Ouellet

The founding ancestor of the Canadian Ouellets is René Ouellet, who reached Canada around 1663 and settled at Rivière-Ouelle on the south shore of the St Lawrence. What matters is not that he came but how he was written down. The record carries his name as Ouellet, as Hoélet and as Hoûallet, three shapes for one man, with the form Houellet behind all of them. A reader who takes Ouellette for a corruption of an older, correct Ouellet has it backwards: there was no correct version to corrupt. The spelling settled long after the man did.

His origin is disputed in the same way. One account makes him a Norman, and the surname is Norman in form, a diminutive built on Houel; the French record of the family gives him as coming from the parish of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas in Paris. The two have not been reconciled. Ouellet, Ouellette and Ouelette are all living French-Canadian surnames, carried by families who share an ancestor and not a spelling.

The place René Ouellet settled bore a name of nearly his own shape, and the record does not say which took its spelling from which. Either way the name spread along the lower St Lawrence, and a mill at Cap-Saint-Ignace still carries it: the moulin à eau Ouellet. Rare in the country it came from, it is one of the commonest surnames in the country it went to.

Cyrias Ouellet, born at Québec in 1906, was the son of an architect, Jos Ouellet, and was taught at first at home, by a Mademoiselle Voyer. At the Séminaire he found his subject through the abbé Alexandre Vachon, the chemistry master who introduced him to photosynthesis; that one problem shaped everything after. He entered the École supérieure de chimie at Laval in 1926 and came out a qualified chemist with grande distinction. A Quebec government scholarship took him to Emil Baur at the federal polytechnic in Zurich, where he took a doctorate in natural sciences in the autumn of 1932.

Wanting something harder to work on, in his own phrase an object that would disobey him, he wrote to Rutherford, who replied on a small scrap of paper and pointed him to Eric Rideal at the Department of Colloid Science in Cambridge. Ouellet stayed three years and there did the work that put a Quebec chemist into the international literature. He built a Geiger-Müller type photoelectric counter, learning to blow glass in order to make it, and used it to measure the glow of phosphorus as oxygen pressure varied; it was the first use of such a counter in chemical research. Rideal presented the results to the Faraday Society in December 1932, and N. N. Semionov, the future Nobel laureate in chemistry, later called it an extremely interesting experiment and quoted it in print. Ouellet lent the technique to the zoologist James Gray as well, an episode he called doing physics with sea urchin eggs, and the two reported to the Royal Society in London in November 1933.

He came home earlier than planned. Visiting Québec in the autumn of 1934 to see his sick father, he was met by the rector, Mgr Camille Roy, who told him the university had been waiting and did not know where he had got to. Laval needed a physics teacher and Ouellet became one, then titular professor of physical chemistry in 1940. In March 1935 he was among the founders of the Société de philosophie de Québec, whose first meeting was held in his own house.

A Guggenheim fellowship in 1949 sent him to Berkeley, into Melvin Calvin's laboratory, where carbon-14 was being used as a tracer to follow photosynthesis. The paper that came of it in 1951 was his first on the subject he had chased since the Séminaire. He became dean of the faculty of sciences in 1956, sat on the National Research Council of Canada and later the Science Council of Canada, and argued before the Parent Commission for a provincial research council with laboratories of its own. Saying what he thought, he held, had not endeared him to Premier Duplessis, and may have delayed the building of his faculty.

Fernand Ouellet, born at Lac-Bouchette in 1926, was educated at Laval and took his doctorate in 1965. He taught at Laval, Carleton and the University of Ottawa between 1961 and 1985 and joined the history department at York University in 1986. He edited Histoire Sociale from 1971 to 1988 and was president of the Canadian Historical Association in 1970.

He was the sort of historian who changes the terms of an argument rather than adding to it. Importing methods from economics and psychology, he wrote Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760-1850, Le Bas-Canada, 1791-1840, and a study of Louis-Joseph Papineau as a divided man, and took positions on the Conquest and the rebellion of 1837 that other French-speaking historians fought hard. He also drew attention to the part women had played in Quebec society, which the field had largely passed over. The honours came anyway: the Governor General's Award for non-fiction and the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize in 1977, and Officer of the Order of Canada in 1979.

David Ouellet, 1844-1915, was a Canadian architect, and Jos Ouellet, the chemist's father, an architect and valuer at Québec; nothing in the record connects them to each other or to what follows beyond the surname. Jean Ouellet, born at Rivière-du-Loup in 1922, served as an air force captain in the Second World War, entered the École des beaux-arts de Montréal in 1946, and in 1961 founded the firm that merged in 1971 into the Société La Haye-Ouellet.

His hand is on the Complexe Desjardins in Montréal, the youth pavilion at Expo 67, the Canadian embassy in Belgrade and the Louis-Colin garage at the Université de Montréal, which won him one of two Massey medals in 1970. He was president of the Ordre des architectes du Québec from 1972 and directed Montréal's school of architecture from 1980 to 1985. Christian Ouellet, born at Montréal in 1934, joined the same order in 1969 and took a master's degree in building at Manchester. He promoted ecological housing from 1973, long before the phrase was ordinary, chaired the Solar Energy Society of Canada, and sat in the House of Commons for Brome-Missisquoi from 2006 to 2011, working on social housing.

Somebody had to be first. Alcide Ouellet, born at Saint-Léon-le-Grand in 1924, took a master's degree in meteorology at the University of Toronto, among the earliest French speakers to hold it. He entered the weather service in 1951 and ran the Montréal forecast office from 1966 to 1971. The radio made him known: he gave the weather on Radio-Canada's Première Chaîne for more than twenty-five years and was heard every morning on CBF Bonjour, having advised Télé-Métropole from 1961 and Radio-Canada from 1965. He published a book explaining the weather to ordinary readers in 1972 and wrote the Journal de Montréal's weather column from 1974.

Gilles Ouellet, born at Bromptonville in 1922, was a notary's son who took the perpetual oath of the Foreign Missions Society of Quebec in 1945 and was ordained the year after. He read canon law at the Gregorian in Rome to a doctorate in 1950, spent seven years in the Philippines, and was named bishop by Paul VI. He held the see of Gaspé from 1968 to 1973 and Rimouski until 1992.

He is not the only one. Marc Ouellet, born in 1944, a cardinal, was archbishop of Québec until 2010 and afterwards prefect of the Congregation for Bishops in Rome. Elsewhere the name runs through Quebec's public life without a pattern: Line Ouellet has directed the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Karim Ouellet made music, Stéphane Ouellet boxed, and Michel, Maxime and Xavier Ouellet played hockey. A broad spread, for a name a French registrar could once have taken for a rarity.