Paternal Ancestry ...
My father, William Robert Courson, was born in Birmingham, Alabama (USA) in on March 29th, 1898, the son of a family that had been in the New World since 1658, in which year one Piers Corson (also known as Pierre de Courson et de Villaneuve) arrived at the port city of then Dutch New Amsterdam.
Piers' native land was France, specifically the village of Notre-Dame-de-Courson, in the Livarot canton of the Calvados region of Basse-Normandie (today a rural tourist center) where the family has been traced back as far as the mid-1400's to one Giles deCourson, its certain progenitor, although one Robert DeCourson was one of Duke William's accompanying nobles at Hastings and the family (the complete surname is - or was - deCourson de Villaneuve) were awarded armorial bearings at one or another point in its history.
As a Catholic convert to the Reformed faith in a strongly Catholic region, he and his family's social and economic prospects as newly-minted "bourgeosie" were gravely limited on account of his religious identification. Although the worst of the Catholic oppression had ended long before and the dreadful Saint Bartholemew's Day Massacre was decades past, Piers had it in mind to relocate himself to (relatively) tolerant Holland, wherein the Established Church was a Protestant one and the members of the reigning House of Orange-Nassau enthusiastically Reformed adherants of John Calvin all.
Leaving the port of LaRochelle, Piers settled briefly in Rotterdam wehre he took a Dutch wife, one Anne-Marie by name and together they cast their sights on a life in America, arriving in 1658 at the port of New Amsterdam, and shortly thereafter taking up residence in Cape May County in southernmost New Jersey. From there, the family spread into branches centered in South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama on the one hand, and Pennsylvania and Ohio on the other. Coursons resident today in New Jersey are few and far between, and the greatest number of family living today are in the city of Tours, in France.
By following the colored "hyperlinks" in the text above, you will be transported to a variety of pertinent websites.
Contemporary Coursons ...
Several internet fora do - or will in the future - house extensive information on our family: among these are Courson.org and the Courson Family Geneology Forum. The branch of the family retaining the "deCourson" cognate name maintains an excellent website as well. |
