Bergeron

At the bottom of the name is an animal. Latin berbex, a sheep, gave berbicarius, the man who kept them, and that wore down into Old French berger. Bergeron is berger with the diminutive -on fixed to it: not the shepherd but the shepherd's lad, the boy at the back of the flock. A second reading puts it on Old German berg, a hill, and the sources do not settle it. The name is widespread in France and in Quebec, where it is attested from 1695 and grew from settler stock into one of the province's most numerous surnames.

Sheep were kept for milk, for meat, and above all for wool, and a few could be folded into any family farm. A large flock was another proposition: to stay large it had to move from pasture to pasture, and moving it was full-time work that no man with a plough to keep could also do. That is the moment the shepherd separates from the farmer. His job was to keep the flock intact, to protect it from predators alone and at night, and to bring it to the market areas in time for the shearing, because the wool was the point and a clip that came late was a year's work discounted.

Where the ground was good the job did not exist. In the lowlands it was more efficient to grow grain than to let sheep graze over it, so sheep-keeping was pushed out into rugged country: Greece, the Carpathians, northern England, the Pyrenees. The movement itself has a name, and the name is French. Transhumance was built from Latin trans, across, and humus, the ground: the crossing of the land. Unlike a nomad, the transhumant moves between the same fixed pastures every year, on roughly the same dates.

In the Pyrenees the mountain period opened in late May or early June and closed in early October, and cows, sheep and horses went up because lowland farms were too small to feed a serious herd for twelve months. The system evolved in the Middle Ages and ran into the twentieth century. Until the 1970s it was mainly dairy cattle that climbed, and cheese-making was the summer's important work: the milk could not come down the mountain but the cheese could.

In some districts it was not a lone herdsman who left but nearly the whole family, decamping to rudimentary stone cabins for the season. What broke the arrangement was industry: people went to the cities for work, and the mountain year thinned to festivals that still mark the departure and the return. The Mont Perdu and Monte Perdido region is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its association with that system, not for a building or a battlefield but for a way of moving animals up and back.

The shepherd's place in the social order is why his name multiplied. Unlike the farmer he was usually not working his own property; he was a wage earner, paid to watch other people's sheep. He lived apart from the settled community, largely on the move, and the work suited solitary men without children, so shepherds had to be recruited from outside rather than raised inside the trade. Those recruited were, most often, the younger sons of farming peasants who would inherit no land.

Generation after generation the boy with no acreage coming to him went out with the flock, and the village called him after the job because it was the only thing that distinguished him. The enclosure of common land across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ended the independence, turning the man who had answered to nobody into the employee of an estate.

Nicolas Bergeron was a sixteenth-century French jurist and historian, and his son Pierre, born about 1580, followed him to the bar of the Parlement de Paris, pleading well enough to be made a king's counsellor and referendary in that court's chancellery. Then he found the work that took the rest of his life.

Bergeron became the hidden hand behind the French travel literature of his generation, writing up the voyages of Francois Pyrard, Jean Mocquet and Vincent Le Blanc from their own memoranda. Galien de Bethencourt commissioned him to edit the memoirs of his ancestor Jean de Bethencourt, and that history of the conquest of the Canaries, made from 1402, followed in 1650. His treatise on navigation and the modern voyages of discovery appeared at Paris in 1629. It was Peiresc who told Le Blanc to hand his manuscripts to Bergeron; he died about 1637 with the work unfinished, and Louis Coulon completed it in 1648.

Jean-Denis Bergeron was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1757 and enlisted at fifteen as a dragoon. In November 1792 the volunteers of the Pyrenees-Orientales elected him lieutenant-colonel of their third battalion, and on 17 September 1793 he went into the redoubt at Peyrestortes first, at the head of that battalion. At the siege of Toulon he distinguished himself on 30 November, the day General O'Hara was taken prisoner and put into his keeping to be brought to Aix. He commanded at Arles, Caen, Besancon and Coblenz in turn, and died at Danzig in December 1812.

Armand-Jean Bergeron was born in Paris in 1765 and made colonel on 12 April 1793. In July 1794 the Committee of Public Safety gave him the 183rd demi-brigade de bataille. He served with the Army of the North, commanded the trenches at the siege of Nijmegen, and directed the attacks at Geertruidenberg in January 1795. He went afterwards to the gendarmerie at Toulouse and Tours, and retired in 1815 with the honorary rank of marechal de camp. The two were near contemporaries in the same armies and the sources do not connect them, which is worth saying plainly: a shared surname is exactly what a family tree invents a cousinship out of.

Elisabeth Bergeron was born on 25 May 1851 at La Presentation in Lower Canada, near Saint-Hyacinthe, the fourth of the eleven children of the farmer Theophile Bergeron and Basiliste Petit. Her family was poor, her schooling brief, and at fourteen she asked to join the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Saint-Hyacinthe and was judged too young. In 1865 economic crisis pushed the family south into New England, and she spent five years at Brunswick in Maine and Salem in Massachusetts working in a cotton mill and teaching catechism in the evenings, at home, to children too poor to have had any schooling in it. She came back to Quebec in March 1870 with savings.

Then came a run of closed doors, ending in a refusal in 1875 on the grounds that she was not educated enough. Twice she proposed a contemplative Dominican congregation to her bishop, Louis-Zephirin Moreau, and twice he steered her elsewhere: what the diocese needed, he told her, was teachers. So she built one. On 12 September 1877 Bergeron and three companions founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Saint-Hyacinthe in an abandoned schoolhouse at La Presentation, and on the morning of 17 September the school took its first pupils.

She was mother superior for two years, then handed the office to a sister better able to deal with the school boards. The congregation held on through hard early years on local donations, then spread into Ontario, New Hampshire and the western missions she visited in 1911 at Lorette and Marieval. She died at Saint-Hyacinthe on 29 April 1936, and in 1996 John Paul II declared her venerable.

Joseph-Gedeon-Horace Bergeron was born at Rigaud in 1854, took a law degree from McGill in March 1877 and was called to the Quebec bar four months later. In January 1879 the death of the sitting member sent Beauharnois to a by-election and Bergeron won it. He held the riding for a Conservative generation: returned at every general election from 1882 to 1896, out in 1900, back in 1904, and deputy speaker of the House of Commons from 1891 to 1896.

The name has settled into the country it crossed to. Several lakes in Quebec are called lac Bergeron, a riviere Bergeron runs into lac Megantic, and there is a Pont Arthur-Bergeron. It went onto the shelves as well: Bergeron is a classic Quebec cheese, an apricot variety in France, and in Savoie the white grape behind the Chignin-Bergeron appellation, a fitting end for a name that began with a boy minding animals in the mountains.