–

Nearly three years ago now, I wrote a post called “The origins of the Beausang surname I – French Revolution? Try East Cork“. In it, I gave some of my thoughts on the Bouzan/Beausang surname, my main conclusion being that the Bouzans of North America were Irish immigrants, rather than French, and that the Bouzans, Boozans and Beausangs across Ireland and North America are descended from the same person, more than likely one man who emigrated from France to East Cork before 1800.

The question remains, though: who is that common ancestor? In the absence of any firm leads, I delayed my second post on the topic. In the meantime, over 1,000 people have read the original post and I’ve had interesting comments and emails from many people outlining their own ideas. Given all that, what I thought I should do is post my latest thoughts, intermingled with what I’ve learned from the work of others.

Who are we looking for at all?

The main problem is that we don’t know for certain who we’re looking for. By this I mean, we don’t know the two crucial details we need to track someone down as the common ancestor of Bouzans and Beausangs: what time period he arrived in Ireland and even what his surname was!

To give you a flavour of how many potential first steps there are, according to the Irish Family History Foundation website, there are at least two dozen Bouzan/Beausang variations in 19th Century Irish birth and marriage records alone (Bozan, Bouzan, Buzin, Boozan, Beausang, Buzan, Boozane, Bouzane, Bouzanne, Bowsang, Boosan, Bauzan, Bousan, Bosan, Bousane, Beauzan, Beausong, Bozann, Boozang… you get the idea!)

The two most common spellings in Ireland in the mid-1800s were Boozane and Beausang; indeed by the 1901 Census, there were only Beausangs left in Ireland. But the problem is that these may have been the most common purely because of the decision of a parish priest or primary school teacher in a key parish to standardise the spelling. Early records are much more varied and two of the earliest marriages have more unusual variants: Bozane and Bozang. Indeed, the oldest Irish record existing of “Beausang” dates only from a baptism in 1838, thirty years after the first written record, a Bouzane wedding of 1808, and nearly 40 years after the 1799 gravestone for Joanna Boosean.

The case for the Huguenots

Why is all this relevant? It’s critical because it changes the frame of reference for all follow-on work. For example, GeneaNet have detailed French records from the 1700s. There are about 325 relevant records that I could find on their system, and I’ve marked them on this Google map. They’re colour-coded, with Beausang denoted by turqoise/light blue and close variants (e.g. Beaussan, Beaussant) in yellow – a picture of the map is shown below.

Map of Geneanet's Beausang/Bouzan/etc records, ca.1700-ca.1900

You can see that the light blue and yellow (Beausang) is scattered across much of the northern half of France. However, the key with surnames is density and that density is highest in a small triangle in Poitou-Charentes, half way down the west coast of France. For example, in the middle of that triangle, the town of Charroux contains 10 Beaussan marriages between 1691 and 1758, and there are four Beausang births (and an equal number of deaths) in the nearby town of Brioux-sur-Boutonne between 1766 and 1800.

What’s very interesting about this is that the bulk of Irish Huguenots came from the main port of Charentes, La Rochelle, and the surrounding area. Thus, if we think that the original surname we’re looking for is Beausang (or something very close, like Beaussant), then the likely home town in France is right in the middle of Huguenot territory.

Beausang or Boozan?

But what if we should be looking at Boozan, not Beausang, for the original source? After all, the earliest Irish records are not Beausang, they are Boosean (a woman born in 1776, according to her graveyard transcription) and Bouzane/Bozane (early 1800s weddings).

So if we look instead on the map for red, green, purple (Buzan and Bouzan) in France, we find a different picture. The Buzan surname is almost exclusively one from France’s Catalan province of Roussillon (which has been a French territory since 1659 and is now known as Pyrénées-Orientales). In that pocket of the French-Spanish border near Andorra, there were three dozen marriages involving the name Buzan in the 18th and 19th centuries in the pretty Pyrenees village of Casteil, and another two dozen in the town of Vernet-les-Bains, one mile down the road.

International man of mystery

But even all of this assumes we should be looking in France. Familysearch.org has very comprehensive records from across Europe. Looking at both Boozan and Beausang strands, it’s clear that we can’t just assume the name is French just because it sounds French now.

For example, a Marcus Beyswang had children in Wurttemberg in the 1500s and the surname reappears (also as Boessewang and Beisang) in nearby Baden in the 1700s. In the grand scheme of things on Europe, Baden-Wurttemberg is not too far from north-east France. And sure enough, in the 1670s, in Verdun (Meuse, North-East France), a Jean-Baptiste Beausang had a son Robert Joseph Beausang. Nearby, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, the surname Bazin appears in the 1500s which may be related to the names Baussin/Beaussant that appear in the same region in the 1700s. So perhaps, France is the place after all…

Remember Buzan, though, which is a Catalan, rather than French name. There are a large number of Spanish entries with surnames similar to Bouzan and Beausang. In particular, in the Basque country, especially around the city of Kortezubi, there was a surname Besanguiz from the 1500s on, while elsewhere in Spain, there were a number of Buyzons and Bazans Valladolid.

Overall, I believe in Occam’s Razor – the most likely answer is, most likely, the right answer. However, the point with the German and Spanish entries is to show that we can never really write off the random. It’s perfectly possible that someone like a Gerardus Bezuijen (born Amsterdam 1671) or an ancestor of Giuseppe Bausan (born Capua 1793) could scupper all our best theories about Huguenot scions cavorting with Irish girls.

As it happens, familysearch.org throws up a couple of eerily close candidates for “random interlopers”. One is Bernard Basano, who had two children in 1638 and 1647 in Dublin, Roger and Mungo. Another is Germaine and Alice Bazine, who had a child, Thomas, in Dublin in 1675.

Riddle me this: Catholic Huguenots?

Nonetheless, because of three factors, one the timeline involved (early 1700s), the others being the locations involved in France (near La Rochelle) and Ireland (near Youghal), I think that most likely origin of Ireland’s Beausangs and North America’s Boozans and Bouzans is a Huguenot migrant to Ireland. And indeed it’s the most popular explanation among Beausangs, Bouzans and their relations today. But one nagging question remains: how could a Protestant refugee have a lineage comprising almost exclusively Catholic descendants? In my opinion, this is not nearly as improbable as it sounds.

For example, previous commenter John Beausang brought to my attention an 1854 article in the Ulster Journal of Achaeology on Youghal’s Huguenots. The author, Rev Samuel Hayman, records that most Youghal Huguenots were military men, not merchants, but that even by 1850, they were “with hardly an exception become extinct”. With such small numbers, it’s clear that the Huguenots who stayed past the early 1700s had small families.

Thus, all that’s needed for Beausangs to be descended from one Huguenot immigrant is a single Catholic-Protestant marriage. Suppose Jean Beausang moves over to Youghal from France in the 1690s. He has one son and two daughters. The daughters and their descendents disappear into the Church of Ireland community, while the son has one son himself, Richard, born about 1730, who marries a Catholic girl from the Manor of Inchiquin, just outside Youghal. If, like good Catholics did, they had a number of children – and thus a number of sons – in the 1760s, then all the ingredients are in place for about three Beausangs/Boozans born a year by 1840, what we see in the IFHF records.

As someone who has Catholic ancestors with the Protestant surnames of Boyd and Fields, I think without any smoking guns, this is the best we can do.

–

PS. For anyone wondering what my Boozan/Beausang connection is, it’s this: my maternal grandmother was the youngest daughter of Professor Timothy Smiddy, born 1875. His grandparents were Timothy Smiddy (b. ca. 1793) and Mary Boozan (b. ca. 1806), both of Ballycrenane in Ballymacoda, County Cork.

Sorry, sorry Brian
Taint your career in a day
Took you from the DoJ
To Finance at the darkest time of all
With a deficit that kills
Sketch the cuts and the bitter pills
Catch them on prescription bills
With price hikes that nobody understands.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
About staying in Justice and equality
How you took that job with glee
I would not listen, I did not know how.
Perhaps I’ll listen now.

Sorry, sorry Brian
Inflaming tensions with cuts in pay
Surly unions, violent days
Reflect in Lenihan’s eyes of china blue.
Talking to SIPTU can age you with all the strain
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are irked by the Budget’s humble plans.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you loved Justice and equality
How you took that job with glee
I would not listen, I did not know how.
Perhaps I’ll listen now.

For they could have loved you,
And still many do like you.
But when no hope was left in sight
On that cold December night,
You cut their pay, as Ministers often do.
But I could have told you, Brian,
This post was never meant for one
With a legal mind like you.

Sorry, sorry Brian
Arguments in empty halls,
Bearded heads and nighttime calls,
With PAs that watch the news and can’t forget.
Like the voters that you’ve met,
The ragged men in ragged clothes,
Children with a bloody nose,
Lie waiting while you handle the IMO.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered in your popularity,
How you tried to shift the blame to me.
I would not listen, I’m not listening still.
Perhaps I never will…

And now back to work…

But before it does, I feel we should mark it in song. You can thank An Taoiseach’s about-turn on publication date for the missing fifth and sixth verses… but as it happens only die-hard Leonard Cohen fans know those anyway! Yes, today’s ditty is to the tune of Hallelujah, and while I think Cohen was most inventive to come up with no less than six sentences that sort of rhymed with the title word, surely An Board Snip Nua was made for rhyming with it! So, crank open your itunes and put on Cohen/Buckley/Wainwright/whatserface-from-X-factor – or else open the video below – and get singing…

Now I’ve read we are so short on bread
That even the Galway tent is dead
But you won’t really go for tax hikes, will you?
“You cut like this
Cut FAS, cut NESC
Cut the lads who print the car tax disc”,
The baffled Cowen is told by Board Snip Nua
Board Snip Nua, Board Snip Nua
Board Snip Nua, Board Snip Nua

Your vote was strong but you needed the youth
You cut stamp duty on the hoof
While the OAPs dreamt they overthrew you
They cried you
didn’t really care
They broke your vote, it collapsed in Clare
And the best that you could do was Board Snip Nua

In the 80s we were here before
We know this gloom, we left these shores
We used to live State-side before we knew you.
We’ve heard all about the ECB
But have you seen our GDP?
It’s so cold and it’s so broken; Board Snip Nua

What will you do-ah, Board Snip Nua?
Board Snip Nua, Board Snip Nua

It’s about time that you let us know
What’s really going on with our dough
But now you never tell it straight, do you?
We paid two mill to move in here
But NAMA’s going to cost us dear
And every budget cut by Board Snip Nua

Board Snip Nua, Board Snip Nua
Board Snip Nua, Board Snip Nua (repeat to fade…)

Youtube: Rufus Wainwright on Tubridy, getting the lyrics to An Board Snip Nua wrong

If you’re interested in the talk I gave at Edinburgh, you can get a good idea of it through the slide deck below. Alternatively, you can watch a quick interview I gave on the day, which is also embedded here. Somewhat surprisingly, I managed to discuss economics, Twitter, Scotland and Cristiano Ronaldo in under 4 minutes!

I’ll be posting my Dublin presentation, which focuses a bit more on the economics of the online world, later in the week.

–

Future Focus Ronan Lyons Edinburgh 11 June

As always, all comments and feedback are very welcome and if there is anything in particular you think I should spend some time investigating, I would really appreciate your suggestions. (Contact details are here.)

Thanks to Susan Gallagher for web design – if you’re in the market for a website I would definitely recommend her – and Naoise McNally for helping me understand the ins and outs of blogging and online marketing.

Recently, I accidentally convinced some people at work to join Twitter – no, honestly, I wasn’t trying to evangelise, it just came up in conversation and I mentioned that I found it really useful. The problem with that, though, is trying to tell someone all the interesting unexpected benefits you’ve got from it while keeping expectations in check. After all, twitter’s good but it’s not very likely change your life completely from day 1.

So, what can Twitter do? Here are my ten tips for new tweeters/twitterers/whatever you want to call yourself, from my own limited experience so far.

What and how to tweet

1. Do not use Twitter like a regular web page – it’d drive you mad having to keep a separate window open for it and pressing F5 to refresh all the time. Use something like twhirl, tweetdeck or – for Firefox fans such as myself – twitterfox. My anecdotal evidence suggests that a fair chunk of people not familiar with the web outside of Internet Explorer fall down at this hurdle. They set up an account, they follow a few people straight away, a couple of days later they realise they haven’t checked back in and they’re gone.

2. What should you tweet? My policy on tweeting is to mix it up. Sure, tweet your latest blog post if you want, but tweet interesting links you’ve found – on Twitter or more likely during your day-to-day work – or startling stats. Tweet what’s on your mind. For instance, one of my first tweets was “Is a Cadbury’s Twirl just a Flake covered a layer of chocolate? Or is it more?” – I stand by that. Also tweet questions if something’s bugging you or you want to find something out quickly.

3. Some twittiquette – retweet sparingly. Twitter’s form of the dreaded FWD:>>>> is RT (retweet). RT can be as annoying as FWD, so use sparingly. If you particularly like a link or point someone’s tweeted, you more than likely have your own point of view on it, so why not write that?

4. Don’t get into long conversations via Twitter. It’s like shouting to someone the other side of the room. A big warning sign is when 80% of your tweets look something like this – @tom Hilarious, @dick Cool! No way!, @harry really?, and so on. Although it’s unlikely that you’ll be doing that as a beginner – this is the sign of a “power Twitter user”, and unless they look really interesting, you probably won’t have cause to follow them.

To be in position to do most of the above, you’ll need an audience and to build an audience of followers, you’ll need to follow people yourself, which leads me to part deux…

Who to follow

5. Find your friends, naturally enough. You’d be surprised at what they actually get to up to, particularly the links they find during their work-day.

6. Get yourself some news. With something like Twitterfox, all the hassle of having to set up Google News alerts, only to delete most, or having to repeatedly visit your favourite news sites is gone. With something like twitterfox, it’ll never be more than 5 mins before the latest headlines (CNN, theeconomist, RTE, The Irish Times, whatever you’re having yourself) pop up in the bottom right of your screen. Major plus for Twitter.

7. Follow the leader. Find someone who’s further out than you on the bleeding edge of IT. Oh sure, you could be conventional and follow Google or IBM – I do. But try and find someone who just looks like they have their finger on the pulse. I follow for example Dexin (“Interested in Entrepreneurship, Crowdsourcing, Cloud Computing and Macro Economics”) because she seems to know what she’s on about. You can also try to find a topical non-person twitterer, like Socialmedianet (“News and views from the world of social media and social software on the Internet”).

8. Stalk a celebrity. When done well, it’s a great way of finding out a little more about the person behind the celebrity. Stephen Fry is a little passe at this point, being the world’s most popular twitterer, as far as I know – he’s also quite talkative, which is a factor to bear in mind if Twitter clutter (twutter?) is an issue. John Cleese is as mad as you might expect, so you won’t always get it. On the other hand, Britney Spears is too quiet and Jamie Oliver is still very much about the cooking.

Jonathan Ross is a happy medium, in my opinion, and comes across as very human. (Not that I thought he was an alien before, but you know what I mean…) MC Hammer is on twitter too and contrary to popular belief, his follow button can be touched. I haven’t gone there yet, though.

9. Inspire yourself – follow someone interesting, just for the sake of it. It could be, for example, @thebuddha, doling out words of wisdom twice daily, or it could be The Earth Institute at Columbia or whatever. But it’s never any harm broadening your mind.

10. Lastly, talk to companies. If you follow companies, whose services you use, and tweet at them (literally @ them), they will definitely hear you – no more interminable phone calls with automatons giving you menu options! For example, I follow MyHeritage and have been able to pass on feedback and suggestions, to which they duly responded. Ditto with Hubdub. Because it’s all done in an open forum, it’s a fantastic way of getting companies to notice a suggestion and even to shame a service provider into action, if you feel so inclined.

So there you have it, some tips from someone who doesn’t know too much, for what that’s worth!

This time it’s Twitter StreamGraph, which tries to show a river of topics related to a keyword over time. It’s early days for this particular method, I think – having a range of options, such as number of tweets, or a particular time period, etc., would be very handy, but still a very promising tool. My first use is below…

Ireland Twitter StreamGraph

The Twitter StreamGraph above shows the last 200 posts from this afternoon. Not surprisingly, given it’s our first decent snowfall in Dublin in about six or seven years (and even that one was a gone-in-a-day jobbie), very little about recession and instead lots and lots of snow!

At this link, you’ll find a market on how much lower rents in Ireland will be in January 2009, compared to a year earlier. All you have to do is place some of your hubdub dollars (don’t worry, the whole thing is free, it’s just to measure how sure of the outcome you are) on the year-on-year rate of change, as per Daft’s very own National Rent Index.

Those who get it right will get naught but some more Hubdub dollars, but hopefully that will suffice. Well, that and the knowledge of being right, and perhaps some real dollars, in the form of a cheaper rent, if you’re a tenant bargaining with your landlord – assuming of course rents fall. (As I write this, the Hubdub market currently gives a 5% chance to rents falling less than 6% or rising, so some of that 5% includes the theoretical, at this stage, outcome that rents will go up.)

There is of course a serious side to all this (careful, blogosphere, here comes the science bit). If the market matures enough, it will be interesting to see how correct it is, compared to the actual outcome. Consistently accurate markets, across a whole range of these hubdub thingies, would say something to economists and policymakers, for example in Ireland, in light of the social partnership talks about public sector pay cuts (e.g. have public sector workers already cut their expenditure in anticipation of a cut?)

Most importantly, though, have fun! We need all the fun from markets we can get these days.

• Using something like digg or scribd to find key themes and recent developments in a topic, and – because you know who’s posted and who’s posted most – experts on a particular topic
• Using something like basecamp or dimdim to project manage flexibly, particularly when teams are non-traditional, i.e. they are globally dispersed, working from home, volunteer-based, etc.
• Using something like LinkedIn or indeed WordPress to access groups of experts on a particular topic and start a discussion
• Using something like Manyeyes (which I’ve done in a few posts) or wordle (which I may have done in one too many posts last year!) to come up with new visualizations and ways of thinking about data

Many or most of these I was already somewhat familiar with. Indeed, twitter is increasingly one of my main sources for accessing news, thanks to RTE’s twitter services, and accessing expertise, as a surprising number of economists are on it. (I may also use it to keep tabs on Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, but that’s probably for another post!)

Anyway, what I was not aware of, or rather perhaps only vaguely aware of, was the plethora of wisdom-of-the-crowd prediction markets tools out there. By way of example, I’ve set up one at hubdub, that hopefully proves my point:

When will Ireland’s Live Register top 350,000? I hope the crowds will tell me…

So, I’ve decided to put up my thoughts on the roots of the Beausang surname (and of course its many many variants, including Boozan(e), Bouzan(e), Boosean(e), Beausan(e)… well, you get the point.) I guess the aim of this two-part post is twofold: firstly, can we shed any light on where most Beausang/Boozan families in Ireland & North America originate? And secondly, as a by-product, what is the connection or chronology of the name Beausang and its variants across France, Ireland and North America?

Assuming that Beausang, which is clearly not an indigenous Irish surname, ultimately comes from France, there are, as I see it, three options in relation to the roots of the Irish clan – and what I believe is its offshoot North American clan – of Beausang/Boozan/Bouzane:

• Firstly, they could be descended from French Huguenot emigrants of the 1600s or 1700s.
• Secondly, they could be descended from those fleeing France around the time of the French Revolution.
• Thirdly, they could be neither – i.e. they could indeed be of French origin, but may have emigrated at a different point in time and for reasons other than religious persecution or the Revolution. As the Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland states, “people have emigrated from France… for various reasons, not just religious, and at various times. French families moved… both before and after the Huguenots.”

The evidence for the second point – i.e. that the Beausang diaspora is as a result of fleeing the French Revolution – comes primarily from a series of posts by Tom McDonald, based in Newfoundland, on the Bouzane Family Genealogy Forum.  In particular, Tom writes:

Salmon Cove, Newfoundland - close to the home of many early North American Bouzanes

During the French revolution Thomas (we believe his name was) De LaBouzan from Brittany France, a prominent Baron and land owner, feared for the lives of his family. He had three of his sons shipped of for fear of their lives. Each has money sown into their clothing to help secure their future, and each put on separate ships. One ship landed in Ireland, one in the south seas, and the third in Newfoundland.

This story is at first glance very appealing, for three reasons. Firstly, it gives the entire extended Beausang/Boozan family a nice and interesting story of origin. Secondly, it in some way helps explain how there are branches in North America and in Ireland. Lastly, it offers the hint of even more… ‘in the south seas’.  There is, unfortunately, very little evidence in favour of this version of events, apart from the oral history that Tom has inherited across two hundred years. The only other supporting evidence would seem to come from Stephen Beausang, who says:

It seems unlikely that the [Beausang] name is Huguenot. I have heard reports that two brothers were shipwrecked off the Coast of East Cork, probably around the time of the French revolution. There has been some suggestion that the original name was German, but the family first moved to France.

If Stephen’s and Tom’s stories come from entirely different branches of the clan, that at least is something. However, it is also very possible that two entirely separate families could easily develop stories to explain an unusual surname based on a seminal event in France, the French Revolution – this is particularly the case if the surname first appeared in a country (as is the case with Canada) in the early 1800s.

Ballycotton, East Cork, Ireland - close to the home of many 1800s Bouzans and Beausangs

I’m a little skeptical, however, about the French Revolution story. For that, I’ll offer two lines of reasoning. Firstly, the earliest mentions of the Beausang surname in Ireland suggest that it was in County Cork before the Revolution. Graves in Dangandonovan in East Cork (Ireland), also transcribed here, point to a Boosean-Kenery marriage in the mid-1770s and the birth of Joanna Boosean in 1775/6. The fact that there are four Beausangs born before 1800 in that one graveyard alone works against the idea of one or two shipwrecked stragglers arriving in East Cork in the 1790s.

Secondly, and this may be more controversial (cue scenes of rioting and looting at the Bouzane family conference!), it looks very unlikely that any Beausangs/Bouzan(e)s went straight from France to North America, as per the revolution story. For the pro-North America direct from Newfoundland argument, take, for example, the following from Linda Bouzane, writing in 2001 on a forum no longer online (to show I’m not making it all up, Linda has posted a very similar version here):

The Beausanes of Newfoundland came originally from France and apparently before that from the Basque provinces of Spain and the name was apparantly spelled Beausani. The first Beausan/e/ys in Newfoundland were Maragret and presumably her brother (not proven yet) Thomas. It is believed others of this family may have gone to Ireland, but this also is not proven. Margaret Beausane married William Walsh ca 1815, supposedly in Newfoundland and raised their family there. I am still working on the descendants.

Thomas Beausane (b. ca 1795-1798) married Ellen Walsh ( b. ca 1800) ( possible sister or cousin of the the above William Walsh) on Jan. 16, 1824 in Newfoundland (possibly Carbonear). They first lived in Carbonear then moved to Western Bay, Nfld. We do not know the parents of Thomas or his place of birth and the same goes for Ellen. Their children were: Margaret, Richard, Michael, James, William, Thomas, John, Ellen and Mary.

Aside from the fact that I would argue that the children’s names are entirely Irish, another alarm bell rings when you look at who Margaret and Thomas married. First-generation immigrants almost exclusively marry someone their own nationality. Bearing that very important fact in mind, let’s continue with some other scattered pieces of evidence from across the internet.

Small sample bias, perhaps? After all, a French and Irish family may have just hit it off in Newfoundland! Well, based on a broader set of evidence, again in Newfoundland, the mother’s surname from Boozan births from the 1860s suggest that these are descendants of Irish immigrants, not French:
F/Surname   F/Given  M/Surname  M/Given  Child  Year
Boozaney      Michael      English      Clare      Mary      1862
Boozaney      Thomas      English      Martha      William      1862
Boozaney      Richard      Dwyer      Ellen      Richard      1863
Boozaney      William      Ryan      Catherine      Honora      1863
Boozaney      Thomas      English      Martha      Margaret      1864
Boozaney      Michael      English      Clare      John      1864
Fitzgerald      James      Boozan      Mary      Bridget      1864
Boozane      Richard      Dwyer      Ellen      Ellen      1869
Boozane      Richard      Dwyer      Ellen      Elizabeth      1869
Boozane      Thomas      English      Martha      Jane      1869

Similarly with a Boozan who married a Dooley, another Irish surname. In the USA, a John Boozane in San Francisco born in the 1820s was also Irish. The evidence mounts…

In my next post, I’ll talk about the Huguenot possibility and stick my next out on the line as to where I think the Beausang and Bouzan clans more than likely originated.