Question

For Wikitree, is there a list of "standardized" spellings of French ancestral Québecois surnames?

Comments

Edit this post and add the tag Quebec and you will get the attention of members with experience in this area.

Answer 1

Probably no. This "issue" spans all languages. For the longest time, the spelling of names was subject to the whims of the officer/clerk/priest who created each record - what they thought they heard and how they thought that should be written. It is only with the rise of literacy that families and individuals could take control of what was written on each record and our family names stabilized - often with some family groups using different spellings from their relatives.

For the original French immigrants, I believe there has been lots of research thus there is likely strong agreement on the spelling of each person's surname. However, their descendants' surnames could be quite different from their ancestors, especially if they migrated into the US or English Canada.

In the end, surnames should be based on how each individual was known during their life and the consensus among genealogists on which surname version to use for each individual. Any attempt to "standardize" surnames within a family line is probably doomed to failure.

Answer 2

Hi John

In my work, I've followed the transcription of the PRDH (ref. https://www.prdh-igd.com/).  Through their genealogical work to reconstruct all Quebec families from 1849 back to the first immigrants, they've done a lot of work to "standardize" names.  They also have a lookup table for name variants for surnames.

I hope that helps. 

Cheers, 

Chris. 

Comments

I haven't compiled statistics, but the standardized surname in the PRDH might correspond to the most common spelling today. However, I think I remember that the PRDH was going to be updated, and that the spelling of names was going to change. I am not 100% that it's going to happen, but it might. This won't bother francophones, I think. It might confuse or sadden anglophones. :-)

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The PRDH standardized names definitely help in searching but don't always fit with the spelling that was used within the family.  Spelling can be quite fluid regardless of language.  Adding the standardized spelling in Other Last Names might help.

Answer 3

Wikitree has rules to follow for the name at birth fields. You should follow them.

As for the spelling of the ancestor's name in the large text field, in which you can provide sources and all kinds of info, Canadian genealogists usually employ the modern spelling of names, if there is any. If the ancestor migrated to an English-speaking area and a certain spelling was most common then or became common later, then you would probably have a reflex to use that one too in a little informal essay, wouldn't you? If the spellings varied wildly and you want to talk about it, you could dedicate a paragraph to the various spellings and the "dit" names. Keep in mind that, sometimes, the "dit" name became the standard surname of descendants in certain lines, but not in others.

Again, for the fields in the header, Wikitree has best practices and rules, so you should look them up in the help section.

Answer 4

There is a lot of guidance on how to do names in Québec at the Quebecois Project page at 10 Guidelines on Names

Basically Last Name At Birth is what is in the baptismal document. The "dit" names are also addressed in detail due to their importance .

Answer 5

The Quebecois Project has the following guidelines on names:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:Quebecois#Guidelines_on_Names

I believe these should be followed.

Answer 6

John, I’m guessing your question might come from the Acadian project that long ago adopted standardized names for that population. This was due to the often significantly different spellings use for the same person or family depending on who was hearing and writing. However, the Quebec project uses the actual spelling as given in the baptism (or other) record. This allows one to follow name changes over time.

When I was new I used the PRDH versions but no longer do that, using the actual spelling from a record instead.

Comments

Exactly, Cindy, the Acadian Project's practice was the stimulus for my question. I'm presently doing a large private project involving many Québec French names, & the utter chaos of spellings of Quebecois surnames in Wikitree profiles started me wondering.  A previous answer, which pointed me toward the PDRH, tempted me to go with that, but I agree that it's wiser to follow the Que Project system.  Of course, many of the profiles fail to cite the baptismal record, either directly or through a secondary source, so I'll go with the name-spelling that has precedence at the moment that I am consulting the profile.  (People do mess around with them!)

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John, for any profile you want that needs a baptism, I’d be glad to look it up. I have a subscription to Drouin/LaFrance and also could go through PRDH to link to records.

Answer 7

Short answer: nope!  

Long answer:

Basically one man's ''standard'' is another man's variant, mention has been made of PRDH, who ''standardize'' to their views, which are entirely statistical.  So that I have seen a name like Delaunay get converted into Delaney.  Which is really not the same name.  One is French in origin, the other is English or Irish.

Tanguay also ''standardized'' names, sometimes quite differently than what PRDH went with.

All of these ''standardizations'' are mainly due to space limitations in a written work like Tanguay's dictionnary, PRDH's humungous set of volumes, or even Jetté's work, which latter stops at 1730.  PRDH is now available as a database, so the limitation is technically no longer there, but the modus-operandi hasn't changed.

If you search among older profiles in this part of the world, one former member actually put a statistical graph of variants on some of them (pie-chart), stemming from PRDH.  So names like Leseur, Lesieur, Lesueur all get grouped together under one header.  But this is misleading, there are only 2 people who came to New France bearing the name Leseur, one a woman so her name did not get carried forward, and a man without issue.  Lesieur and Lesueur were 2 different origins, so making them into a single one is tantamount to conflation, and misleading.  My own multiple times ancestor François Cottu gets listed as Coutu by PRDH, but the man could sign and it was quite clearly Cottu.  Trying to find his parents under Coutu in France would be nonsense.  The name eventually became Coutu here, but that wasn't the original name.  Although it got used for his father here on WikiTree, erroneously.

Comments

Pierre Tremblay's profile shows an example of the pie chart I mentionned above.  There are 28 other versions not listed out, just mentioned in the little box.  Look on the right of the profile.

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