Bezansons in North America

Jean George Bezanson

This site contains genealogical outlines of Jean George Bezanson and over 4,000 of his descendants, their spouses, and the parents of their spouses. I have omitted any people who are still living.

Recent Update: I've been adding census entries mostly from the 1950 US Census.

Jean George Bezanson was the first Bezanson to emigrate to North America. He came from the Montbeliard region of France, and his surname was probably spelled "Besançon" there, "an example of a surname derived from the family's town of origin."¹ He was one of many Foreign Protestants recruited by the British Board of Trade to augment the population of Nova Scotia and to do so with Protestants.

Inspiration

Shortly after I became interested in genealogy I came across a name that looked like "Bejarson" in some handwritten family history notes. I was convinced that Bejarson was not correct, but the person who wrote the name had passed away, and so I had to work it out for myself. After a few hours research on the Internet, I learned the name was actually Bezanson. I subsequently took a more than routine interest in that portion of my ancestry, and I have been gathering information about the Bezanson family, to one extent or another, since that time.

One of the great resources I found was Bezansons from Nova Scotia by Dorothy Evans. Originally published in 1986, and revised in 1991, the book includes character sketches and lineage information on more than five hundred Bezanson family members. Ms. Evans did a great job, but I found it time-consuming to find people within her book. I am a technology nerd, and I wanted an electronic version of the Bezanson family members listed in Bezansons from Nova Scotia, so I entered all the names and events from the book into my genealogy database.

You can see a list of people with character sketches in Bezansons from Nova Scotia here.

Over the years I entered more data, primarily from census records, but also from other sources. The result is this website. Unfortunately, I've never had the time to research any of these Bezansons in any depth, so most of what appears here lacks the color necessary to make interesting reading. However, it should help other Bezanson researchers to find where they connect to the North American roots of the family.

I owe a huge debt to Dorothy Evans and her two collaborators, Elaine Hoare and John DeCoste. Their work on Bezansons from Nova Scotia is the foundation of this site.

I relied on numerous other sources that were the labor of love of their creators/compilers.

• Surnames