If Your Surname Is on This List, It Is a Haitian Name in French Clothing

Most Haitian surnames look French on paper. Almost nobody asks how they got there. Around 1790, roughly nine in ten people in Saint-Domingue were enslaved and recorded without a family name — so where did the surnames of modern Haiti actually come from? A quick note on the title: this is not a countdown of "fake French" names, and no honest source can hand you one. This video shows the documented routes a French-looking surname travelled, so you can test your own. In this video we walk through the real record behind it: 📌 Why most of the colony's people were recorded by a single given name, and why labels like Congo, Nago and Arada were European assignments, not family names 📌 Dessalines — born Jean-Jacques Duclos, then given the surname of the free man of color who bought him 📌 Toussaint — "Bréda" from a plantation, "Louverture" chosen by the man himself in 1792–93 📌 Pétion — born Anne Alexandre Sabès, son of a wealthy French father: proof that some French surnames are a real paternal line 📌 What the old civil registers (Port-au-Prince, from 1793) show about how surnames were gradually acquired after independence 📌 A published Y-chromosome study of 123 Haitian men: 77.2% African-derived and 20.3% European-derived paternal lineages — and why a French-sounding surname is not evidence of French ancestry 📌 Three questions to test your own surname against the record What we could not verify, and say so in the video: no single dated decree ordering surnames turned up in the sources we reached, the origin of the name "Pétion" is unconfirmed, and we found no measured percentage of French-form Haitian surnames. 🔎 Want to know which road your surname actually travelled? Our surname and record research service goes directly into the surviving colonial, church and civil records tied to your name. Link pinned in the comments. 💬 Drop your surname and region of Haiti below — and tell us which road you think it took. Sources referenced in this video: - Association de Généalogie d'Haïti — survey of the old civil registers of the Archives Nationales d'Haïti - University of Maryland Libraries, "Colony in Crisis" — The Slaves of Saint-Domingue - Biographical accounts of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture and Alexandre Pétion - Simms, T.M., et al. (2012). "Y-chromosomal diversity in Haiti and Jamaica: Contrasting levels of sex-biased gene flow." American Journal of Physical Anthropology. - Documented history of Sonthonax's emancipation proclamation, 29 August 1793 Subscribe — every week this channel goes back into the real documented history behind the Caribbean diaspora. #HaitianHistory #Haiti #Genealogy #HaitianSurnames #CaribbeanHistory #AncestryDNA #FamilyHistory