Hello Allan.

I just stumbled upon your webpage... www.garon.us/Garon%20name.html

It is quite informative and very interesting. Thank you for posting it online.

Years ago I was told by some Israeli friends of the “Garon = throat” translation.

Thank you for confirming that.

You probably already know the rest of this, but just in case, I’ll forward it anyway.

Subsequent to being told of the “throat” translation, I learned from a classical historian of a certain “steamed” fish plate popular among the legions of Roman soldiers.

“Garum derives from garos (also garon), the fish originally used by the Greeks in about the fifth-century BC to make a sauce of the same name.”

“Fish sauces in Ancient Greece and Rome

It is interesting to note that fish sauce was also used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. There is evidence that these ancient cultures produced fish sauce on a very large scale and that there was commerce of fish sauce across many regions. In Ancient Greece, the fish sauce was called Garon, and in Ancient Rome, it was called Garum or Liquamen. According to ancient written records it appears that the method of production is very similar to the traditional methods of fish sauce production in Southeast Asia.”

https://www.ajinomoto.com/features/aji-no-moto/en/column/ancient.html

Regarding the caption from your webpost:

So I take the story as true, though there are still many unknowns:  

Which Garon was the first? 

Could it have been Simcha Zimel, our great-grandfather? 

Was there a "real" Garon family?

Yes, according to our decades-long research there both was and still is a “real” Garon family.

We trace our roots back to “The Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine”.

Further back beyond that, the family of origin was located near Lyon, France.

Generally speaking, we consider ourselves to be more “French” than “German”.

My 88-year-old father, who is a retired university professor, has spent 50+ years researching our family history.

So far, he has been able to directly trace our Garon family ancestry positively back to the mid-to-late 1400s.

The search continues.

So the question still remains to know... “Which Garon was the first?”.

However, we can definitely answer the question “Was there a real Garon family”.

The answer is “Yes!”, and I’m one of the “real” ones  :-)

Hope this adds to the storyline.

God bless.

Kind regards,

Michael Garon