The SEARCY Name
Submitted By Rick
Woodard
From a 1966 letter from Esther SEARCY to Lois JETT:
"The family name, SEARCY, has many spellings, some of which
are: SEARCEY,
SEARCIE, SEARCE, SCEARCIE, SARCE, SIRCY AND SCARCE. The most prevalently
used form seems to have been and is today, SEARCY. The name originated from
a place in France. According to Harper's DICTIONARY OF FAMILY
NAMES, the
name SEARCY means "one who is from CERCY or CERISY" in
France.
The Searcy ancestors were Huguenots and the Huguenots were French
Protestant
people. They were much involved in the Religious Wars of France,
Civil Wars,
during the last half of the 16th century.
The Edict of Nantes was issued in the year 1598 by Henry IV, the
king of
France. It gave the French
Protestants or the Huguenots freedom of religion,
granting them liberty of conscience, the right to private worship,
and the
freedom to public worship wherever it had been previously
granted. The Edict
of Nantes was revoked in 1685, during the reign of Louis XIV. It was the
revocation of this document and its ensuing religious persecution
which forced
the Huguenots to leave France.
They fled in large numbers, going to England,
Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and America. They were a people who had
constituted many of France's most intelligent, skilled and
industrious people,
also some of her most wealthy people. This fact was well borne out in their
newly adopted homes or countries, where they contributed
substantially toward
and became a benefit to a way of life there.
The original United States SEARCYs came over from England. It seems logical
to assume that they must have gone from France into England,
coming later to
America. Evidence of this
is in the numbers of old SEARCY tombstones found in
England today, especially in Nottingham, with inscriptions dating
from 1733
to 1785.
The first Searcy to come here along with two or three of his
brothers was John
Searcy who was born in Nottingham, England in 1694 and died in Granville
Co.,
North Carolina in 1784."