Family name origins & meanings
- Italian : from a personal name composed of the elements bona (buona) ‘good’ + parte ‘solution’, ‘match’, a name bestowed as an expression of satisfaction at the child’s arrival. The name has also been adopted as a Jewish surname and by admirers of the Emperor Napoleon in North America and the Caribbean.
- The family of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) had originally come to the island of Corsica from Tuscany in 1512. They were landowners, proud of their noble Italian background, and they claimed descent from a 10th-century count of Pistoia. Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, married Elizabeth Patterson in Baltimore, MD, in 1803, but the emperor refused to recognize the marriage and it was annulled. Many years later her son’s legitimacy was recognized by Napoleon III. Her grandson Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1851–1921) was secretary of the navy and U.S. attorney general. Another grandson, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II, graduated from West Point in 1852, but resigned from the U.S. Army to serve with the French army.