By MICHAEL F. DWYER
A monument with the name “Christmas” carved at its base in St. Alphonsus Cemetery in Pittsford commands attention. Who was this family? Throughout his long life, did George Henry Christmas Sr. (1847–1928) endure teasing because of his surname? Born in Hinesburg, the seventh child of French-Canadian immigrants who crossed the Vermont border in 1841, he never changed his name—his parents had already done that. George, at the age of three, was baptized at St. Joseph’s Church in Burlington as Julien Noel, son of Francois Noel and Felicité Coulombe, who were married in Yamachiche, Québec, on 23 July 1832. Catholic church records notwithstanding, they would be known in Vermont with the last name of Christmas, a direct translation from French of “Noel.” Frank Christmas, George’s father, lived to be 92! Among George Christmas’s siblings, Margaret (1835–1918) married Antoine Poreau [Poro] and also settled in Pittsford. With Margaret’s age at death exaggerated to 98 years, newspapers proclaimed her Pittsford’s oldest resident. In fact, she was only 83!
In October 1863, barely sixteen, and not eighteen as he claimed, George Christmas enlisted as a Civil War soldier and signed his declaration with an X. Regimental muster sheets from Company C, 11th Vermont Infantry disclosed that George was only 5’ 2” with brown hair and gray eyes. All told, he spent months of his service ill, with “enfeeblement,” according to hospital records. Nonetheless, George served until the end of the war with an honorable discharge. No surprise that when, years later, he was granted a Civil War pension, his underlying disabilities were chronic diarrhea and rheumatism, common afflictions among aging veterans.
Two days before Christmas 1865, he wed fifteen-year-old Kate Landers, their marriage officiated by a Congregational minister in Williston. Along with Kate’s parents, Ambrose and Lucy Landers, the young Christmas family moved to Pittsford where they were all counted in the 1870 U.S. Census. Born in Canada, Ambrose and Lucy Landers had been in Vermont since the early 1840s. Since Landers is not a French name, I suspected changes in their first and last names, obscuring their true identities. Solving this puzzle was not quite as simple as direct translation as “Noel” to “Christmas.” The first clue came in the naturalization record, dated August 30, 1860, wherein Ambrose Landers, age 60, declared he was born in L’ Acadie, Lower Canada [Québec]. At least that gave me a location to search for more records. Recognizing a pattern from other Vermont name changes, I wondered if the name Landers could have been Therien—emphasis on pronouncing the first syllable terre [silent H], the French word for land. My hunch proved correct in discovering the baptismal record of Catherine Therien, daughter of Ambroise [Ambrose] Therien and Clotilde Masse, baptized on 22 September 1850, at St. Joseph’s Church in Burlington. Yes, Catherine Therien became Kate Landers!
Going back a generation, I expected then to find a baptismal record, circa 1820, for Ambroise Therien in the vicinity of L’ Acadie, Québec, but did not find an exact match with full first and last names. Instead, I encountered a baby named Ambroise, a foundling of unknown parents, baptized on 6 August 1820. He literally had been left on the church doorstep. Many Therien families lived in the area, so evidently one of them raised Ambroise to adulthood. A record of Ambroise and Clotilde’s marriage has not survived; their eldest son Joseph was born in Burlington around 1842. Sometimes name changes do not follow predictable patterns. For example, Clotilde became known as Lucy! They may be the couple, named Ambrose Palmer and Louisa Mosser, married by an Irish priest at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Burlington on 5 March 1848. If so, this was likely a rehabilitation of an earlier non-Catholic marriage.
Ambrose and Lucy Landers ended their days in Pittsford among a tightly knit cluster of French-Canadian families. In 1896, they died less than six months apart from one another. Their handsome double gravestone in St. Alphonsus Cemetery has survived well.
Just west of the Landers cemetery plot is the double-sided stone for George and Kate Christmas. In moving to Pittsford from Williston, they worked hard to attain a higher standard of living than their parents achieved as immigrants. Starting as a farmer laborer, George later worked in marble quarries and then became a blacksmith. He and Kate eventually owned their own home and enjoyed retirement.
George Christmas Jr., whose name appears on the other side of the stone, was the only one of George and Kate’s three children who lived to maturity. For reasons unknown to me, George Sr., after his wife Kate’s death, went to live in Underhill, Vermont, with his nephew Charles Christmas. That is where he died, his body brought home to Pittsford for burial. George’s family honored his Civil War service. In 1975, grandson Raymond Christmas applied successfully for a military marker to be placed on George’s grave. My first trip to the Christmas lot failed to find the marker. Taking advantage of an unseasonably warm November afternoon, I returned to the cemetery, looking carefully around the large Christmas stone. Noticing an indentation partially filled with dried grass clipping, I found the sunken marker!
Our area cemeteries will continue to tell stories of names lost in Vermont.
