Whether it is written Kirouac, Kerouac, Keroack or Kyrouac, these family names all derive from one Breton name Kervoac meaning: light soil place light soil place and always pronounced KERROUAC, originally it was a place name and not a family name. Kervoac is located in the village of Lanmeur in the north of Brittany, in the Finistère, a Department of France. Today, it still identifies an estate in the village of Lanmeur.

We owe our family name to a long-standing tradition within the bourgeois -- i.e., well-to-do -- class during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the rigidly organized society at the time rank and hierarchy were of the utmost importance. There were three main rungs in the social ladder. At the bottom were the ordinary folks, peasants and labourers, basically non-educated and penniless; on the middle rung were the well-to-do people, usually merchants and notaries, with some education and money but no title; at the top were the nobles -- i.e., lower and higher aristocrats with title and crest. According to the late famous Canadian historian Marcel Trudel, nobility fascinated anyone not belonging to that higher rung. "Nobility" held a powerful attraction for all other levels of society. Consequently, the 'bourgeois' wanted to give the impression of belonging to a higher social class social class as well as project that illusion onto others.

One way of doing so at the time was to add, to their family name, the name of the family estate, like the upper class always did. The nobles owned land and adding the name of their land to their family name set them apart from the rest of society. So our ancestor did just that, he added the toponym de Kervoac, the name of his ancestors’ land, to his family name to identify himself. His contemporaries in New France knew him as Le Breton (or Le Brice which means Breton in the Celtic language), from Kervoac, Alexandre de Kervoach. It was clever and permitted.

However, using almost exclusively the toponym de Kervoach without anything else had a consequence: The toponym became a new family name. First Kervoac, then Keroac, followed by numerous derivatives, to the many variations now used throughout North America.