Called: how one family can become many

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Quebec, a small founding population meant the same handful of French surnames turned up constantly, in the same parishes, married into each other for generations. A priest with three René Roys and two Jean Gauthiers in one register needed a way to tell them apart, and the colony's answer was the dit-name — a second name, attached with the word "called," that rode alongside the surname in parish and notarial acts. It wasn't a nickname in the casual sense. It functioned as legally as the surname itself: children were baptized under it, land was deeded under it, and sometimes, after a generation or two, it simply replaced the name it had once only clarified.

Every family on this site's direct lines carries at least one. This page names the ones that survive in the records, and the four different ways a family could come to acquire one.

Four ways a name could change

An origin, correctly marked. Jacques Saurette's own dit-name, Larose, has nothing to do with a flower. Family tradition holds it was a nom de guerre — a barracks name, issued the way a uniform was issued, when he enlisted with the Compagnies franches de la Marine — though no service record has been sighted to confirm the enlistment directly. His marriage act in 1741 names a witness only as "Saint Jean, Soldat" — a soldier identified by nothing but his own nom de guerre and his trade, one piece of the circumstantial case alongside the tradition and the marriage's own timing. The parish registers on both this family's lines carry other men issued the same kind of name: an Amédée Basile dit Larose at Fort Saint-Frédéric, a Pierre Corlet dit Richelieu. Flowers and rivers, handed to enlisted men like equipment.

An origin, incorrectly marked. Jean-Baptiste Oligny's dit-name, Lauvergnat, means "the man from the Auvergne." He wasn't from the Auvergne. His 1759 marriage contract gives his actual home parish as Saint-Mathurin-en-Limousin, in the diocese of Tulle — Corrèze, not Auvergne, a neighboring province with an audibly similar accent to Quebec ears. Someone in the parish misplaced him by one province within a few years of his arrival, and the error outlived whoever made it: his own children were married under the wrong-province name a generation later, in 1784. This is a different mechanism from a simple mishearing — it's a community assigning a stranger an origin, getting it wrong, and the mistake hardening into a name his descendants carried for decades.

Phonetic drift. An illiterate family's surname, spelled by ear, by whichever clerk or notary happened to be holding the pen that day. The Saurette line alone has been recorded as Saurette, Sauret, Soret, Sorel, Sorette, Sorette-Larose, Saurette dit Larose, Larose, LaRose, and Soret dit Larose — and one notary's hand in 1774 adds another, rendering it Chorel. None of these are different families. They're one family, filtered through however many different people wrote its name down.

The modern version. The same drift didn't stop at the border. American census enumerators, working quickly and often by ear themselves, produced their own variants once these families crossed into New England — a pattern that belongs to the same mechanism as the Quebec clerks, just a century later and in a different language.

The names carried on this site

The Oligny surname, across the documents behind this site: Oligny · Oligney · Olighby · Aligney · Aulney · Auligny · Ollegney · Oligny dit Lauvergnat

The Saurette surname: Saurette · Sauret · Soret · Sorel · Sorette · Sorette-Larose · Saurette dit Larose · Larose · LaRose · Soret dit Larose · Chorel

Watching one name finish the job

That a dit name can eventually swallow the surname it was only meant to clarify is easy to assert and hard to show. Usually the evidence is a gap: a family visible for three generations under one name, then nothing, and no document anywhere remarking that anything changed. One line on the mothers' side of this research happens to document the whole process instead — generation by generation, from a clerk's mistake in the 1650s to a surname that had stopped being written by 1763.

A misspelt province

In May 1653 a master carpenter named Paul Benoit signed on at La Flèche to serve Maisonneuve and La Dauversière, and crossed to Montréal that November aboard the Saint-Nicolas with the Grande Recrue — the recruitment drive mounted when Ville-Marie had shrunk to a few dozen people and stood on the edge of being abandoned. Marguerite Bourgeoys and Jeanne Mance crossed on the same ship.

He came from Châtillon-en-Bazois, in the Nivernais. In Quebec his origin was written down as Livernois.

That isn't a variant spelling. It's an error — an initial N heard, or copied, as an L. Whether it began with a clerk's ear or a clerk's pen can't be recovered now, and it doesn't matter. What matters is that it stuck, and that everything downstream inherited it. He married Élisabeth Gobinet at Ville-Marie in 1658; Maisonneuve signed the contract and so did Jeanne Mance, while neither the bride nor the groom could sign anything at all.

At this stage the name behaves exactly as the textbooks describe. A surname, Benoit. A nickname, dit Livernois, attached to one man to tell him from other Benoits. Two things, with the word dit sitting between them doing its job.

The connective disappears

Paul and Élisabeth's son Étienne married Jeanne Campois — Marie-Jeanne-Marguerite Campeau in PRDH's rendering, one woman — at Longueuil about 1697–98, by the age the act gives him; PRDH files the marriage at Montréal on 3 February 1699. On his record he is Étienne Benoit Livernois.

The word dit is gone — not the nickname, the connective. What was a surname plus an explanatory tag has become a compound surname, two words sitting together as though they had always belonged to each other. Nobody decided this. No document announces it. It is simply how the second generation got written down.

This is the step most easily missed, because nothing appears to have changed. The family is still findable under Benoit, and anyone indexing by surname will file Étienne under B and be right to. But the name has already shifted its weight.

Where this project got it wrong

This page carried, for a long time, the position that the descent could not be established. The acts that name Marie-Josèphe's own parents read plain Benoit, with no Livernois anywhere, and that absence was taken as evidence the nickname had died out before her generation.

It was not evidence of anything. A clerk recording a baptism is under no obligation to write out a family's full compound name, and frequently doesn't. The absence of a dit name on one act tells you what that clerk wrote that day, and nothing whatever about what the family was called.

The correction came from looking upward instead of at her. Her father's record and her grandfather's both carry the compound plainly. Which is the transferable lesson: when a dit name seems to vanish, check the generation above and the generation below before concluding anything. A gap in the middle of a chain is a gap in the paperwork, not in the family.

Two systems at one altar

Marie-Josèphe Benoit Livernois was baptised at Longueuil in December 1715. She married Louis Quenneville there in 1730 and, widowed, married Jacques Gauthier dit Saint-Germain at Chambly in October 1743.

Two compound surnames in one marriage — Benoit Livernois and Gauthier dit Saint-Germain, one with the connective still in place and one without. The two forms coexisting in a single act, in a single parish, in the same year, is worth pausing on. There is no orderly progression from dit to compound across the colony. Each family runs its own timetable, and two families standing at the same altar can be at different stages of the same process.

Benoit is gone

On 18 July 1763 at Chambly, Marie-Josèphe's daughter Catherine married Jean-Baptiste Soret. The act names both sets of parents, as a good act does. Her father is given as Jacques Gautier dit Saint Germain. Her mother is given as Marie Joseph Livernois.

Not Benoit Livernois. Not Benoit dite Livernois. Livernois.

A hundred and ten years after a clerk misheard the name of a French province, the mistake had finished the job: it had replaced the surname it was originally attached to explain. Anyone starting from this act and searching backward for a Livernois family will find nothing, because there was never a Livernois family. There was a Benoit family from the Nivernais.

Marriage contract, Benoit × Gobinet, 9 Sep 1658, greffe of Bénigne Basset, Ville-Marie, sighted · marriage act, Soret × Gauthier, 18 Jul 1763, Chambly (St-Joseph), sighted · marriage act, Étienne Benoit × Jeanne Campois, c. 1697/98, Longueuil, sighted · Register 03 §3.70, five sighted acts across the descent · PRDH-IGD family #8280, compiled, for the 1699 date · graded Proven end to end; see the Étienne Benoits

The same thing, twice more, on this site's own two surnames

Livernois is legible because the paperwork happens to survive at every step. The two surnames this whole project is named for went through the same process, and in both cases the name that took over was also a mistake about geography.

Oligny dit Lauvergnat. Lauvergnat means the man from the Auvergne. Jean-Baptiste Oligny was not from the Auvergne. He came from Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel in the Corrèze, in the Limousin — a province over, with an audibly similar accent to anyone not listening carefully. Somebody misplaced a stranger by one province within a few years of his arrival, and six generations wore the correction. His own name drifts across his lifetime: Jean Olignis Mathurin in 1759, plain Jean Oligny in 1766, Jean Baptiste Oligny dit Lauvergnac by 1784. The last form stuck, and it names the wrong place.

Soret dit Larose. On the other side, the takeover went further and faster. Jacques Saurette's Larose was, family tradition holds, a nom de guerre — a barracks name issued like a uniform, of which there are dozens on the Carignan rolls alone. By the nineteenth century whole branches of the family had stopped writing Saurette at all and were simply Larose. The parish répertoires show the seam: an entry filed under “Sauret-Larose,” hyphenated, both halves, one man — because the index itself couldn't decide which name was the real one.

Three names, three provinces or nicknames, two of them wrong about where the family came from. In each case the tag outlived the surname it was appended to clarify.

What this means if you're reading an act cold

• A dit name that looks like a surname may be a place. Livernois is not a family; it's Nivernais with the first letter wrong. Provinces, towns and regions turn up constantly as dit names, and they survive their own misspellings. If a name resists every attempt to find it as a family name, try reading it as garbled geography.
• Absence on one act proves nothing. A record that omits the dit name is a record whose clerk omitted the dit name. That is the whole of what can be concluded from it.
• A dit name is not an identification. It narrows; it does not name. This site owns a clean counter-example: one family, the Charles dit Lajeunesse of Boucherville and Longueuil, appears across seven sighted acts and only two of them write the dit name at all — and because that family married into the Benoits twice, a document pairing “Étienne Benoit” with “Lajeunesse” fits three different men. See the Étienne Benoits.
• Check three generations, not one. The name may be present above and below the person who seems to be missing it. Working outward from the individual in both directions is reliable; working from the individual alone is not.
• Watch for the moment the original surname drops. That's the transition that breaks searches, and nothing marks it. Here it falls between 1743 and 1763 — twenty years, one generation, and a surname of a hundred and ten years' standing simply stops being written.
• Expect two families in one act to be at different stages. The 1743 marriage has one compound surname with the connective and one without. Neither is wrong. They just aren't synchronised, and nothing says they should be.

And the mothers married into both lines carry the same system: Moitié dit Lafonderie · Dumesnil dit Lamusique · Beauvais dit St-Gemme · Gauthier dit St-Germain · Benoit dit Livernois · Marotte dit Labonté · Roy dit Lapensée · Gaboriau dit Lapalme · Davignon dit Beauregard · Renaud dit Rainaud · Besset dit Brisetout

The dit-name apparatus has one practical consequence for anyone reading a parish act cold: a clerk will often record only half of a compound name, and nothing on the page tells you the two halves belong together. This project has caught its own researcher making exactly that mistake — reading "Louis La Palme" in one act and concluding, wrongly, that Lapalme wasn't a dit-name at all, when a second act elsewhere in the same family plainly gives "Gabouriau dite Lapalme." The correction is logged, not smoothed over, on the same principle behind every grade on this site: see Sourcing & Method.