Wordwise: Disney's French and Canadian origins
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Last week here, the French surname “Beauharnois” was highlighted for its source from a family of France in the 1600s associated with the fabrication of “fine harnessing.”
That identification’s original form was “de Beauharnais” – (they) of fine harnessing, which evolved into a family name, then into an estate title with the patriarch known as Sieur de Beauharnois – “Sieur” being an abbreviation of “Seigneur” for the “senior” person as owner of an estate, which then was termed a “Seigneurie.”
The “de” aspect eventually was dropped.
From the preceding short form derived the English word “Sir” as a title of honour with the English equivalent of “Seigneur” being “Lord,” whose estate was known as a manor.
In France, the main grand residence on a seigneurie could be either a ”manoir,” or a “château” – the difference being a château was usually a fortified wall-encompassed castle with corner watchtowers, part of which could consist of a dungeon, while a “manoir” was a very big house.
The manor featured in the popular television series Downtown Abbey was presumed, like most abbeys in England, to have formerly been a large monastery which, in the late 1500s of official anti-Roman Catholic policies, were granted as residential properties to royally favoured families.
Let’s now explore another French-based surname of similar association with d’ as the “of” element.
Disney (as in Walt Disney) is derived from “D’Isigny” for D’Isigny-sur-mer, a town in the Calvados district of Northwest France’s Normandy region with the meaning “of the side-pond” (used for wading and washing) at a location along the Rivière Vire (River of Swirls).
A fellow named Jean-Christophe “D’Isigny” was among soldiers of the Norman force which defeated the English at the 1066 Battle of Hastings. He eventually settled in the Lincolnshire area. Among his descendants was Kepple Elias Disney (1838-1909) who emigrated to Canada from Ireland to first settle near Wingham, Ont., from where, in 1878 with his son Elias Charles Disney (1859-1941), he moved to the U.S. for the California Gold Rush, from which he got sidetracked to an orange-growing farm in Kansas, from where Elias in 1664 moved to take employment in a Union Pacific machine shop where he worked alongside Walter Percy Chrysler (of Chrysler Motors fame).
Elias next worked as a fiddle player in Kansas, a mailman in Florida – during which time he married – before becoming a construction worker at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a trade he subsequently locally pursued while buying into and working at an apple juice and jelly operation.
In 1906, when son Walter was three years old, the family moved to a farm in Missouri where, with older sons, Elias managed two large newspaper routes. In 1917, they were back in Chicago where Elias joined the management of the apple food company in which he had retained interests.
Meanwhile, Walt had developed a skill at drawing, which in 1920 he took to California to successfully fulfill an animated film ambition.
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