RUBY One-Name Study : studying the Ruby surname across the world

Sheila Dohoo Faure,  a Canadian Guild member, is one of the researchers delving into the many French Rubys.  Indeed, when the original data on Rubys worldwide was gathered, France was one of the primary sources of the origin of the Ruby surname.  Here, Sheila shares the story of Maurice Ruby and the mixups of wartime.  Maurice Marie Joseph Ruby was born on 5 November 1888 in Lyon, France, the son of Benoit Joseph Amed ée Ruby and Augustine Marthe Lacroix. His parents had married in Lyon on 24 November 1887 and had two children—Maurice had a younger brother, Henri Marie Cyprien, born in 1890. His father worked in the silk industry which, at the time, was a pillar of Lyon’s economy. His grandfather, Alexandre Annet Ruby, and great-grandfather before him had been shopkeepers in Lyon. Maurice may have been the first in his family to get a higher education. He attended the Ecole des Mines in St Etienne—just 60 kilometres away from Lyon—and gr...

  Globe, 12 September 1910.   Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive ( www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk ).  We have identified several origins of the Ruby name, in Denmark, Switzerland and England, with many families in France and Ireland, as yet with roots unidentified.    However, as we saw from the case of Jack Ruby, there are other families called Ruby whose roots lie in Eastern Europe, so far as we have yet found, under other names.   In Jack Ruby’s case it was Rubenstein, originally from Sokolow, near Warsaw, in Poland.   In the case of another Ruby family in Boston, Massachusetts their original name was Rubinovitz and they hailed from Merkinė in modern day Lithuania. Another origin of a Ruby family was traced to a man in Limehouse, one of the most socially-deprived areas of inner London and home to much immigration for Jewish migrants escaping from Eastern ...