By MICHAEL F. DWYER
A steep climb in Chittenden’s rocky Horton Cemetery brings us to a large memorial stone inscribed like two faces of the same coin. One side reads MAYO and the other side reads McGEE. Gravestones around this one bear both names. To unravel the story of how this Chittenden family lived with interchanged names, we need to begin with Civil War soldier Joseph McGee (1826—1889). Juxtaposition of these two grave markers document the chronology of the name change. Although two-year-old Homer Mayo died in 1897, eight years after his grandfather, Joseph McGee, Homer’s gravestone was erected soon after his death, whereas Joseph’s stone, with its Civil War marker, was not placed there until after the death of his wife Phelinda in 1930. The Mayo surname was seemingly closer phonetically to Joseph’s original surname, Maillé, pronounced “My Yay.”
Born in Terrebonne, an island south of Montreal, on April 7, 1826, Joseph was the son of Alexander Maillé and Elizabeth Montigny. His early years elude documentation—his siblings, save one brother, Lewis, stayed in Canada. On August 5, 1862, at Troy, New York, as Joseph Mayo, he enlisted in Company 7 of New York Heavy Artillery Infantry and served until his discharge at the end of the war. Within the next few years, he moved to West Castleton, Vermont. On February 28, 1869, he married for the first time, under the name Joseph McGee, to a young Civil War widow, Phelinda Belden, born in Whitehall, New York to French-Canadian immigrants. Phelinda’s first husband, Homer Belden, a veteran of Company E, Vermont’s Fifth Volunteer Infantry, had died only ten months prior, leaving her with two toddlers, Homer and Henry Belden.
In the early years of their marriage, as Joseph made his living as a lumberman in the woods, cutting down trees and burning charcoal, they moved frequently before settling in Chittenden around 1876. Curiously, it was Phelinda alone who took out a mortgage in 1882. As described later, it consisted of “a log house, barn, 20 acres of rocky mountain land, no income from said premises and just serves as a home and shelter.” Moving forward, we have much detail about Joseph’s last four years from his Civil War pension file, housed at the National Archives in Washington. In 1885, at age 59, 5’ 3,” 145 pounds, Joseph attempted to gain a Civil War disability pension, citing bowel problems, asthma, and “moon blindness,” all of which interfered with ability earn a living as a manual laborer. Because the pension board could not determine his ailments were a direct result of the war, and with no record of his wartime hospitalizations, they turned him down. Joseph “Magee” died in Chittenden three years later, age 63, of dropsy (i.e., congestive heart failure).
Over sixty additional pages of the pension file describe how Joseph’s death plunged Phelinda into crisis mode. She had seven children to support, the youngest less than three. The Mayo/McGee name-tangle impacted and delayed Phelinda’s pension on two fronts. First, she had to clear the hurdles of how the man who enlisted in the Civil War as Joseph Mayo was the same as Joseph McGee. One of her depositions stated, “said McGee enlisted under the name Mayo because that was the English way of speaking.” Unable to read or write, she had to be persuaded to assume the name Mayo to facilitate getting the pension. Secondly, and unbeknownst to her at the time of her marriage, the clerk in Fair Haven, Vermont recorded her name as Cordelia, not Phelinda Belden on her marriage certificate. She could not explain the discrepancy, only that she did not speak much English. With testimony from Joseph’s older brother, Louis McGee, and other neighbors in Chittenden, she eventually prevailed and gained a pension of eight dollars per month, with two dollars per month added until each of her children reached the age of 16.
Phelinda’s widowhood lasted 41 years. She held her family together. Eight of her nine children married and had children of their own. With her pension, she kept her house in Chittenden—at least one of her sons always living adjacent to her. After Phelinda’s seventieth birthday, her pension increased to $20 per month. In 1921, electricity came to her house. By 1928 she was getting $40 per month, a far cry from the original $8! Phelinda’s obituary in the Rutland Herald, written by a Chittenden correspondent, reflects how local news and society happenings were then reported.
Phelinda’s gravestone, matching her husband’s, inscribes her maiden name as Sanspree, a phonetic variant of Saint-Esprit (literally “holy spirit”), adopted by her parents after they had moved to Whitehall, New York around 1840.
From Maillé to Mayo and McGee, we come full circle with Joseph’s first patrilineal ancestor from Paris, Pierre Maguet, pronounced “Ma Gay.” Sounds a lot like McGee, doesn’t it? Pierre signed his name on this marriage record from Pointe-aux-Tremble, Québec, on 7 January 1686.
With thanks to Muriel (McGee) Soulia and Frank Mussaw.
