The Spelling of our Name
From OUR FRENCH-CANADIAN ANCESTORS
by Thomas J. Laforest (vol 10, ch 7): Lovers of geography and history brighten up reading
the word Cholet. It is the name of a town in France, today the
leading town of the arrondissement in the department of Maine-et-Loire. It has
borne this name for nearly one thousand years. The wars in the Vendée
inflicted mortal wounds on the town. It was burned thrice and for a time
after 1794 it was abandoned. Now, with industry revived, the town numbers about
40,000 inhabitants. It has given its name to the well-known handkerchiefs
of Cholet…According to etymologist Albert
Dauzat, Cholet is a diminutive of cholier, which means a small truck gardener of
cabbage.
When Sebastien Cholet dit Laviolette came to Quebec as an early pioneer from France, he became the first Cholet in North America. His name was spelled as Cholet in all the documents about him. The pronunciation likely followed the French form as Show-lay'. It seemed to remain this way in much of Quebec until about 1900. (Note that there were various records that also spelled it with a double L as Chollet, and others had it as Chaulet.)
However, in many subsequent
records, the spelling Cholette began to be used quite often. For
example, in the St. Polycarpe written records, both Cholet and Cholette
forms of the name were prevalent. The church there was established in 1819 and
one of the first entries in 1820 spells the name Cholette. One would
think that this meant that the name must have then been pronounced Show-let',
to conform to the French spelling rules. In 1822 there is an entry with the
spelling as Chaulette. Interestingly, my great-great grandfather,
Hyacinthe's first marriage to Rose Marie Liboiron shows the name being spelled Cholette,
but in 1833 his son is referred to as Mathias Cholet in his baptismal record,
and of course later Mathias’s son Pierre by his second marriage is referred to
as Cholet. In fact, there are entries made in the same year where Cholette
is used for one baby and Cholet for another, with no apparent reason for
the difference in spelling. I cannot believe that the people in this small
town, all closely related, pronounced their name differently. Perhaps the priests
didn't know the rules for spelling all that well, or didn’t care much about
such variations.
I
have noticed the same thing with other names, such as Paquette and Paquet.
This variation for the spelling of Cholette continues in St. Polycarpe
until at least 1875.
In compilations that I have seen that cover multiple years, the authors seem to
make some arbitrary decision and then use just one spelling for the
name. I have a CD showing all the Catholic marriages in Soulanges County
from 1752 to 1966. In it, the name is spelled as Cholet, even for those
later marriages. Strangely in the listing of "dit" names it shows Laviolette
as being a dit name for Cholette (and doesn't mention the spelling as
Cholet).
At the PRDH web site for genealogy, provided by the University of Montreal, they discuss at length some of the
problems with names. Here is part of what
they say:
As they naturally fell under
the laws and customs of France of the Ancient
Régime, inhabitants of the St. Lawrence Valley in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries all had a family name and a first name. Children
inherited their father's family name, and men transmitted this name to their
children. Married women kept their family name at birth, at least in
religious, administrative and legal documents.
These customs have played in favour of Quebec genealogy
because they
facilitate the identification of people by name. Nevertheless, practical
problems do arise. In particular, spelling was not standardized, and both
family and first names could be spelled in several different ways. Although
first names can generally be recognized fairly easily, this is often not the
case for family names. Data gathered from old documents can be difficult to
read because letters can be confused, and the problem is complicated further
because a number of names are similar - Boucher and Baucher, for example.
Because most people were illiterate, their names come to us via an
intermediary and were submitted to the vagaries of pronunciation, regional
accents, and other factors. Added to this are the inevitable typos at the
data-entry stage.
Therefore, it is not surprising that a name may at least be
written in
many different ways, if it is not in fact confused with another. That is why
the names in the PRDH were standardized: each name is presented in a
standard form that groups together all the variations found for this name in
the documents. For example, the name Charbonneau is recognized under 55
different spellings, covering common variations - Charbono, Charbonnau,
etc. - and errors of all kinds - Charbonnauu, Cherbonau, etc. You can find
out about the spellings associated with each name and the frequency of each
associated spelling in the approximately 700,000 certificates in the PRDH's
data base.
Another problem with denomination concerns the use of
nicknames, often
referred to as "dit names", because they are introduced in French by
the
word "dit" meaning "said", which abound in the
nominative history of old
Quebec. They have many origins: military nickname, sobriquet related to a
physical characteristic, immigrant's place of origin, name of fief for
nobles, mother's family name, father's first name, and so on. Some go back
to the ancestor, while others are introduced by descendants; some are
transmitted, others not; some belong to an entire family line, while others
concern only a single branch. In short, it's a real hodgepodge! From a
practical point of view, an individual can be designated by a nickname at
just about any time, and no rules can be made to predict when.
I checked further at this site to see what
they said about variations on
Cholette/Cholet. Here is their summary, for name usage prior to 1800:
Cholet (all spellings) is used 867 times and is the 114th most common
name in Quebec during that time period.
The primary spelling is Cholet 615 times, followed by Chaulet 121;
Cholette
64; Chaulette 19; and then several others are listed with very
infrequent
usage.
Sometime around 1850-1900 it appears that
almost everyone started to
uniformly use the spelling as Cholette. I have found no explanation for
why
this occurred. Checking at the people search for Yahoo/Canada, one finds 565
listings with the name Cholette but only 2 with the name Cholet.
In the United States this variation is quite different. At Yahoo’s site, there are 72 listings for Cholette, but only 19 for Cholet. Even more striking is the fact that there are 53 listings for Sholette in the US, while there are none in Canada. Some of this difference may be from the fact that there are also people descended from Swiss immigrants to the US with the name Cholet, although that is more often spelled Cholett, or Chollet.
The main reason that there are so many people with the name spelled as Sholette in the US stems from just one branch of the family living in Ogdensburg, NY in the early twentieth century. These Cholettes came from St. Polycarpe, Qc where Hyacinthe Cholet had 18 children, six by his first wife, Rose Marie Liboiron and 12 more by his second wife, Angelique Andre. One of those children was Pierre Cholet, the kidnapped boy made famous by the story written about his captivity and subsequent search for his family. Another of Hyacinthe’s son’s, Mathias Cholet, or Cholette as it was sometimes spelled by then, moved to the United States with his wife in about 1865. Mathias had 14 children with only four of them born in Ogdensburg. From this branch of the family, came the spelling change to Sholette.
Mathias had five sons who went on to have their own families, all living initially in the Ogdensburg. However, the children of three of the sons (George, Leon and Magloire) decided sometime in the 1920’s to change the spelling of their last name to Sholette. For example, Magloire’s son, Maguire’s marriage certificate in 1920 gives the name as Cholette, but Maguire’s son Carol is listed as Sholette on his birth certificate in 1923.
I suspect this name change was done unofficially and probably to fit the pronunciation of the name to the SH- sound as in the word show, and differential it from the incorrect pronunciation which results from the CH- sound, as in the word choke.
The other two sons (Adelord and Alfred) and all their descendants retained the original spelling of the name as Cholette. It is not known why these two sons did not also change the spelling; although the probable explanation is that they moved from Ogdensburg before the others started using the Sholette spelling. Adelord and his family moved to Auburn, NY in about 1916, and Alfred had moved to Canada by 1905.
The three brothers whose offspring were responsible for the spelling change of the name were themselves affected less by the spelling change since they were fairly old in the early 1920’s when the change was made. Leon, the oldest of the three, died in Ogdensburg in 1929. His tombstone gives his name as Leon C. Cholette 1860-1929, but his brother George, buried in the same cemetery, is shown as George M. Sholette 1871-1935. These three men, however, had a total of 33 grandchildren who carried the name as Sholette, whereas the other two brothers who retained the spelling as Cholette had 18 grandchildren with that name.
Other family branches have taken to using still other spellings. From a genealogical viewpoint, these differences aid the researcher since it helps identify to which branch of the family the various members connect. One spelling common to the Canton, Alexandria Bay region of northern New York State is Shoulette. This branch stems from two brothers, Alexandre Cholet born in 1830 in St. Polycarpe, Qc, and his brother Raphael born in 1832. Their parents were Francois Cholet and Josephte Dubeau. These two brothers moved to Northern New York State in about 1850 settling in the town of Redwood, which is southwest of Ogdensburg. They married there and they and their children used the Shoulette spelling of the name. While I have found no record for grandchildren with the Shoulette name for Alexandre, I have 14 grandchildren with that name from Raphael.
There is another branch of the Cholette family that moved into this general area of New York State. They used various spellings of the name. The originator of the new spelling was Arthur Cholet the son of Jean Baptiste Cholet and Madeleine Legault. Arthur was born in about 1820 in Montreal. However, he later moved Stormont County, Ontario and then to Clayton, NY, another northern NY town. There he began spelling the name as Sholette. Variations on the name for his children and grandchildren often showed up as Sholett or Villette (the latter from the dit name of Laviolette). Today in that region, most of the family members go by the name Sholett.
Another branch of the family settled in Michigan. These produced many offspring, but for the most part they spelled their name as Cholette. In Michigan they were located mainly in Delta County, being descendants of Joseph Damien Cholet and his wife Rose Delima Treppanier who moved to Escanaba, MI in the late 1880’s. Some members of this branch later moved to Massachusetts.
And then there is the Laviolette branch of the family. While this was a dit name for Cholet, it was also used for other families that had no connection with the Cholette family. In fact, it is a much more common name than Cholette with 708 being listed in the Yahoo people search for the US and 1165 in Canada. Many of these are descendants of Sebastien Cholet, although I suspect that it is far less than from other family lines. In my database of descendants of Sebastien Cholet, I have this frequency of people with these spellings:
Cholette 1191; Cholet 307; Sholette 129; Laviolette 120; Shoulette 24; and Sholett 19
Of these with the Laviolette spelling, almost all that I have listed are descended from Joseph Cholet and Marie Anne Dufour who were married October 27, 1822 in St. Benoit, Quebec. For reasons that are not clear, they and their six children all took the last name Laviolette when they settled in Ontario. From there, a large percentage of the family moved to western Canada where their descendants now reside mainly in Alberta and British Columbia.