MReilly wrote 18/06/03: "That -by suffice is Scandinavian, denoting a place name, but I forget exactly what it means, village I think. It's common in England and Scotland because of the heavy Norse settlement in the Middle Ages, the extent of which can be gauged by the name Ingleby, meaning "English Village," which tends to show that villages inhabited by the English stood out from the norm in Northern England at the time. I don't know what Busby means but it seems likely that all Busby families originate in the town of Busby, except for those who adopted the name. There may well be more than one town named Busby, however"." What Christian denomination were the Indian Busbys? Busby is a common "yankee" name in New England, and I wonder if the source of the name was American missionaries". I would think if any Indians took the Busby name from American missionaries, they would have been Baptist, Methodist, or Congregationalist. Maybe Quaker. In any event some evangelical sect of British origin, and not Anglican or Lutheran. But then it would be hard to distinguish them from converts by English and Scottish missionaries, who were also active in the same places" My comment: All the above may be true, but it is important to also note that the Busby is also the high-topped fur head-dress, worn by the Prussian Hussars, and Cold Stream Guards who guard Buckingham Palace. The origin of the word is thought to be Hungarian. Among Bengali names we find the names Busbee, Busby, and Busbyr. A little known fact is that the Danes were also in Bengal, with the Danish East India Company, in a settlement called Fredericknagore, named for their King Frederick V, near Serampore, in 1699. When the Company went bankrupt, Serampore was incorporated as a Danish Crown Colony in 1777. It was in Serampore that Baptist Missionaries first set up their operations in Bengal, as the British East India company did not permit missionaries to operate in British India, a policy that was in place after the Act of Regulating Act of 1773, when the BEIco. and controlled areas came under greater British Parliamentary control and oversight with the appointment of a Governor-General. In Serampore in 1799, Rev. William Carey, from a Leicester City Baptist congregation, and two other Baptist missionaries set up a printing press to print Bibles etc. The first institution of western higher education in Asia, the Serampore College, was set up by Carey in 1819, and incorporated by Royal Danish Charter in 1827, putting it on par with the University of Kiel and Copenhagen. In 1845 Denmark ceded Serampore to Britain. So the Busbys may also have Danish origins and Baptist origins in Bengal. There are also Scandinavian first names in the Bengali male names list that I posted some-time ago.