Ivan's weblog

A couple of weeks ago I went to Barcelona (see pictures) to visit my friend Christian and a few other fellas who live there. I took the opportunity to go to Mas Tubert, a house for rural tourism in El Ripollès, a couple of hours from Barcelona. I expected to find distant cousins there, but alas, they told me that I was a bit late–the last time someone with the Tubert name lived in that house was in 1866. But I also learned that the house is there and belonged to a Tubert at least as early as 1675. The story is told in Columbaris: El Colomer de la Vall de Bianya (Segles XIII-XX) by Antoni Herrero. Here I show a picture of one page:

And here is a picture from the house itself, from the keystone of the arch above the main door:

Many people in Barcelona and in El Tubert told me that they were pretty sure that Tubert is a Catalan name. I’ve decided to investigate by using the white pages, which are available online. What follows is a list of the number of Tuberts found for each province in Spain and département in France, sorted by decreasing frequency. Notice how the Tuberts are heavily concentrated in Girona and Pyrénées-Orientales. So it appears that the Tubert name comes from the Eastern Pyrenees region between France and Spain, although even there it is not a very common name. The question now is, how did some Tuberts ended up moving to Russia and from there to Argentina? I suspect that Napoleon may be involved somehow.

Spain

(Note: this count includes matches for both the father’s family name and the mother’s family name, so the count is overestimated by a factor of two relative to the French data below).

France