Pitard.com: What's in a Name?: Pitard.net: Genealogy

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Pitard.net: Quaker Ancestors

This page is virtually all speculation. I just thought I'd warn you first. If anyone has any hard evidence on origins, please send it along.

Where do the names come from? One way to learn about names is to look at maps of where the names are present today. Generally (not exclusively), Pitards appear in France, whereas Pittards appear in England. Searching for the names on a site like ancestry.com also illustrates this, as well as the fact that the American immigrant ancestors for Pitards and Pittards seem to have arrived from France and England, respectively.

However, Pitard and Pittard would seem to be variants with a common origin. How so? Looking again at maps, the surname Pitard seems to originate in the the north and west of France. So, presumably the name is Norman French. One might theorize from this that different branches diverged when Pittards migrated to England with the Normans. This doesn't mean that the family split in the year 1066--Normans went back and forth for centuries after that--but it does hypothesize an origin to the relationship. If anyone has any more concrete evidence about the history of the names, please let me know, and I'll post it here.

There are early French Pitards who can be identified. (To digress briefly, I must admit I'm VERY wary of any family histories which stretch back beyond about 1600. Some do appear on this website which come from well-documented sources, but I make no promises. The modern, skeptical notion of history which I'm very fond of was an unknown concept during and before the Renaissance, when the point of history was often to create what we would call a myth. You can even see this idea in more recent family histories--people seem to like basking in the reflected glory of their ancestors, even in "classless" America. Genealogy should instead be a way to connect to history, and this requires some historical accuracy. One can, of course, trace families back that far, but you can't rely on contemporary histories without some heavy lifting to document them.)

In any event, back to my early Pitards. There was a Jean Pitard in the thirteenth century who was famous for being the first surgeon of St. Louis and the founder of the College of Surgery. I have seen no research on his family, however.

Pitard coat of Arms There are other early Pitards. Because there are two coats of arms associated with Pitard, there must be Pitards upon whom they were bestowed. I do not know anything about those who won the arms, or why; consequently, I have no idea of how they might be connected to later Pitards. The families may even have died out. In any event, these are descriptions of the two coats of arms, taken from Dictionnaire de La Noblesse, Par De la Chenaye-Desbois et Badier (Paris, 1869): Vol. 15, cols. 904-05 (which gives no more information than this):

PITARD, en Normandie, Election d'Artagentan; Famille qui porte pour armes: d'argent, au chevron de geules, accompagné en chef de 2 roses de même, & en pointe d'une hure de sanglier de sable, défendue & allumée du champ. (These are the arms in the image to the right).
PITARD, autre Famille de la même Province, Election de Domfront, dont les armes sont: d'azur, au faucon d'argent, empiétant une perdrix d'or.

If anyone would like to dive into some sources which reveal the stories of these two families, I would be happy to post their work here.

On this side of the Atlantic, there have been different groups of Pitards who emigrated from France to North America. Some came to Canada. I have not found any relation between Canadian families and the Caribbean and New Orleans family which Pitard.net describes, nor any evidence that there is an Acadian Pitard family (there are Acadian families on this tree, but none are "Pitards").

The Pittards are a Southern family whose history seems especially concentrated in Georgia. One family history site which cites sources with authority on the subject is The Sarretts of Georgia. Also, I have seen references to a book entitled Pittard Family History by Anne Clark Bowden. Aside from these coincidental hits while surfing, though, I know nothing about them.

I have encountered two Pittards who seem to have appeared Louisiana and lost a "t" in the process; Benjamin Pitard and Mortimer Pitard do not seem at all connected with any members of New Orleans Pitards. Abner Pitard from Mississippi seems actually to have been a Pittard as well. For more on them, see the "Notes" to the earliest direct ancestor I have been able to trace in New Orleans, Joseph Pitard.

Oh--and the name has nothing to do with being hoisted. A "petard" is a small bomb used to blow open a wall or a door. To be "hoisted with one's own petard," as Hamlet implies, is when the "engineer" is destroyed by the metaphorical backfire from his own plots:

For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard: an't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon. O, 'tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet. (3.4.205-210).

Several crafts do meet in genealogical research, but I fervently hope that it will not be the means of my own destruction.