Dubois

Dubois is du bois, 'of the wood'. It is a description before it is a name: the first man called it lived in or by a forest, or worked it, and in a country of great forests that was all the identification his neighbours needed. Names of this kind are toponymic, taken from where a person lived, and usually from somewhere small rather than a great city.

The plainness is the point. Across medieval Europe people moved from small communities into the towns, and a new arrival needed a defining name: where he had come from. A man became du Bois the moment he stood among people who were not from the wood. So Dubois is not one family but thousands, formed wherever a house stood at a forest's edge, which is why it is one of the two or three most numerous surnames in all of France.

Some French surnames carry a particule, a preposition or article fixed at the front: de for 'of', le or la for 'the', du for 'of the'. A widespread misconception holds that a particule marks noble or feudal origin. It does not. Many non-noble families carry one because it says where they came from, and Dubois is the plainest example there is.

It was still worth counterfeiting: in the 19th century wealthy commoners who bought titles were mocked as Monsieur de Puispeu, a pun on depuis peu, 'since recently', and in the Revolution of 1789–1799 others dropped the de out of their names altogether. Dubois had nothing to add and nothing to shed. Dubois, Du Bois and DuBois are one name, though the medial capital of the DuBois form is never used in France; that spelling was made on the far side of a migration.

France carries an extraordinary stock of surnames: between 800,000 and 1,200,000 at any time since 1990. INSEE, the national statistics institute, recorded more than 1,300,000 between 1891 and 1990, and 50 to 80 per cent of French citizens may bear a rare name, one with fewer than fifty living bearers.

Much of that scatter is spelling: most French surnames had many variants, more than forty in some cases, and around 1880, when family vital records booklets were issued, the variants were registered as entirely separate names. Against all that Dubois is remarkable. In a country where most names are rare, this one sits among the very commonest, because 'of the wood' was the obvious thing to call a man in a thousand parishes at once.

Not every Dubois stayed Catholic. François Dubois (1529–1584) was a Huguenot French painter, and when the Protestant families of France were driven out, name and household went with them: into the Low Countries, into England, and across the Atlantic. Louis DuBois (died 1696) was a Huguenot colonist in New Netherland, the name carried out of France and planted in a Dutch colony in America. That double crossing is what makes a Huguenot line so hard to trace, and why the surname is the thread worth holding on to.

The name settled into the Low Countries in its own right too, with the Dutch Golden Age painter Guillam Dubois (1623–1661) and the anthropologist Eugène Dubois (1858–1940). Surnames were made compulsory and permanent in the Netherlands between 1795 and 1811, under the Napoleonic Code's rule that a family name not change across the generations, locking a Dubois household already there into the registers for good. Belgium gave the naturalists Charles Frédéric Dubois (1804–1867) and Alphonse Dubois (1839–1921), England the man of letters Edward Dubois (1774–1850).

A name meaning 'of the wood' met its match in North America, where a continent of forest was waiting. Josué Dubois Berthelot de Beaucours (c. 1662–1750) was a French-Canadian military officer, chief engineer and governor; John Dubois (1764–1842), also called Jean, was a French missionary in Virginia and the Appalachians who ended as bishop of New York.

The name stayed put once it landed: the architect Macy DuBois (1929–2007) and the singer-songwriter Claude Dubois (born 1947) are both Canadian. Where it was translated rather than carried it became Wood, so a family that appears as Wood on one side of a migration and Dubois on the other is often not two families at all.

The name is on record early. Pierre Dubois (c. 1255 – after 1321) was a French scholastic and writer; Guillaume Crétin, also known as Dubois (c. 1460–1525), a poet; Jacques Dubois (1478–1555) an anatomist. The highest a Dubois climbed was Guillaume Dubois (1656–1723), cardinal and statesman, and the church line ran on to Louis-Ernest Dubois (1856–1929), Archbishop of Paris.

In the arts the name is everywhere: the sculptor Paul Dubois (1829–1905), the organist and composer Théodore Dubois (1837–1924), the Neo-impressionist painter and army officer Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846–1890). Pierre Joseph Dubois (1852–1924) was a French general of the First World War, and Stanisław Dubois (1901–1942), a Polish journalist and political activist, shows how far east the name travelled.

None of them founded the surname, and that is the best of it. Dubois was made over and over by ordinary households living where the trees began, and every bearer since carries a name that says, quite simply, that his people came from the wood.