The Gabus Line

A Family of Horologers

The family came from Le Cerneux-Girard, a hamlet above Les Brenets on the French border. Jacob Gabus and Judith Bourquain were baptising children there in the 1710s; the godparents at one of those baptisms were the parish greffier, Daniel Guinand, and his wife. Their son David married Anne Marie Guinand, daughter of the judge Abram Guinand, at Les Brenets on 15 July 1750, and when their own son Pierre Frédéric was baptised there on 28 May 1756, both godparents were Guinands again — one a nephew of the father, the other a daughter of the parish justicier.

Les Brenets in those years lived on farming, forestry and the sawmills along the Doubs; its first watchmaking comptoirs would not open until the nineteenth century. By 1768 the family had moved to Le Locle, a town that made watches. Pierre Frédéric’s son Félix Henri was born there in 1797 and killed on 1 August 1834, when a wall came down during a fire in the town. He was thirty-six and left six children, the youngest aged two.

Three of his sons went into the trade. By the 1850s Louis, Édouard and Jules-Frédéric Gabus were all working as horlogers in Le Locle, standing witness at one another’s children’s births, and it was from their households that the three houses documented here came. Two were founded by Louis’s sons: Louis William, who left for Moscow in 1868 and traded as W. Gabus, and his paternal half-brother Georges-John, who married Amélie Guinand and gave that union’s name to Gabus-Guinand — a firm he set up at Les Brenets, four generations after his family had left it. Édouard’s son Georges stayed in Le Locle and began making gold cases around 1881 — the firm that became Gabus Frères. The registers name all three founders as grandsons of Félix Henri and Émilie Dubois.

A generation later, the houses were tied again. Georges’s son Jean Edouard Gabus married Jeanne-Ida Gabus, Georges-John’s daughter — second cousins — in 1912. Their son Jean-Louis, born the following year, became Gabus Frères’ most prolific inventor and its chronicler.

Other Gabus horologers worked the same mountains. An earlier and unrelated Jean Louis Gabus was a master enameller at Le Locle as early as 1787, and a firm known as Veuve Gabus operated in La Chaux-de-Fonds by 1840 — neither yet connected to this line by record. One branch crossed into France: Pierre Frédéric’s brother David Henri, born at Le Locle in 1768, died at Vandoncourt in the Doubs in 1836, where his son Jacques Frédéric continued the trade and later descendants included Frédérique Augustine Gabus, a woman horologer notable for her era — the trade continuing there for at least three generations, intermarried with another Vandoncourt watchmaking family, the Peugeots.

Patents tie two more marriages into the family, five filings in all. Georges Brutus Quartier-la-Tente married Edith Amélie Gabus — Georges-John's daughter — at Les Brenets in 1900, and filed two patents for Roskopf movement work under the name Georges Quartier-Gabus. A generation later and a different branch, Pierre Brunner-Gabus — Pierre David Brunner, married to Justine Adèle Gabus — patented a gem-setting method for watch casebands and bezels on 7 July 1895; his son Senn Philémon Brunner, who later married a second Gabus, Sophie, filed two more patents and continued the family jewelry trade at Le Locle under the same compound name until his death in 1933. Neither branch is yet connected to the Félix Henri line documented above.

This site documents the three houses above where the surviving evidence permits it — through company records, trademarks, patents, surviving pieces, and clearly identified secondary sources. The wider family’s horological history almost certainly runs deeper than what appears here.