About Us and Our History
This is not an officially registered coat of arms for the Labuschagne family, but one we designed ourselves.
Here follows a brief outline of the ancestry of both the paternal Labuschagne and the maternal Durandt sides of our family in Dunedin.
The Labuschagne Ancestors
The name Labuschagne derives, via a chain of misspellings, from that of our paternal ancestor Pierre Labuscaigne. He was born in 1675 into a Huguenot family living in Bergerac, France, and fled to Holland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. Reaching Holland in 1696, he worked as a tailor in Enkhuizen, north of Amsterdam, amd in 1703 he married Marie Anne Bacot, whose family was well known in the Loire Valley. In 1710 he travelled to South Africa, as an employee of the Dutch East India Company, and was later joined by his wife and children.
The word "buscage" or "boscage" meant bushy or woody country in medieval French, suggesting an historical connection between the family and forests, though not of the cultivated kind represented by the aristocratic du Bois.
Credit goes to Professor Casper Labuschagne of the Netherlands, for confirmation of the dates.
The Durandt Ancestors
The Durand family was a well–known and respected Huguenot family in the Dauphiné region in the south–east of France, near Italy. The South African paternal ancestor, Jean Durand, was born in 1666 at La Motte, Chalançon in Dauphiné. As far as can be established he arrived at the Cape in South Africa between 1688 and 1690. His name is noted in documentation pertaining to a grant of monies to settlers in 1690.
The word "durand" occurs in Latin and French, meaning enduring.
Jean Durand was twice married. His first wife, Anna Vermeulen, bore him two daughters, Johanna and Susanna. It is believed that Anna died at the birth of Susanna in 1716.
Jean and his second wife, Wilhelmina van Zyl, had four children — Wilhelmina, Jan, Jonathan and Christina. Jonathan had one son, Pieter, who never had any children. It appears that our branch of the family is that which ensued from Jan. From Jean Durand our ancestry can be traced for six generations to Leta's paternal great grandfather Abraham Lodewikus Durand, who was born in 1845 and died in 1910.
Recent Family History
The Labuschagnes of Dunedin arrived in New Zealand as permanent residents in January 1999 — a nuclear family with parents Willem and Leta, son Jacques, and daughter Lisa. We feel a gentle kinship with Pierre Labuscaigne, having also taken the step of abandoning a familiar environment, grown inhospitable and dangerous, for a new beginning in a strange land. In order not to lose our sense of being part of a larger family, we record here some snippets of history relating to the world we (Willem and Leta) grew up in. That world was the Union of South Africa, which lasted from 1910 until 1961, when Verwoerd declared a Republic. In many ways, the Union was a pleasant, though not idyllic, country in which to grow up. Our own children had the misfortune to be born into the dark days of South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, when violence and paranoia were rife. Now that they live in the civilised and caring community of New Zealand, we'd like them to know that the South Africa they remember was not the whole story. Jacques and Lisa, this is for you and your eventual children.
Since much of the story of our lives is of a rather personal nature, that information is protected by password log–in. We will provide the username and password to our family and close friends.
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