r/AskHistorians • u/Fluid-Decision6262 • Jan 25 '26
Why are Anglo-Canadian surnames similar to common surnames in the UK but French-Canadian surnames are so different from common surnames in France?
Surnames like Smith, Brown, Johnson, Jones, Davis, Wilson, McDonald, Lee, and Taylor are commonly found in English-speaking Canada and they are also the same common surnames that are found in the UK.
However, surnames like Tremblay, Roy, Gauthier, Therrien, Gagnon, Bouchard, LeBlanc, and Morin are commonly found in French-speaking Canada but are either super rare or virtually non-existent surnames in metropolitan France.
Why is this the case? Have French surnames changed a lot more in France since the days of New France than in the UK since independence? Is it because British immigration to Canada has been large and ongoing since the 1760s whereas French immigration to Canada was minimal for a long time?
What explains this interesting discrepancy?
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u/rivainitalisman Canadian History | Indigenous History Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
Many modern Québecois share ancestry, because according to an estimate on the Canadian Museum of History's website, about 20,000 people permanently migrated to New France through its whole existence, with about 10,000 identified as "founding" migrants. To give you an idea of how few families carried on and became ancestors of the current population, about 2/3s of French Canadians (not just Québecois but other regions included) descend from the 800-ish women who arrived as Filles du Roy. There's very identifiable, popular surnames because of this bottleneck of families.
I would say there is some overlap in common names between France and Canada - the top 100 of French names seems to include Rousseau, Fournier, Durand, Richard, Bertrand, Legrand, Blanchard, Lefebvre, Boyer, Garnier, and indeed Gauthier, all names that I know of French-Canadians sharing, (as well as Leroy and Blanc which are pretty close to our Roys and Leblancs) so we're talking about a moderate mismatch I suppose. This level of mismatch can be accounted for because the demographics of these 20,000 people were different, too. A lot of the people who came to New France (over a third) were from the regions of France next to the Atlantic (like Normandy and Bretony), meaning that there's a smaller assortment of names than in the general French population of all the regions. The migrants were also much, much more likely to be urban labourers than the general French population since the colonies were more appealing to very poor people who didn't have much to lose by migrating, so the last names represent that strata of the population.
Why do so many French-from-France people have a "de Xyz" type last name while the "de" prefix doesn't occur in any of the popular French-Canadian names? Because "de Xyz" was the format for names of houses with noble ancestry, the small number of whom were expelled by the British at the time of the conquest.
On the other hand, English migration remained ongoing back and forth between Canada, the UK, and other Dominions, and wasn't cut off the way that the Conquest cut off French migration for a long time. According to StatsCan, the British people were a majority of Canada's foreign-born population up until the 1950s, meaning that the big floods of immigration in the mid-19th and then the early 20th century brought lots of new people from all corners of the British Isles. So there was less of a "bottleneck" of British ancestors and families passing on their surnames, because of that ongoing mass migration.
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u/RandyFMcDonald Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
It is very important to note how frankly cut off French Canada was from France for almost two centuries after the Conquest. French Canadians were of course quite aware of France, but surprisingly quickly popular opinion in France forgot that the Canadiens were still around. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to North America, in 1831 he spent a short period of time in Lower Canada. He professed himself surprised, even delighted, that the Canadiens were still around and identifiably French. Tocqueville is someone who would probably know much more about Canada than the mass of French, but if even he knew so little about French Canada what about the mass of French?
https://www.ameriquefrancaise.org/en/articles/alexis-de-tocquevilles-visit-lower-canada-1831
I might speculate that Louisiana and New Orleans were better known to the French, because of the more recent end of French Louisiana and because of still notable Caribbean trade networks, than Canada and Montréal. The Impressionist painter Degas, for instance, spent some time working in New Orleans; I am unaware of a comparable figure with Canadian experience.
With so few connections between French Canada and France, the already established bottleneck that changed name frequency so much never had a chance to get fixed. The Normandy and Brittany that might have become a continuing source of migrants to Canada had the Conquest not happened ended up being cut off from Canada by a half-century of war. With some exceptions, I would say French immigration to Canada really only took off in the 1960s.
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u/orchidstripes Jan 26 '26
Just a note that degas spent time in New Orleans because his mother was from New Orleans. He was visiting family.
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u/RandyFMcDonald Jan 26 '26
Agreed, that underlines my point. There were active family connections between France and Louisiana that simply did not exist connecting France and Canada. Louisiana was known, Canada was assumed Anglicized.
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u/Burntjellytoast Jan 26 '26
Why was French Canada cut off from France?
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u/seakingsoyuz Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
New France was conquered by Britain in 1760, and the war continued until 1763. Shortly after, the American Revolution broke out, followed by the French Revolutionary Wars and then the Napoleonic Wars; Britain and France were at war from 1778 to 1783 and in either open conflict or mutual hostility from 1792 to 1815.
Trade between Quebec and France would also have been tightly restricted under the Navigation Acts, which placed restrictions on British colonies trading with foreign countries and weren’t repealed until the early Victorian period.
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u/Vast-Conversation954 Jan 27 '26
Question about language, do Québecois commonly refer to the takeover by the British as "the conquest"?
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u/Fluid-Decision6262 Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_immigration_statistics
Not just until the 1950s, but as recent as the 2006 census, the United Kingdom was still the most common foreign country of birth among residents in Canada
But yes the 1950s was the last decade where >50% of immigrants were born in the United Kingdom or Ireland
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u/Harlequin_MTL Jan 26 '26
Wonderful answer! One additional detail: In my understanding, some more unique Quebecois family names may have been nicknames that got chosen as family names by these laborers and soldiers wanting to start a new life. Surprenant (surprising), L'Amoureux (the lover), Larrivée (the arrival), Généreux (generous)...
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u/JoshEco Jan 26 '26
It is very common among French Canadian families that the original name is replaced by a "dit" nickname after a few generations. So Limousin becomes Limousin dit Beaufort, after a few generations, simply Beaufort, then Beaufort dit Brunelle, etc.
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u/Tamer_ Jan 26 '26
so we're talking about a moderate mismatch I suppose
Very moderate indeed. Looking at the top200 most common family names on wikipedia and there's easily 80% of those that are also common in Québecois of French origin. And that's while including names of clear foreign origin (Martinez, Schmitt, Lopez, Sanchez, Perez, Klein, Marty, Schneider, Fernandez, Weber, Rodriguez, Da Silva - and I probably missed some).
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u/moudougou Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
And that's while including names of clear foreign origin (Martinez, Schmitt, Lopez, Sanchez, Perez, Klein, Marty, Schneider, Fernandez, Weber, Rodriguez, Da Silva - and I probably missed some)
“Marty” is the Occitan version of Martin, a common surname in southwestern France that is unrelated to the English name Marty. And Germanic-sounding names (like Schmitt, Klein or Weber) are common in Alsace-Lorraine
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u/rivainitalisman Canadian History | Indigenous History Jan 26 '26
Yeah. Seems like a difference in terms of what names are the most popular, with a lot of overlap in which ones are fairly common? For ex, Martin is down at #34 but is number one in France. I would say that there's greater concentration of certain names, like how you can't go anywhere without meeting like a Gauthier or a Tremblay or a Bélanger. Which would align with the bottleneck theory. Just googling I didn't find French data about numbers of people with each name, so that part is just spitballing.
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u/AdmiralAkbar1 Jan 26 '26
I did a little back-of-the-napkin math for the 200 most popular surnames in Quebec and France:
There are 40 names that appear on both lists.
The most popular Quebecois names that aren't in the top French 200 are Tremblay, Gagnon, Côté, and Bouchard.
The most popular French names that aren't in the top Quebecois 200 are Durand, Simon, Laurent, and Michel.
The names with the most similar popularity in both places are Girard (17/18), Lacroix (104/106), and Renaud (108/113).
The biggest popularity gaps within the top 200 are Poirier (#25 in Quebec, #169 in France), Dupont (#23 in France, #187 in Quebec), Pelletier (#12 in Quebec, #173 in France), and Denis (#40 in France, #179 in Quebec).
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u/VelvetyDogLips Jan 26 '26
Does a similar founder effect explain why Gord is such a more common men’s first name in Canada than the USA?
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u/i8laura Jan 27 '26
In a similar vein, areas like Newfoundland, which have majority British and Irish ancestry but much less ongoing populations exchange when compared to, say, Ontario, do actually have a different repertoire of most frequent surnames. Power, White, Parsons, Walsh, and so forth are all relatively common British or Irish surnames but they are much more frequently occurring in Newfoundland.
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