At least 42, and not one is the European spelling. The European variations are fewer, just three, although there was a short period when the family used BURGER, the German form of BOURGEOIS. (The spelling that appears on the transcribed passenger list of 1827 is yet again different from all the others.) Lester Bushue transcribed the various spellings of the name that appear in the early American records. The full list can be seen in the third edition of “The Bushue Family Tree.”
It’s easy to see how the variability occurred. The French pronunciation of BOURGEOIS is BOO, followed by a swallowed R ending in sort of a ZHWAA sound, with the accent on the second syllable. I have no idea how it would have sounded with a German accent, a likely scenario since the family spoke German, not French. Imagine the various clerks, priests, court officials, and transcribers as they tried to record the name. Early Perry County was home to immigrants from Alsace, Prussia, Ireland, and France (and other places), and while German may have been a reasonably common language, its use, accent, and dialect would have varied by region.
And those making records were using English and the English style alphabet rather than the old German Fraktur. Most of the records look as though the recorders were comfortable with English, but we are still left with the mental image of a man knowledgable of English, perhaps raised in a German or Irish household, trying to accurately record a name spoken with a strong accent that may have been unfamiliar. Certainly the name was unknown until our ancestors arrived in 1827. Michael BOURGEOIS was literate, but he may have been hard to understand if he tried to spell the name. And as we all know, standardized spelling of anything is a pretty recent phenomenon. The bottom line is that early records of marriages, births, land transactions, wills, headstones, and such use spellings that are all over the map.
This made sorting everyone out very difficult, especially since it appears that three Michaels and three Morands settled for a while in Perry County. There was also a Mirod whose name was spelled pretty creatively early on in ways that make it easy to confuse him with the various Morands. Thankfully, Lester Bushue did the early research, and he painstakingly sorted out those he was certain of. I sorted out most of the rest. We still have one old couple who are a mystery and likely to remain so.
I am boring you with this little lecture because early on I made an executive decision about this blog and names. Generally if I’m referring to the American family, I use the spellings that the families seem to have settled on: BUSHU (Morand’s descendents which include Herbert Bushu), BUSHUE (Mirod’s descendents, including Lester), and BUSHUR (Michael Sr.’s cousin Morand). I use the European spelling of BOURGEOIS when referring to the family in Europe. I also use the spelling MORAND, MIROD, and MICHAEL. For the reader, this means that if you go to the original records upon which this is based, take your imagination with you.
