By
John Hind Chesnut
Since people are always trying to “correct” the spelling of our name, it should be made clear at the outset that the spelling c-h-e-s-n-u-t, without a middle t “was the predominant form (82 per cent. of instances examined) from 1570 to c 1820,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Dr. Virgil Gordon Walker told me that County Antrim in Northern Ireland is the primary seat of the name Chesnut in the Old World today. Since County Antrim is the home of many Scotch-Irish families, most of whom were originally Lowland Scots or English, it has been proposed that the name Chesnut is of Scottish or English extraction. Chesnut may be a variant of the Scottish Chesney or the English Chesson or Cheston, for example.
It would be interesting to know whether chestnut trees are found as far north as Scotland, since that might bear on the possibility of a Scottish origin for the family name Chesnut. Peter Bridgeman, Trees for Town & Country: A Practical Guide to Planting & Care (London: David & Charles), p. 7-8, states that the sweet chestnut is not “native” to Britain in the strict sense, because it was not growing there before Britain broke away from the continent about six thousand years ago. Nevertheless, the tree was introduced long ago by the Romans (the name of the tree is derived from Latin) and the tree is now accepted as a near native. The sweet chestnut (p. 132) likes sandy and gravelly soils or (p. 135) salty coastal conditions (suggesting its origins in southern Europe).
Not all the residents of northern Ireland are of Scottish or English descent, however. Many French Huguenots also settled in County Antrim after the revocation of the Edict of Nante in 1685. There are records of Huguenots naturalized in Great Britain and Ireland as early as 1681. Indeed, the famous linen industry of Ireland was founded by Huguenots, and I have seen a record of an Alexander Chesnut who settled in Georgia with a group of Irish linen weavers.
Currently available information suggests that the name Chesnut first appears in the English-language records at about the time of the Huguenot migrations. Because of these coincidences—which are at most clues in a detective mystery and are not genealogical proof—I have given particular attention to the possibility of a French Huguenot origin for the name Chesnut.
The following modern French words pertaining to chestnuts are derived from the Latin, castanea: la châtaigne, the nut; la châtaigneraie, a chestnut plantation; le châtaignier, a chestnut tree; châtain, the color brown. In Old French the letter â was spelled as. It will be seen below that the h seems to have been optional.
Regional variants of these words, except the word for a chestnut plantation, are found as surnames in France. These are discussed in Albert Dauzat, “Les noms de famille de france,” (Paris: Payot), p. 148, and by the same author, “Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille et prénoms de France (Paris: Librairie Larousse). The word for the nut probably indicates a merchant of those goods. The word for the tree suggests a characterisitc sight in the region where the bearer of the name lives. In the North of France, Châtain, Châtin, evokes the color of hair, especially where there are no chestnut trees.
John O’Hart, Irish Pedigrees, 5th Ed., Vol. 2 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 463-482, writes about Huguenots who settled in Great Britain and Ireland during the reign of Louis XIV, of France; and the names of Huguenot families naturalized in Great Britain and Ireland, commencing A.D. 1681, in the reign of King Charles II, and ending in 1712, in the reign of Queen Anne. Most of his information comes from Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France (1886). Several family names that could be translated as Chesnut are found in these sources. For each name in Agnew and O’Hart, I have added comments about the meaning or origins of the name from Dauzat, Agnew or the French tourist authorities. The names are as follows:
From Agnew, we learn these first names: amongst the males there were three Johns, an Alexander and a Henry. By comparison, amongst the American Chesnuts, John, Alexander and William were especially popular. William may be in honor of the Protestant King William of Orange. We also learn (Agnew, vol. 2, p. 511) that in Wandsworth there were felt-hat makers named Chataigne, later anglicized to Chatting.
In summary, there are several French Huguenot names which could have been translated as Chesnut. Alternatively, the names could have been anglicized without translation, as Chatting. I have personally known a family named Chastaine, which is obviously another direct importation into English without translation.
More than one of the names could have been translated, so it is possible that the name Chesnut represents more than one unrelated line. Just to complicate matters, we even have to consider the possibility that there are unrelated lines of French, Scottish and English Chesnuts. To settle the question will require specific genealogical proof.