the ancestral line in America and a second subsection for ancestry of the immigrant ancestor.

          The third section of each surname page contains information on individuals also bearing that same surname, but whose relationship to the immigrant ancestor has not yet been determined. Please email me if you can establish or disprove their relationship.

          The fourth section contains notes on sources, a bibliography of printed and online materials, and contact information for others working on this line.  Please email me to let me know if you are a researcher who'd like to be listed on one of the surname pages.

          Each one of my direct ancestors is identified by a number in parenthesis following his or her name.  The system used is the Sosa-Stradonitz classification and the numbers correlate to those on my complete, but abbreviated, family tree.  The numbering used for the descendants is  D'Aboville system and those numbers precede the names instead of following them.  Websites explaning  Sosa-Stradonitz and D'Aboville numbering can be found by googling those names.

           Many lines are not yet complete and I welcome additions to the family tree.  Please email me at the address found at the bottom of the Home page with information you would like to share.

Until the late nineteenth century, most people were much more concerned that their name was pronounced correctly rather than that it was spelled correctly.  The vast majority of people lived in small villages, where messages were delivered orally and not in writing.  To complicate matters, country school teachers often taught spelling as it was pronounced in their spoken dialect or local accent. Uniform rules of spelling did not generally take hold until the nineteenth century (think of Noah Webster and the dictionary) and, as would be expected, permeated schools and governmental institutions much more quickly in urban areas than in rural ones.  Each surname page shows variant spellings just under the surname title.  These are not exhaustive, but include only those that I have actually found in documents.  Again, if you find the surname with another spelling, please email me and I shall add it to the list.  

          The names from the Lorraine region of France show the greatest number of different spellings.  It cannot be emphasized enough how helpful it is to understand the rules of pronunciation of other languages and even other regional dialects spoken by your ancestors.  For example, the dialect of German spoken in the Lorraine area includes the following substitutions: "d" for "t" (Denes/Tenes); "p" for "b" (Polander for Bohlender); "f" for "v" (Feltin for Valentine);  and many others.  It is also helpful to remember that in German the vowels "a," "o," and "u" when written with an umlaut are transcribed as those vowels with the letter "e" following them, e.g. Haerer, Schoenberger, and Wuest.  In German the "o" and the  "u" with an umlaut indicate sounds that have no counterpart in English and so "oe" or "ue" have e often retained.   Over time "ue" sometimes was replaced by "i, " e.g. Wuendstein/Windstein.  On the other hand, an umlauted "a" sounds much like a short "e" in English and over time, a name that was orginally spelled with an "ae" in the U.S. will often eventually drop the "a."  (Bohlaender become Bohlender.)  Many instances of double vowels in German became single vowels in the nineteenth century.  See for example, Schaaff/Schaff and Beer/Behr.

        Over the last several centuries, it has become common for Europeans and Americans to have two or more given names.  In the English speaking world, the first name is the most important one and the one by which an individual is called.  In continental Europe, on the other hand, it is the name that immediately precedes the surname that  is the most important.  Johann Gottlob Haerer was not called "Johan," but rather "Gottlob."  Marie Elina Solange Lambert was called "Solange."  If the full name was not given, it was the first or first two given names that were omitted.  It is very important when using search engines to remember to check all possible combinations of given names.  My paternal grandfather, Lambert Joseph Gonzales, was issued a birth certificate in Louisiana as "Joseph Lambert Gonzales."  He was always callled Lambert.  Evidently his parents gave his name European style when he was born in 1891, although his family had been in Lousiana since 1809, and all of his other vital records show the English-speaking custom of naming, i.e. Lambert Joseph Gonzales.

          In polyglot cultures like that of New Orleans, the given names were translated into the language being spoken or written.  There are contemporaneous documents in early nineteenth century New Orleans referring to one person variously as "Pedro Lambert," "Pierre Lambert," and  "Peter Lambert." If a surname was that of a common object, it was often translated also.  My paternal grandmother, Henrietta Bird, was often called (teasingly) by her French sisters-in-law "Henriette Oiseau."  The best known example of a translated surname was in the German Coast area of Louisiana around 1720 when the German surname "Zweig" was translated by the French priests as "La Branche" and so the family has been called for nearly three hundred years.

          English and continental customs also vary in the naming of married women.  Married women in Virginia, for example, really did totally lose their maiden surnames upon marriage.  Women on the European continent, and in French and Spanish colonies in the New World, continued to be named in documents by the names they had at birth or baptism, although it is always followed by the equivalent of the phrase "lawful wife of [husband's name]."  When researching a woman of continental European descent, be sure to search under her maiden name, even if she had been married for fifty years at the time of her death.  One also occasionally sees a married woman from Continental Europe sign her name without a given name but with her maiden name followed by her husband's surname,  e.g.,  Oliveira Gonzales or Chapdu Lambert.

About me and my research

When I was eight years old in 1957, my church parish, St. Rose de Lima, celebrated its centennial.  As part of the festivities, special liturgical items were commissioned and the contributors were listed in a booklet printed thanking them for their generosity.  For some reason that list of names exercised a powerful fascination over me as few other things ever have.  There were astonishing given names that were borne by no one of my personal acquaintance and surnames that defied all the rules of phonics that were the focus of so much of my school day.  (Although French was still spoken by elderly ladies in my neighborhood and a few of my older relatives, no one had taught me how to read it.) 

The very exotic nature of my little enclave of creole culture was greatly reinforced when the next year my family moved first to Connecticut, and then to Washington, D.C.  I seemed to be a figure of curiosity to schoolmates and teachers alike.  Why, with a surname like Gonzales, didn't I have a Spanish accent?  Why did I get strange looks when I explained that no one in the family spoke Spanish, but that some of them spoke French?  Why were they amazed when I said that I was French, Spanish, German, and Irish?  It certainly was not worthy of being remarked upon back home in New Orleans.  Why was it so very odd elsewhere?  (It helps to remember here that the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. in the late fifties was a good bit smaller than it is now and, apart from a few European war brides, they were clustered in big cities.) 

By the time I was in high school back in New Orleans, I had begun to pester relatives about whatever they could tell me about these French, Spanish, German, and Irish people that I desccended from.  It was not until after my graduation from law school in 1973 that I finally had time to begin my own research.  Fortunately the offices where I worked were downtown quite near the main New Orleans Public Library, with its wonderful card index of every obituary that had appeared in local newspapers.  Here one could begin research with just a name and an approximate year of death.  Once having found the obituary, it was a simple matter to find marriage and death certificates, property and court records, and census entries.  Since I had been trained as a lawyer, it had not occurred to me to approach the research in any other way than through primary documents and I am still very sceptical of the usefulness of published genealogies.  While they are helpful to point out the direction that research should take, they are no substitute for the actual documentation of an ancestor's birth, marriage(s), and death.  Many European records have been microfilmed by the Church of the Latter Day Saints and the microfilms are available in this country at  a very modest fee.  Those microfilmed church records are the sources for my documents for many families in France and Germany.  Please ask for documentation of my research.  I shall be happy to provide it.