General Notes

Origin(?) of Tetreau Name
Most surnames have a reason for being, whether they origina
te from a characteristic, a locale, a vocation, a relations
hip, or possibly an important event in an individual's life
. Thus we have names such as Short, Cruikshank (bowed legs)
, Carpenter, Smith, Ford (a river crossing), Hartford (a de
er crossing at a river), Johnson (John's son), etc. While t
hese are English names, this method of naming was not confi
ned to that language. Of particular interest to us would b
e names like Meunier (miller), Desjardins (gardener), Chass
eur (hunter), Forgeron (smith), Petit (little, small), Bouc
her (butcher), etc. However, there are some names for whic
h these origins do not seem to fit. On closer scrutiny, som
e of these names could be variations of others. Jones coul
d very well be a variation of John or a shortened form of J
ohnson, for example.
The French word for "son" is "fils," pronounced "feece" (fl
eece without the "l"). Therefore, the son of the Frenchma
n Maurice would be "Fils de Maurice," or, as we know it tod
ay, Fitzmaurice.Why is it, then, that we usually think of t
his name and others like it as being Irish? It is not widel
y remembered, or perhaps known, that the Norman Conquest o
f England in 1066 did not stop there. In later years, as Ir
eland came increasingly under English rule, many of the Nor
man French went from England to Ireland to claim land. In t
ime, "Fils" evolved into "Fitz."
Whatever the origins of the name Tetreau may have been, the
y seem to be lost in the mists of time. There are those wh
o claim that the name is a corruption of the verb "teter,
" meaning to suckle. In my own family, it was widely though
t to have come from "tete-rouge," or redhead, because man
y of my family had this chracteristic. In fact, Louis Tetre
au, our common ancestor, is said to have had red hair.
There is a legend which affords another interesting view o
f our name's origins. This story came to me quite a few yea
rs ago from a "cousin" in New York State. As the story goes
: During the Middle Ages, the average French feudal peasan
t was firmly bound to the land of his landowner, or seigneu
r. He never left his village, and since most villages wer
e very small, many if not most of the inhabitants did not e
ven have surnames -- they just weren't needed. In the 1400'
s and 1500's, the Ottoman Turks were invading the Balkan Pe
ninsula, and captured Constantinople (today's Istanbul) i
n 1453. Countries did not maintain standing armies such a
s we know today, and any defense was based on their knighth
ood and whatever citizens and peasants could be scraped tog
ether to form an army. The Turks, bent on conquest, and mai
ntaining a strong army, presented the most aggressive dange
r at that time, and what forces there were did not seem abl
e to stem the Turkish tide.
The particular events that concern us are the Turkish invas
ions of the Kingdom of Hungary, in the early 1500's. The Hu
ngarian king appealed to his royal Christian brethren to he
lp him out, and apparently among those who responded was th
e King of France. Word was sent down through the feudal ran
ks to raise a Christian army to fight the infidel. Among th
ose who "volunteered" for this service was an ancestor of L
ouis Tetreau -- although he did not have a surname at the t
ime. Battles were fought, and Hungary was defeated and part
itioned between Turkey and Hapsburg Austria. Our ancestor o
bviously survived and went back to his village, presumabl
y in the province of Poitou in west-central France.
However little education this ancestor had because of his l
owly peasant status, he obviously had enough sense to notic
e that he was NOT the only one named Pierre, Antoine, Jacqu
es, or whatever in the world -- he had met many others fro
m various provinces of France with the same given names. So
, he felt that he had to have some additional means of iden
tification, if onl