BY MICHAEL DWYER
“Battis Santa” and “Julia Potway” were married in South Hero, Vermont on October 19, 1838 by a Justice of the Peace. With no further information on the marriage record, their names, albeit garbled forms, pointed to their origin in Canada. As a starting point, their marriage outside the Catholic Church, would have resulted in their excommunication unless their marriage was later validated or “rehabilitated” by a priest. No further record was found. Julia’s surname was easier to reorient than Santa’s. She was baptized as Julie Lapoetrie at Varennes, across the St. Lawrence River, from Montreal, on March 31, 1817.
Wondering if Julie and her husband left Canada in the aftermath of the rebellions, I discovered that Julie’s uncle Barthélemy Lapotterie, a carriage-maker of Varennes, was arrested on February 18, 1838 for making a dinnertime toast to the health of rebel Louis-Joseph Papineau. Evidently, one of his neighbors denounced him. While freed 11 days after incarceration, Lapotterie’s arrest underscores the social tension within his village.
Jumping forward to the census of 1900, widow Julia Center, age 92 [really 82], lived with her son Adam Center. A telling statistic from the census: Julia had borne 13 children of whom only 6 were living. Having lived in many places, Julia spent her last days with married daughter Sophie Ploof in St. Regis Falls, New York, where she died in 1909. The Ploof family gravestone in St. Ann’s Cemetery with Julia’s name and dates looks fairly modern, rather than dating from the early 20th century.
Only through tracking Julia’s family through censuses from 1850 through 1880 did her husband’s true identity come into sharp relief. Battis Santa was born Jean-Baptiste Henri Palland/Payer dit St. Onge at La Présentation, Québec, in July 1819. Only 19 at the time of his marriage, “Battis,” later known as John, would have needed his parents’ permission if married in the Catholic Church. Thus, the dit portion of his last name, St. Onge, was mangled to Santa and then Center.
ADAM CENTER’S off-center headstone in Pine Hill Cemetery. Not only is the name off center, but the year of death was also never engraved.
In the first ten years of their marriage, John and Julia Center had at least six children born in northern Vermont, their births unrecorded. I can only speculate why they ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the time of the 1850 census alongside the family of Lewis “Laputra,” Julia’s brother. Their time west was short-lived because they were counted in New York State’s 1855 census in Granby, Oswego County before coming back to Vermont in 1860. Searching by last names alone can lead down false paths. Living in Grand Isle, the census-taker wrote John and Julia’s surname as Stone! Perhaps the recorder heard St. Onge and could not spell a French name.
More moves awaited this migrant family: John, Julia, and their two remaining children at home lived in Dickinson, New York, in 1870, nearby to their married children. John Center died sometime before 1900, probably in New York State, where vital records were not as well kept as Vermont during this time. One branch of John and Julia’s family established themselves in Brandon and surrounding towns. Some of the Center descendants may have figured out some earlier generations were named St. Onge, but it is a greater leap to learn their first ancestor to migrate from France to Canada was Jacques Payant dit Saint-Onge, a soldier, who chose to stay in New France (Quebec), where he married and plied his trade as a shoemaker. He was born in the village of Jonzac, within the Saintonge region of France—at last a dit name with a specific link to geography!
