The Des Maretz are by the means of a very ancient traditional family lineage correspondents in relation to the House of Flanders - by way of Bertha Countess of Cambrai, she is the daughter of Raoul I, Count of Cambrai, and the grand-daughter of Baudoin I, Count of Flanders.

Baudoin I of Flanders married to Judith, the Princess Royal of France, daughter of King Charles II (the Bald), being of the House of Emperor Charlemagne.

Bertha Countess of Cambrai it seems bestowed her title by marriage to her husband, one Isaac Rémi, c.890-950, he is presumably the earliest known direct male ancestor, the Lord of Lens, of an unknown family history at this particular time period. Ref: Seigneurs de Lens.

Their son Jean Castillian de Lens, was a chastelain, or castellan of Lens, a fortified area - presumably a formal castle. He married Adele of Vermandois (known also as a branch of the House of Emperor Charlemagne), c.934-984, they had a son Jean de Lens, also a chastelain of Lens. This son Jean married Dame Montdidier and their son was Jean, the first Baron of Bousies.

It is exactly this point that the male line splits between his two sons, the brothers Jean II Baron of Bousies and Baron Wautier of Bousies.

Jean II, the Baron de Bousies, had a son Baudoin I, the Baron des Marets, and he is the father of all the succeeding generations within the family of the Barons des Marets.

Wautier Baron de Bousies gave way to successive generations of the Barons of Bousies which continued for centuries afterward.

Therefore the Barons des Marets are traditionally by lineage the cousins of the Barons of Bousies in the male line.

They are thereby both cousins of the innumerable and successive Counts of Flanders by way of Bertha Countess of Cambrai, the daughter of Raoul I Count of Cambrai who was the son of Baudoin I Count of Flanders.

It is indicated that these brothers were known as crusaders in the Holy Land.

The villages of Maretz and Bousies are located near the city of Cambrai, in the Nord department, Hauts-de-France, and are separated by approximately 20 km, within the historical territory and former administrative region of Picardie or Picardy. The city of Lens is located 50 km northwest of Cambrai, in the Pas-de-Calais department, Hauts-de-France. Le Cateau-Cambrésis is a place where it has been noted that many generations of the des Marets historically resided and is located exactly in between Maretz and Bousies.

This family name has had various pronunciations and spellings based on twofold a hard or a soft pronunciation of the Picardienne language or dialect versus other local languages.

Variations of this name have been as follows:

Desmaretz, De More, de Maurais, de Maretz, Desmarest, de Marest, etc.

Glimpses of the Fatherlands, ‘History of Harlem’ (revised), Striker, 1904. p.14-15

“To catch the spirit and genius of the times under review is to ignore such changes, political, moral, and physical, as three centuries have wrought; for Europe of to-day is not the Europe of the sixteenth century. By the light of the historic past, its wealth of significant fact and incident is more clearly revealed. In the land of the Huguenots the remote eras of the Gaul, the Roman, and the Frank yet lived in a piquant story, and might be traced in existing monuments as well as in musty tomes. Still in popular use were the old provincial names, time-honored and interwoven with all the history of the country; for not yet had revolution stripped the French provinces of these means of identity, in its well-conceived but too radical onslaught upon feudal rights and institutions. An exhaustless theme, with our Huguenot refugee, was his dear old Picardie, or Artois, or Normandie; the talisman which in his remotest wanderings , e’en til death closed his exile, recalled all that was endearing in the word HOME. In church and state the ancient regime was intact. The old provincial dynasties which had grown up and flourished under the feudal system, but whose lines of puissant counts and dukes were long since extinct, lived even yet in important senses, not only in monumental stones and structures, and in the local annals and traditions, but in countless charters, privileges, laws and usages still prized and cherished by the people. History, as if to deepen its impress upon the popular heart, had scattered its monuments over the soil with lavish hand; and around these, time, —which in the annals of Gaul meant a score of centuries, —had woven its weird and marvelous legends, often a tax upon credulity, but perchance too real: some tale of gallant heroism, of gentle piety, or dark superstition, touching the heart or quickening the blood, but, whether true or otherwise, a telling paraphrase upon the national traits or instincts. The old baronial castle proudly rearing its towers was rich in reminiscences of warlike feudal times. The razing its ponderous walls as material for the mason? —sacrilegious thought. Dingy cloisters, over whose turrets crept venerable ivy, still swarmed with pious monks, yet had come to be symbolic of that moral darkness which in the early ages first drove the gentle handmaids’ religion and learning to the covert of such strong and friendly walls. Held by the masses in profound veneration, they evidenced the singular fervor of the race. But here’s a touching emblem, the cross, —it is coarsely fashioned in stone, —which surprises one in some rural solitude, but near the highway, so none may fail to see it, and, kneeling, offer up a paternoster. Mute; yet it tells, maybe, the affecting tale of some early martyrdom, or of the gallant brave slain in battle, on this now sacred spot. How suggestive of that strong, unnatural alliance between war and religion; whence bloody crusades against Turks, Albigenses, and Vaudois, and, we may add, the Huguenot wars.”

“No class of Gallic blood was more remarkable than the Walloons, —a people at the present day numbering nearly two millions, and mainly included within France and Belgium. Time has wrought but slight change among them, but we needs must describe them as they were. Theirs was a belt of country extending eastward from the river Lys, beyond both Scheldt and Meuse, and embracing French or Walloon Flanders, most of Artois, the Chambresis, Hainault, Namur, Southern Brabant, and parts of Liege and Luxembourg. Within the last lay the principality of Sedan, stretched along the east side of the Meuse, on which the city of Sedan, its strong capital, was seated. A fruitful region and, in the sixteenth century, an independent Protestant state, it attracted many of the persecuted Walloons during the religious troubles of that period. The northern limits of the Walloon country would have been nearly defined by a line drawn from the city of Liege, on the Meuse, to Calais. On the south it was bounded by Picardy, Champagne and Lorraine, provinces which in the times referred to composed the French frontier.

(The term Walloon is derived from the word Gaul, which the Germans, by an etymological substitution of W for the latin G, changed into Wahl, and in the plural Whalen; the low Dutch making it Waal and Wallen…)

The Walloons were a hardy, long-lived race, tall, stout, and muscular; in which respects, quite unlike the ordinary French, they compared better with their neighbors, the Flemings, but again were readily distinguished from the latter both by their physiognomy and their speech, which  last was a crude French patois, spoken by them unchanged for centuries, and still in common use among them. Of strong intellects, manly bearing, a sagacious, practical and laborious people, they were also noted for the plainness of their tastes, manners and dress. These several traits were clearly traceable to their ancestors, the old Belgæ, their descent from whom was also unmistakable in their coolness and pertinacity, so in contrast with the excitability and fickleness characterizing the French of proper Celtic blood. It was these qualities, combined with a natural love of arms, and the courage inherited from their ancestors, —whom Cæsar describes as the bravest of all the Gauls, —that made the Walloons such famous soldiers. Ever tenacious of their rights, and thus excessively litigant, they were yet hospitable and social, possessing much of the French vivacity. In domestic life they lacked no element of solid, homespun comfort: the plain, substantial domicile, roofed with tile or thatch; a bare floor, but genial hearth stone, with ample pile of blazing wood, or turf, as it suited; the oaken board, set with brown ware or pewter with goodly supply of simple, wholesome food, —this satisfied the Walloon ambition in the line of living. Song, or instrumental music, of which they were excessively fond, commonly enlivened the social hour. They were devout, and, as a people, intensely attached to the Roman ritual.”

“Very interesting is Picardy, whence came so many of the French exiles who made their homes at Harlem, for longer or shorter periods; in all some thirty families, of which a full third were Picards or of Picard descent. Of this class were Tourneur, Cresson, Demarest, Casier and Disosway, all of whom, except the last, served as magistrates.”

“But who were the Picards? A quite superior people to the average French; being of mixed origin, descendants of both Belgæ and Celtæ, and occupying the border between these two ancient nations, or rather the district which parted the Celtæ from the Nervii, the most invincible of the Belgic tribes. Thus sanguine and choleric like the Celts, they approached the Belgæ in their moral and physical stamina. In stature above the medium, with usually well developed frame, they betrayed their affinity to the Walloons, whose patois, rough and disagreeable, resembled theirs; yet, proud and spirited, they held those neighbors, and all others, in secret disdain. The love of independence was not so strong within them as the love of equality; it was here their vanity showed itself, but it tempered the popular homage to wealth or titles. Though hasty, blunt, and obstinate, yet without the effrontery of the Normans or the superstition of the Champenois, —and more religious than either, —Picards were withal lively, generous, honest and discreet. Their conversation sparkled with wit, mirth and sarcasm. Necessity rather than inclination made them industrious, yet they yielded their full share of workers and proficients in the arts and sciences; as also of able physicians and divines, —some of the latter as much distinguished in the controversial history of the Reformation as others had been who where its earliest champions. With intelligence, and a manly aim to excel in what they undertook, even though it were but agriculture, —in which by far the greater number were engaged, —Picards could not but add a valuable element to any society so fortunate as to attract them.”

(Picard, though a term of disputed origin, is admitted to have been first local and restricted to the people of the Amienois, the district in which Amiens, the provincial capital, is seated; but it early spread to the whole supplanting all the tribal designations. It probably came from the pique, an ancient war weapon, with the German suffix -ard, meaning a species or race; adhering to these people as inventors of that weapon, or from the renown they had acquired in handling it. So they became known as the Picards, or pike-men. Dated to not earlier than the 1200 by Gibbon, its occurrence early in the AD 1000’s refutes this.)

“There was another large and flourishing church gathered at Oisemont, a market town twelve miles south of Abbeville, where the Huguenots were strong. It was some eighteen miles (?) west of Amiens, to which its royal provost was subordinate. In the time of our refugees this church enjoyed the labors of Rev. Jacques De Vaux, a native of Compiegne. One of its elders, living at Oisemont at the date of the passage of the Edict of Nantes, was David Des Marets, Sieur du Ferets. In 1625 he represented the church in the Provincial Synod, held at Charenton, near Paris. Beyond question our David Des Marest [also an elder], who came from Picardy, was of this family, but how related we cannot say.”

“Would we truly estimate the character of such men as Demarest, and Disosway, and Casier, and Cresson, and their real value to the community at Harlem, we should follow up the pageant last introduced, and admit the moral sublimity of that primitive worship, with its power to mold the life, —the fervid invocation, the holy song, set to the metrical psalms of Clement Marot; the simple Gospel, clothed in the warm, persuasive eloquence of the times, which raised the soul heavenward. We would also note the activity and zeal which pervaded the Huguenot churches, and the watchfulness over the walk of the members, which so contributed to soundness of faith and purity of life.”

“The family Des Marets was of the old Picard gentry, and was also prominent in the church at Oisemont, of which David Des Marets, the Sieur Du Ferets, was an elder. His son, Samuel [i.e. MARESIUS], born at Oisemont, in 1599, and taught at the great schools of Paris, Saumur and Geneva, became in 1619 pastor of the church of Laon. But forced to leave in 1623 by an attempt upon his life which nearly proved fatal, he accepted a new charge at Falaise, in Normandy, but after a year went to Sedan, and thence, in 1642, to Groningen, in Holland, as professor of theology. Our David Des Marest, who wrote his name thus, was born in Picardy, and, as is strongly indicated, was of the same lineage, —for dignity of character and fidelity to his religion, worthy so excellent a kinship; the clerical tendency among his descendants is also very significant. He went to Holland and joined the French colony in the island of Walcheren, at which place his eldest son, Jean Demarest, was born in 1645. Here David probably married his wife Marie Sohier, as a family of this name from Hainault had taken refuge at Middelburg in the first Walloon emigrations.”

From ‘The Huguenots on the Hackensack’, p.102, by Rev. David D. Demarest, D.D., Prof. in the  Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1886.