Dig deeply enough into your family history, and if you have French or French Canadian ancestors, you will uncover a dit name. These can be a little confusing, if you’ve never seen one before.
Dit is a form of the verb dire, which means “to speak.” In this context, it means “was called.” So Nicolas Jahan dit Denys = Nicolas Jahan “called” Denys. It means that he was formally known as Nicolas Jahan, but for some reason the name was changed to Denys. Most likely, given the time and place (18th century Quebec), he was a recent immigrant and the name change coincided with his family’s move from France to Canada. Hopefully more research will clarify the when, if not the why.
I came across my first dit name last weekend: Marie Celeste Jahan dit Denys (daughter of the aforementioned Nicolas). In trying to figure out what this funny word meant and how to properly record it, I took a look at her in Ancestry.com’s public trees and found a variety of ways people have handled her name.
- Marie Celeste Jean (I don’t know if Jean is a legit rendering of Jahan, but I try to transcribe names exactly as I see them, and I see Jahan.)
- Marie Celeste Denis (Not wrong, because that’s how it was spelled in her burial record, but both forms of her last name should be recorded and a source given for where you found each spelling.[1])
- Marie Celeste Denis St. Denis (Love this one. This person has presumably never encountered dit names and their brain turned dit into St. We cannot see what we have never seen. Quite a catch-22.)
- Marie Celeste Jean Denis (Not too bad, but not exactly right, either.)
- Marie Celeste Denis Dit Denis (Denis dit Denis is not A Thing.)
- Marie Celeste Denis dit Jean (Cart before the horse!)
Marriage Registry from the Drouin Collection for Francois Caillet and Marie Celeste Jahan dite Denys, 22 November 1726, Neuville, Quebec[2]
And then last night someone shared a link to a blog post on the Legacy User Group, on dit names. How timely! I in turn shared the post on Facebook, and a friend commented that she’s run into dit names in French dog pedigrees. Before the 1920s, French kennel names weren’t widely used as part of the dog’s registered name. The dit names would have reflected both the formal name and the dog’s call name.
My friend also mentioned that she’s seen the feminine form, “dite” in pedigrees, but didn’t know if that was just an archaic usage.
Hm. I double checked my source image, to make sure I’d transcribed the name precisely, and sure enough, it looks like it ends in -e. That doesn’t answer the “Is dite still used?” question, but I feel secure in using it for Marie Celeste, who was married in 1728.
And then my brother and another Facebook friend started language-geeking about dit vs. dite, and lo and behold, it is a legitimate feminine form in current usage.
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1. The spelling of the family name Denys seems to have changed to Denis during Marie Celeste’s lifetime, and the name Jahan dropped entirely by the time Marie Celeste died.
2. Unfortunately Ancestry.com has no index entry for her name, for the marriage register image. It’s only indexed under the name of her husband, Francois Caillet. That means that I cannot file a transcript correction for her. Very annoying!
red paper boat 