Tremblay

Tremblay is a place before it is a family. The word is the aspen wood (the tremble, from Latin tremulus, the tree whose leaves move in the least wind) and in France it belongs to the ground rather than to a lineage: a stand of aspens, a damp clearing, the far corner of a parish. Toponymic surnames of this kind are taken from inhabited spots (a farmstead, an enclosure, a hamlet, a cottage) and they point far more often at small communities than at cities, because the people who needed a name that fixed them were the ones who had arrived from somewhere smaller.

That is the mechanism the surname records. Nobody is called du Tremblay while he still lives in the aspen wood among neighbours who all do; he becomes it the moment he leaves and stands among strangers who have to tell him from the other Pierres and Jeans. The name is about a departure (hamlet to market town first, much later across an ocean) and its spelling belonged to whichever clerk held the pen. That is how Trembley came to be counted in France not as a way of writing Tremblay but as a separate name.

The older French form of the name carries a particle: Du Tremblay, of the aspen wood. The particle is the most misread thing in French naming. De, du, le and de la are read as badges of nobility, and mostly they are nothing of the sort; many families with no claim to rank carry one because it says where they came from. Noble style ran the other way about (title, particle, then the name of the land, as in Louis, duc d'Orléans) and it was the land, not the little word, that did the work.

The confusion was worth money, and people traded on it. Wealthy commoners buying titles in the nineteenth century were mocked as Monsieur de Puispeu, Mister Of-recently. The traffic ran in reverse during the Revolution of 1789–1799, when a connection to the nobility was dangerous and families quietly dropped the de and left their feudal titles unmentioned. Names of this shape are often two things stitched together, a family name and an estate (Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, Hélie Denoix de Saint Marc) and most such houses later shortened themselves, keeping whichever half they preferred.

The earliest bearer of the name who can be dated is François Leclerc du Tremblay, 1577–1638, a French friar and agent: a man under vows with business in the world. His name is the double pattern exactly: Leclerc, a surname in its own right, then du Tremblay, the aspen wood. The second half was the half strangers repeated, which is why the wood and not the clerk survives in the record.

Rank in his century was audible in the first word anyone said to you. Monsieur meant my lord before it meant anything as flat as sir. Under the Ancien Régime a woman of common birth was addressed as mademoiselle for life, married or not, while madame was reserved for women of the high nobility, married or not; the Revolution swept that away. Leclerc du Tremblay lived on the older side of it, where a particle, a form of address and a wood in a parish register all belonged to one system of telling people apart.

Perche is the pre-migration home of the name as the wider world now knows it. Pierre Tremblay left it for New France around 1647 and married Ozanne Achon there, and that French province is the answer to the question a Quebec reader is really asking: not what the name means, but which corner of Europe it was carried out of. Perche kept its aspen woods and its few ordinary Tremblays. The colony kept the name.

Something happens to a topographic surname when it crosses water. In France, du Tremblay could still be checked against the ground: there was a wood, and a family known to have come from it. On the far shore the wood was unreachable and the name stopped describing anything. It became a pure lineage marker, inherited rather than observed, and a name that need not match a place is free to spread as far as its bearers do.

France is a country of scarce surnames, which makes what happened to Tremblay abroad stranger still. It has carried between 800,000 and 1,200,000 family names at any point since 1990; the statistical institute counted more than 1,300,000 registered between 1891 and 1990, of which some 200,000 have vanished, mostly lone spellings that died with their last bearer. By various estimates between half and four-fifths of French citizens carry a rare name: fewer than fifty living bearers at census time.

Part of that splintering was done with a pen rather than by blood. When family vital-records booklets were issued around 1880, the orthographic and dialectal variants of a name, more than forty for some, were entered as entirely separate surnames, so one family's name could be filed as a dozen. Quebec ran the opposite experiment. As of 2006 Tremblay was the most common surname in the province, carried by 1.076 per cent of the population: better than one person in every hundred, tracing back to one aspen wood in Perche.

The particle survived the crossing in at least one line. Pamphile Réal Du Tremblay, 1879–1955, was a Quebec lawyer, businessman and politician who kept the Du his namesakes had dropped. Thomas-Louis Tremblay, 1886–1951, was a Canadian general. Léonard Tremblay, 1896–1968, sat in politics, as did Arthur Tremblay, 1917–1996, René Tremblay, 1922–1968, and Jean-Noël Tremblay, 1926–2020, a run of officeholders sharing a surname that in France would have marked a man out as coming from one particular wood.

Suzanne Tremblay, 1937–2020, and Monique Gagnon-Tremblay, born 1940, were both Canadian politicians, the latter carrying the hyphenated pair of names that French law only came to permit its own citizens in 2005, when article 311-21 of the Civil code replaced the old rule that a child took the father's surname and nothing else. Rodrigue Tremblay, born 1939, is an economist, humanist and political figure; Gérald Tremblay, born 1942, a politician and businessman. Benoît Tremblay, born 1948, Stéphan Tremblay, born 1973, and Véronyque Tremblay, born 1974, a journalist as well, continued the pattern, and the church took its share in Eugène Tremblay, 1936–2026, a Roman Catholic bishop.

The name went north with the people who carried it. Émilie Fortin Tremblay, 1872–1949, was a Canadian explorer, and Alfred Tremblay, 1912–1975, a Canadian prospector and explorer, trades that took French-descended families out past the settled parishes into ground that had no parish at all.

Winter sport claimed the rest. J. C. Tremblay, 1939–1994, Mario Tremblay, born 1956, and Yannick Tremblay, born 1975, were Canadian hockey players, Mario a coach as well; François-Louis Tremblay, born 1980, raced short track speed skating, and Charles Tremblay, 1930–2002, was an American Nordic combined skier. Off the ice come David Tremblay, born 1987, freestyle wrestler, Stéfanie Tremblay, born 1990, judoka, and Kathy Tremblay, born 1982, triathlete.

For a surname that began as a description of trees, Tremblay has an unusual grip on the French-language stage and page. Michel Tremblay, born 1942, is a French Canadian novelist and playwright; Lise Tremblay, born 1957, and Clarisse Tremblay, 1951–1999, a poet as well, wrote in the same language, and Paul G. Tremblay, born 1971, is an American author. Richard-Max Tremblay, born 1952, works as an artist and photographer.

In music the line runs from Amédée Tremblay, 1876–1949, a Canadian organist, composer and music educator, through George Tremblay, 1911–1982, a Canadian-American pianist, composer and author, to Lucie Blue Tremblay, born 1958, a folk singer-songwriter. On screen there are Kay Tremblay, 1914–2005, a dancer, Ghyslain Tremblay, 1951–2020, an actor and comedian, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, born 1950, and Jacob Tremblay, born 2006. Generations after a man of Perche married Ozanne Achon, the aspen wood is a household word.