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 It seems to be generally accepted by genealogists that the name currently spelled "BOON" , "BOONE", or in any of a number of variations that fall within the B-500 Soundex structure, originated from the Viking name "Bjorn" in the mid-800's AD. It spread south along the coast of Europe as conquring bands invaded those accessable lands, long before "family" names were used in those areas. Generations of marriages and migrations, and the evolution of the "family" name as an identity concept, distributed variants of Bjorn -- Bone, Boon, de Bohun, Bonn, Bunn, and others -- through the populations of Germany, France and the Low Countries. Migrations of these peoples, in war and in common trade, further distributed the name, or at least the phonetic equal, as far as America, Australia and oriental cultures.For my purposes on this website, the name is most likely English, descended from Humphrey de Bohun, who came to England from the Normandy region of France as a result of the Conquest; he was given title and property in Hertford, Middlesex and Kent, for his loyalty and service in the war, and his descendants would accumulate property and titles from Essex and Kent on the east to Devon and Somerset on the west.
In any case, the DE BOHUN / BOONE name can be found in English records from the 1066, and in surviving parish records from the 1500s. It can be found in America from the earliest successful colonizations, in Jamestown in1608; in the Caribbean islands from the 1620's, and in the New England, Virginia and Carolina colonies from the 1650s. There are intermittent references to members of a BOONE family in southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina as early as 1663, and with multiple individuals identified by 1723. My earliest proven link is a Thomas Boone, who dies in that area in 1800, and who is purported to have been born to this same family about 1725. The accumulated DNA evidence, from other Boone descendants in different parts of the country, who share a similar paper-genealogy to mine, would indicate that this is indeed true -- but we need more more samples to increase the reliability of the assumption, and we need other descendants, from English Boone ancestors who did not come to America, to identify which ancestral Boone family we belong to. It is the goal of this website to communicate accumulated research to other individual family genealogists researching the BOONE name; to request that any newly-discovered information on this family be forwarded to me, for use in this website; and to eventually identify the european roots of this family group, for all descendants. |
As it is believed that the direct male line of de Bohun died out -- meaning there were generations in all branches where there were no male children, there should be no direct blood-line back to Humphrey (i.e. Y-DNA trace) -- it is believed that the name and title may have passed through surviving female heirs, to their husbands. It may also have been assumed by peasants living on lands owned by the de Bohun heirs, much as American slaves assumed the family names of former owners. These various sources would give rise to separate Boone families, each with a distinct Y-DNA signature, which we see in the evolving 
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