Sousa

The name begins as water. The Sousa is a river of the Douro country in northern Portugal, and Sousa was first of all the land it watered — the valley, the holdings along the banks, the men who held them. The word is older than the family: it descends from the Latin saxa, stone or pebble, and describes exactly what such a riverbed is, a place of seixos. Portuguese has a whole class of surnames built out of the ground rather than out of a father's name — Rocha for rock, Pedroso for stony land, Seixas for pebbles, Ribeiro for a brook. Sousa is the one of them that became a dynasty.

The spelling has never been quite fixed. Souza is the archaic form, and it survives because Portugal enforces standard spelling on personal names but sets no legal restriction on surnames, so families kept whatever their registers said. In Brazil, where there are no naming laws at all, the z simply carried on. The variants on a document — de Sousa, d'Sousa, e Sousa, de Souza, d'Souza, e Souza — are the same name wearing the small Portuguese words for "of" and "and". In Galicia the Portuguese carried it in as Sosa.

The Casa de Sousa traces itself to the 9th century and to a nobleman remembered as D. Sueiro Belfaguer, dated 875 to 925, counted the first lord of the house. That opening is family tradition rather than charter evidence, and the roll of lords descending from it is not internally consistent — it puts some of its ladies out of sequence and gives more generations than its own dates allow. Read it as the house's memory of itself, not as a register.

The surname proper begins later, and the date the family itself gives is 1035, the birth of D. Egas Gomes de Sousa — the first man recorded using Sousa as a surname rather than as the name of a place. He was captain-general and governor, imperator in the Latin of the documents, of the military province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho, and a leading figure of the Portuguese Reconquista. One tradition makes him a noble of Visigothic descent, another has him born in Galicia; both describe a frontier aristocracy that did not yet think in national borders.

The arms come with a story attached, and it is one of the better ones in Portuguese heraldry. Near Beja, Egas Gomes de Sousa is said to have beaten a Muslim commander the sources call the king of Tunis, and to have taken from the field the crescent-worked banners his opponents carried. Those crescents went onto the shield: four of silver on a field of dark red. The arms are first recorded in the 11th century, within living memory of the man himself.

By the 16th century the shield had been quartered — the royal arms of Portugal in the first and fourth quarters, the four crescents of Sousa in the second and third. That arrangement, the Sousa of Arronches, after the family's lordship there, is still borne by noble houses of Portugal, the Dukes of Palmela among them. Under it runs the motto the family kept through a thousand years of frontier war and ocean service: Deus Connosco, God is with us.

The 12th century gives the house the two lords its own tradition remembers best, and both by nickname: D. Gonçalo Mendes de Sousa, 1120 to 1190, called the good, and his son D. Mendo de Sousa, 1140 to 1197, called the sousão — the Sousa, as though the name and the man had become the same word. Through them the family stood among the first houses of the realm in the century Portugal was being made a kingdom.

In the late 13th century the lordship passed through a woman, D. Constança Mendes de Sousa, who died at Santarém in 1298, and then to D. Martim Afonso Chichorro, 1250 to 1313. From him and his son, who signed himself Martim Afonso de Sousa Chichorro, comes the branch carrying both names together for three hundred years, down through D. Vasco Martins de Sousa Chichorro, 1320 to 1387.

The lands accumulate as the list runs on. D. Lopo Dias de Sousa, born about 1350, was lord of Mafra, Ericeira and Enxara dos Cavaleiros; Álvaro de Sousa, born about 1410, lord of Miranda and mayor of Arronches. Later generations turned those lordships into higher titles — Diogo Lopes de Sousa, 2nd Count of Miranda, born about 1595; Henrique de Sousa Tavares, first Marquis of Arronches, born 1626; Luísa Casimira de Sousa Nassau and Ligne, Duchess of Lafões, born 1694.

When Portugal went out onto the oceans the Sousas went with it, and the empire's first appointments read like a family roster. Martim Afonso de Sousa, about 1500 to 1571, was the first donatary of the Captaincy of São Vicente in Brazil and afterwards governor of Portuguese India; some sources style him Brazil's first royal governor, a different office from the one Tomé de Sousa held. Tomé de Sousa, 1503 to 1579, was the first governor-general of Brazil, and founded Salvador da Bahia in person.

The same generation held the other ends of the route. Pedro Lopes de Sousa, who died in 1594, was the first governor of Portuguese Ceylon, and Thomé de Sousa-Arronches sailed as a captain of the Portuguese navy in the India armadas. At home the house supplied the church as readily as the sea: João de Sousa, 1647 to 1710, was Archbishop of Lisbon. That line of service ran on until the republican revolution of 5 October 1910 swept away the monarchy and every rank of nobility in Portugal.

Sousa is today one of the commonest surnames in the Portuguese-speaking world — Portugal, Brazil, Galicia, East Timor, the former Portuguese territories in Africa, and the Catholic communities of Goa, Mumbai, Mangaluru and Fort Kochi, where it is written D'Souza. Most of those bearers are not descendants of the Douro house, and the honest history of how the name spread matters more than a flattering one.

Along the Brazilian and West African coasts the Portuguese built trading forts later turned to the slave trade, fathered children with local women, and gave those children their own surnames. A whole West African De Souza family descends from Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Portuguese-Brazilian from Salvador in Bahia who grew rich on that trade. A surname that arrived by that road, or by baptism and conversion in Goa, is not the ancestral European line this atlas traces, and a reader deserves to be told so rather than sold a crest.

The line this page follows is the Portuguese one, and it is traceable through the naming system itself. Portuguese law allows up to two personal names and four surnames, the mother's usually before the father's, so a Sousa can sit anywhere in a long string — José de Sousa Saramago, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa — and the particle is ignored when filing, the man entered under S as Sousa, Luís de. If Sousa appears anywhere in your family's papers, it is a surname to follow, not a middle name to drop.

The literary line is the proudest. José de Sousa Saramago, 1922 to 2010, won the Prémio Camões and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Behind him stand the monk and writer Luís de Sousa, 1555 to 1632; the poet Christovão de Sousa Falcão, born about 1512 and dead in 1557; the historian and poet Manuel de Faria e Sousa, 1590 to 1649; and the folklorist and novelist Maria Peregrina de Souza, 1809 to 1894.

In public life the name reaches the top of the Portuguese state twice over: Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, born 1948, President of Portugal, and José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa, born 1957, Prime Minister. Jerónimo de Sousa, born 1947, led the Portuguese Communist Party.

The diaspora carries it too. Washington Luís Pereira de Sousa, 1869 to 1957, was the last president of Brazil's First Republic; Júlio César de Mello e Souza, 1895 to 1974, wrote as Malba Tahan; Charles Sousa, born 1958, was Minister of Finance for Ontario; Pete Souza, born 1954, was chief official White House photographer. A Portuguese river gave its name to a valley, the valley to a house, and the house to people on every continent Portuguese ships reached.