What is a “dit” name? A guide for French-Canadian and Acadian families
A dit name (say "dee") is a second surname that French-Canadian and Acadian families used beside the family name, or in place of it. Dit means "called," so Jacques Guéret dit Dumont was Jacques Guéret, called Dumont.
If an ancestor seems to vanish from the records, or turns up under a surname nobody recognizes, a dit name is often the reason. We'll look at where these names came from and how to search for them, with true examples from one family in our sample books, Two Rivers and an Ocean.
How a dit name looks in the records
A priest might write the full form, Guéret dit Dumont, or dite for a woman, as in Victoire Oresteille dite Lamy. Often he wrote only one of the two names, and not always the same one. Modern indexes sometimes join them with a hyphen, as in "Jacques Guéret-Dumont."
Library and Archives Canada says both names appear in the records until about the 1850s. After that, most families kept one.
Where dit names came from
The custom came from France, where a nickname helped tell apart families with similar names in the same area, and it crossed the Atlantic with the settlers. Some described a trait, like Le Roux or Le Sage. Others named a trade, like Le Boucher, or a place of origin, like Le Picard or Le Normand.
Many soldiers carried a nom de guerre, a name used in the ranks, and after discharge a good number passed it on to their children. When the Carignan-Salières Regiment came to New France in 1665, about 400 of its men stayed to settle.
Land could give a name, too. In the 1690s Gabriel Godin dit Châtillon, a naval officer, received land on the St. John River, and that land, says the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, was the origin of the name Bellefontaine. His children appear in our sample tree as Godins dit Bellefontaine.
In large families, a dit name told one branch from another. The grandchildren of Sébastien Provencher, who married at Québec in 1663, went by at least five different dit names. One grandson, Simon, took Villebrun.
Four dit names from one family's records
Guéret dit Dumont. Jacques Guéret was baptized in Normandy in 1665 and crossed to Canada about 1691. He married Anne Tardif at Beauport in 1694 and moved down the river to Kamouraska. Two generations later the family still carried both names. His granddaughter Marie Judith Guéret dit Dumont married an Acadian at Kamouraska in 1767 and died at Saint-Basile, on the upper St. John, in 1820.
Thibodeau dit Cramatte. Pierre Thibodeau, a miller near Port-Royal, and his wife, Jeanne Terriot, raised 16 children. Their grandson Jean-Baptiste Thibodeau dit Cramatte married Marie LeBlanc at Grand-Pré in 1727, lived through the deportation and died at Saint-Basile in 1795. Our sample books don't say where Cramatte came from or why he carried it.
Godin dit Bellefontaine. When a granddaughter of Gabriel Godin had a daughter baptized at L'Isle-aux-Coudres in 1765, the priest named the mother only as "Marie Bellefontaine." Nothing in the act says Godin. It names her husband, Jean Baptiste Chaloux, and Bellefontaine was the Godins' second name, so the book identifies her as Marie-Anne Godin.
Guédry dit Grivois. Grivois, one of the surnames on the cover of our sample books, began as a dit name, and here the dit name won.
When the dit name won
Claude Guédry turns up in Acadia about 1671. He was also called Grivois (and Laverdure), and his sons were recorded as dit Grivois. In the French of the 1600s a grivois was a soldier, which suggests a soldier's nickname, though no record says why Claude carried it.
For generations the family used both names. An index of a 1776 baptism calls Claude's grandson "Augustin Guidry dit Grivois." Augustin's grandson Jean Anselme Guédry came to Madawaska from Nova Scotia by way of the Gaspé and married at Saint-Basile in 1833. In the valley, Grivois took over.
You can see the change in one woman's census entries. In 1850 the census taker at Van Buren wrote down Romain Guédry's widow, Marie Comeau, as "Mary Gedree." Ten years later, at Grand Isle, she was "Mary Grevway." When her grandson Hilaire died at Grand Isle in 1899, his death return named his father as Anselme Grivois. Hilaire's son Clovis, born there in 1887, married in 1916 as Clovis Grivois.
Simon Provencher's Villebrun went further. Our sample books trace the Vilbrins of Vermont to his branch. A clerk there wrote the name as he heard it, "Vinbrine," and Vilbrin is the spelling that stayed. No register in Québec or France carries it, and Edmund Vilbrin's own baptism, in 1867, calls the family Provencher.
One person, two trails
A dit name splits one family's records into two trails, sometimes more. A baptism might use one name and a marriage the other, and a burial might bring a new spelling of either. Records of one family in the Montmagny area spell their surname Horostaille, Aurestail, Rostille, Horosteille and Horestay. Only some add "dit Lamy." Mathieu Oresteille dit Lamy's own marriage act, in 1738, never mentions Lamy, and the margin of his daughter's baptism calls her simply "M. Victoire Lamy."
So an ancestor who seems to disappear often hasn't gone anywhere. She's just filed under the other name.
How to search for a dit name
Try both names, separately and together. Anyone looking for Marie-Anne Godin's children under Godin would miss that 1765 baptism.
Try every spelling, and say it out loud. Clerks wrote what they heard. American census takers wrote Grivois as Grevway, Grenway and even Jedry. Maine records turned Guéret into Guerrette, and a Québec priest wrote Dumont as Dumond.
Look the name up. Jetté and Lécuyer's Répertoire des noms de famille du Québec des origines à 1825 is the fullest list of dit names and the families they belong to. Tanguay's Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes has a shorter list in volume 7, and the PRDH database at the Université de Montréal shows the nicknames found with each family name in the Québec registers.
Read the registers. René Jetté's Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec covers families to 1730. For the registers themselves, there's the Drouin Collection (on Ancestry and Généalogie Québec) and FamilySearch, which has many of them free with an account.
For Acadian lines, start with Stephen A. White's Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (1636 to 1714). For branches that went to Louisiana, try Rev. Donald J. Hébert's Southwest Louisiana Records.
Don't assume one dit name means one family. Julien Fortin dit Bellefontaine married in 1652, decades before the Godins took the name, and both families are in our sample tree. An older Library and Archives Canada guide pairs Lafleur alone with 56 different family names.
When the name is only a clue
One line in our sample books runs back to Maxime Dumont, born at Saint-André-de-Kamouraska in 1814. His baptism says "Dumond," never Guéret. Compiled trees tie his Dumonts to Jacques Guéret dit Dumont, but no original record read for the book does, so the book marks that link as open. A shared name like his is a good reason to go looking, but only the records can close the link.
Is there a dit name in your family?
At Root & Quill we write hardcover family history books researched in the original records, with every fact cited. When the records give two names, we follow both and tell you which links are proven. You can see how that looks in our Sample Pages. On Books & Pricing you'll find the Ancestor Portrait (from $450), the Family Heritage Book (from $1,500) and the three-volume Heirloom Collection (from $2,800). Every project starts with a free 30-minute consultation and a fixed quote. We share more stories like these on Instagram.
