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Booz Coat of Arms / Booz Family CrestThis surname of BOOZ was a name of local origin, from Balhousie, Fife in Scotland, which appears in 17th century records as BOWSAY and BOUSAY, still the local pronunciation of the name. The surname was mainly localized in Fife. Sir John BOUSIE who claimed the chaplaincy of the Trinity of Dysart was recorded in 1566, and Sir John BOWSIE was master of the Hospital of the Holy Trinity in Edinburgh in 1584. Alba, the country which became Scotland, was once shared by four races; the Picts who controlled most of the land north of the Central Belt; the Britons, who had their capital at Dumbarton and held sway over the south west, including modern Cumbria; the Angles, who were Germanic in origin and annexed much of the Eastern Borders in the seventh century, and the Scots. The latter came to Alba from the north of Ireland late in the 5th century to establish a colony in present day Argyll, which they named Dalriada, after their homeland. The Latin name SCOTTI simply means a Gaelic speaker. Thomas Boose was a notary public in St. Andrews in 1567, and David Bowsie was commissioner to parliament for Crail in 1579. The name has numerous variant spellings which include BOOS, BOOE, BOOZE, BOUSE, BOUSY, BOWZIE and BUSE. Over the centuries, most people in Europe have accepted their surname as a fact of life, as irrevocable as an act of God. However much the individual may have liked or disliked the surname, they were stuck with it, and people rarely changed them by personal choice. A more common form of variation was in fact involuntary, when an official change was made, in other words, a clerical error. Among the humbler classes of European society, and especially among illiterate people, individuals were willing to accept the mistakes of officials, clerks and priests as officially bestowing a new version of their surname, just as they had meekly accepted the surname they had been born with. In North America, the linguistic problems confronting immigration officials at Ellis Island in the 19th century were legendary as a prolific source of Anglicization. |
