French Huguenot Index of Projects - Please Help to Create It

I actually have one French Huguenot ancestral line -- Gylette - who settled in Connecticut, America.

I've taken the liberty of adding the following people as possibly having projects they'd want added:
Erica Howton
George J. Homs
Private User
Eldon Lester Clark
Pam Wilson (on hiatus)
Private User
and I'm using this discussion as a heads-up to let you know, in case you'd rather remove yourself. (although I hope you don't :-) and hope you know of others who might have projects to add to it.

Hatte, you truly have family interests across all the significant placesof history and geography. PLEASE add the Gylette profiles.

I started a new project for Huguenots of New England and also added Antoine Deol de Gylet my 12th great grandfather to your umbrella project. There does not seem to be a project for Huguenots who fled to England. He is the ancestor of the Connecticut Gilletts, e.g., my 6th or 7th great grandfather Jeremiah Gillett, Jr..

Of course I spelled Huguenots incorrectly.

http://www.geni.com/projects/Hugenots-of-Colonial-America-New-England

:-) I always seem to be rewriting it four times!

http://www.genyourway.com/gt-hist.html SUMMARY of the HISTORY
of the GILLETT FAMILY

The first known member of the family was believed to have come from the town of Bergerac, Guyenne Province, France with introduction of the Rev. Jacques de Gylet. The Rev. de Gylet was born about 1520. He was banished from France and his property confiscated when he continued to preach the Gospel. He was at the massacre of the French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572. Gylet is a Bergerac name.

The Rev. de Gylet fled to Scotland with his family where they resided for almost 57 years. This was during the reign of King Henry II. The family, after almost thirty years, started an exodus to England.

http://books.google.com/books?id=TtR-AAAAIAAJ&dq=Huguenot+desce...

Good source for American Huguenots. Also in full text from archive.org -- http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofhugueno02bairuoft/historyofh...

Sharon Doubell I found the project earlier and linked my Huguenots project to it. Great idea. Do you want individual profiles or projects only

For 'de Gylett', I think we should try and search for a French 'Gilette' or 'Gillette', because obviously the name was anglicized. I think the whole Huguenot chapter in history should be way up in the list of priorities once we have French curators on board. This affects Flanders, Holland - and obviously emigration to South Africa, New Amsterdam, Acadia, etc etc.
In fact, my 'old idea' on having a 'New France' project that mimicks the 'New Amsterdam' approach would quite well fit that bill - and provide more direct touch-points with French emigration in those days.

Thanks Eldon Lester Clark and Hatte Rubenstein Blejer.
You rock, guys!

Eldon, I think I need some help thinking through what would be the most useful set - up. The way it is, isn't right yet.

Perhaps we should also collect individual profiles under the Countries list - pending those countries creating their own Country Specific Huguenot projects. At which time we can move the individual profiles and family projects over to them and just have one link on the Index page?

Eg South Africa already has a South African Huguenot Project Page with over 100 profiles on it. It would clog up this Index page to add them all onto it - so I've just hyperlinked it there.

But America seems to have a couple of different area-specific projects, and some stray family name projects, as well as some as-yet unconnected-in profiles. It seems to me that it would be useful to collect those under the America heading on the Index page, until someone has the urge or the time to see if they should be put on one American Huguenots Project.

The same for the other countries.

Hatte, PLEASE be adding all of that to the project too. I think we might build up quite a useful Resource here that will attract people to it - if we just keep collecting the data - and making it accessible by sorting it into categories?

Sharon, I think the Diaspora project will be great!
In the 'Golden Ages in the Low Countries', I have two 'dormant' subprojects about migrations. One is about migration to Antwerp (at the dawn of its golden age) - another on about the Flanders-Holland migration (at the dawn of the Dutch golden age). Obviously, the Huguenots are at the heart of these migrations, together with the other 'local' protestants in Flanders.
I've been trying to drill somewhat in French-Flanders migration, but not in a structured way.
I'll think it over how we can do that. There are French books (online) that give inventories of the French protestants (pre-St-Bartolomew), and there must be some that track the movement of those that escaped (Flanders clusters and German clusters, in my mind).
What is nice is how these projects tie so nicely into one another :-)

George J. Homs, you always have the best ideas for projects!
I suppose the spelling of the family name depends when you come in on the timeline. So the Gillet family of England are probably sufficiently established to be considered to be spelling their own name 'correctly'.

By the same token, on the SA French Huguenots, I've been toying with putting in 'Foucher' as the Birth Name of a male French settler - who is listed as this on the French embarkation lists; but who dies in SA calling himself 'Fouche'. So I'm experimenting with putting 'Fouche' as his Last Name/Surname field. Seems to work quite well. Then his children are likely to have 'Fouche' as their Birth Surname – and ultimately, the SA family Fouche can be considered to be spelling their name – correctly - as such from the moment they got here.

A similar thing applies to my own surname. Somewhere in the mists of time it is likely that Doubell was spelt duBell, but as far back as we can track the slippery miscreants, they were operating a piracy run from 16th C Kent across the channel, and they had already Anglicised their name.
Of course my ggreat granny Theron - who knew she came from French nobility - only sanctioned her daughter marrying this Doubell, assuming he was originally from 'her kind' :-) Much mother-in-law affront was created when he donned a British uniform in the World War :-)

So nesting projects within projects that become more and more all encompassing makes sense to me. The Gillett Brits would then feature as a sub-project link on the French Gillete Page, which would be a family subproject link on the French Diaspora Page. Which one of those pages is the one to apply to the French Huguenot Diaspora Project page is more the question I suppose.

Roll on French Curators!

Is there such a place as New France anywhere?

The French Huguenots in SA were forced to speak Dutch faster than they could say “Mon dieu,” so the Dutch eradicated their language in one generation. We have the beautiful Franschoek (French Corner) – wine district in the Cape- but even the gabled architecture is predominantly Dutch. So, sad to say – there was no New France in SA.

By and large, New France started in Acadia, passed by current Detroit, and then follows the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans. hence all the French names for the cities on the river. You bet that there's a lot to be researched around that too ;-)

You learn something everyday! Thank you.

The Dutch Diaspora aspect is another Discussion, I think - but the Cape Dutch architecture and culture that was created in SA is so worthy of a page of it's own.

My other French diaspora interest in the Alsatian Jews (also Lorraine) who settled Mississippi and Louisiana in the early, mid, and late 1800s. My brother-in-law's great grandmother was born in Rodney, Miss in 1846! There's a French sociologist PhD who studies this population. Plenty of books written on them. And I have links to the French sociologist's papers. Not Huguenots, but still French diaspora.

George J. Homs - the time for a French Diaspora project is obviously now! :-)

It's a good thing that George J. Homs is so multicultural!

Maybe you can entice some of the French Canadian curators back to work on this project too? And I know that there are others besides me with an interest in and knowledge of the Alsatian Jewish immigration. There are several active Geni user descendants of one of these families (Levy who settled in Mississippi).

Oh no!... more Chinese plate spinning! :-)
Hatte, do we have French Canadian curators? If so, tell me - I'll shake them up :-)

Peter Dore as I recall. Erica Howton can tell you. There were also others who worked on the French Canadian families.

Paul Louis Doré is our Quebecois.

American curators who work in the FC tree include
Gene Daniell who is also a Rhode Island native if I recall correctly
Private User quite Acadian in descent
Private User
And the always knowledgeable mutli linguist
Ric Dickinson, Geni Curator

George J. Homs

New Orleans needs its own Project (linked to New France of course). It's settlement is much too Creole for anything else. I can get that going as soon as I finish finding my witches for halloween. I also have family resources there I might be able to get to contribute.

I'm embarrassed. http://www.geni.com/people/Paul-Dor%C3%A9/763402 of course.

OK.

I have some knowledge of some, of the Huguenots that settled in New France (Acadie and the St-Lawrence valley) and some about their forced conversion by the Catholic church and their better than average business venture successes.

But I didn't even know that there was a significant Jewish population in Alsac-Lorraine. However that may explain why one of my extended Leblanc family members would share the Leblanc branch from Acadie with a Jewish family ?

If there is one thing I've learned in trying to document our family history is that everytime I learn a little bit more, I realize how little I know.

Let's try it !

Whatever, I'll do my best to help on the project

:-)

I have some Huguenot ancestors but don't know much about them. Most came through Virginia or the Carolinas.

My largest group is the Auxier family (Michael Auxier, I) but one faction claims they are not French at all and that the name should be spelled Oxer. The most of that bunch ended up in Texas.

I also have Bobo ancestors who originally spelled the name Babeau.

I am very, very distantly related to the Vernadeau/Vernadoo family. They came through Virginia and went Deep South.

I think there is one more family but the name is escaping me at the moment.

Leave me in the project and I'll add my profiles as I go back through them. As Paul said, whenever I learn something, I realize how much more there is to learn. I don't have much time to give other projects as I work on cleaning up the founding families of Virginia, but I'm happy to follow what is being done and to contribute when I am able.