Introduction

This website presents the provisional results of our genealogical research on the surname Boucneau in Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Because of the diversity of countries involved, three languages are used in this publication: Dutch, French and English.

In the past, our name has been written in different ways: Bouckenau, Bouckeneau, Bouckneau, Boucniau, Bougneau, etc. In the second half of the 19th century, the modern spelling Boucneau replaced the alternative orthographies.
Boucneau is a French name, the pronunciation of which rhymes with the English words book and no. That's how the name is pronounced in Belgium and France today. A deviant pronunciation - booknove - still exists in the province of West Flanders (Belgium), in the countryside, restricted to the elder generations. In the United States, it is pronounced as buckno.

Boucneau means young male goat. The first element - bouc - is (still) the French word for a male goat. The second element, -neau, is a diminutive element, meaning small or little, which was very productive in Old French.

All the results of our research point in the direction of the county of Hainaut as the place where our ancestors lived. This county - ruled by the counts of Hainaut - was the core of the present day Belgian province which bears the same name. The southern part of the county became French territory before 1700.
From Nimy, a village close to the city of Mons, ancient capital of the county and presently the capital of the province, Stephanus Boucneau moved to the county of Flanders in the second half of the 17th century. He is the ancestor of all Dutch speaking Boucneaus in Flanders (Belgium).
Other Boucneaus - farmers and stonecutters - lived in the small county of Beaumont, in the southeast of the county of Hainaut. In the first half of the 19th century, some of them - stonecutters - living in and around the village of Rance (province of Hainaut, Belgium), went to Paris. They even went to London in the middle of the 19th century.

At the end of the 19th century, Kate 'Boucneau' and her son Ernest, widow of Adolphe J.H. Boucneau, marble-manor and born in London (and a son of Adolphe Boucneau who came from Rance in Belgium), emigrated to the United States.

-

[To translate pages in english you can try Babelfish]

[nederlands][français]