By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Thirty-five years ago, when Barry Gearwar appeared on my student rolls at Otter Valley Union High School, I encountered a surname I had never seen before. With good reason: the index for the 1900 census shows only one family group, for the entire country, with the Gearwar name living in Lamoille County. This story traces when the Gearwars came to this area.
Prescott Gearwar, born in Topsham, Vermont, died in Brandon in on 13 June 1959, age 70. His two sons, Francis Gearwar (1919-1995) and John Prescott Gearwar (1918-2007), known as Prescott, moved to our community in the late 1930s. Of the two, John has the greater number of descendants. His obituary counted 16 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren; no doubt the number of his progeny continues to grow.
It surprised me to find that Prescott Gearwar had generated an eight-page F.B.I file from the World War I era. Why was special federal agent N.W. Hobbs dispatched to Newbury, Vermont, to come after a Vermont farmer? Hobbs’s account describes the draft board “unearthed a man by the name of Gearwar” who claimed to be 32 years old and failed to register. Report details include the agent’s spending the night in Wells River because Newbury had no hotel. Over three days, Hobbs interviewed the Topsham town clerk and Prescott’s father to determine his correct date of birth because the local records did not list the child’s first name. Catching up eventually with Prescott, Agent Hobbs wrote in conclusion that Prescott should have registered for the draft on June 5, 1917 instead of September 12, 1918. This episode underscores the tight scrutiny of citizens who failed to comply with their duty during wartime.
With Prescott’s father, Frank Gearwar (1857–1927), a first-generation Vermonter, family drama resembles more soap opera than political intrigue. Frank married his first wife, Hattie Olds, in Philippsburg, Quebec on April 9, 1877. They had one son, Charles (1879–1932). A notice in the Orleans County Monitor on 11 July 1881 listed Frank’s petition for divorce from Hattie on the grounds that she had committed adultery with Charles Gearwar, Frank’s brother. Hattie did not answer a summons because she was not living in Vermont. Shortly after the final decree, Frank married Minnie Currier, mother of Prescott Gearwar and seven other children.
Where did Hattie and her son Charles Gearwar go in the meantime? Canada’s 1881 census for Philippsburg, Québec, shows them living in the household of Charles Gearwar, his wife, Cyrena and their two children. Cyrene, neé Olds, was Hattie’s sister. History repeated itself when Charles Gearwar published a notice in Morrisville’s News and Citizen on December 23, 1886 seeking a divorce from his wife Cyrena on the grounds of adultery. One gets a little suspicious here with the parallel circumstances of the two Gearwar brothers wanting to divorce their wives who were not living in Vermont! After Charles Gearwar’s uncontested divorce, he married his former sister-in-law, Hattie (Olds) Gearwar. Hattie’s son by Frank, Charles, moved to Boston, where he assumed the name Charles Gerard. Whether to differentiate himself or not from his Gearwar half-brothers in Vermont, Charles’s adoption of the name Gerard brings us closer to the original surname.
Mitchell Gearwar, born in Canada, father of Charles and Frank, moved to Vermont in the late 1830s. His death notice from Burlington Daily News, 5 July 1908 stated he died in Morrisville on the fourth-of-July, his 98th birthday. It continued, “Both Mr. Gearwar’s father, mother, and grandfather were born and died on the Fourth of July” — No doubt a good family story that emphasized Gearwar’s embrace of American identity. In truth, Mitchell Gearwar was born and baptized at St. Hyacinthe, Québec, on July 3, 1819, as Michel Giroire, eldest son of Michel Giroire and Marie Caouet, making him 89 years old at his death. The original name, sometimes spelled as Girouard, is pronounced Zhee-roo-ah, not a far leap to rendering it in Vermont as Gearwar. Michel, the father, was twice widowed, when he married his third wife, Adelaide Loranger, in 1838 who bore children over the next twenty years. There would be a span of thirty-nine years between Mitchell Gearwar and his youngest half-brother, Jean Aldyas Girouard. Thus, some of Mitchell’s children were older than their aunts and uncles.
No doubt a crowded house with younger siblings provided a context as to why Mitchell struck out on his own and moved to the area around Johnson, Vermont. He married Vermont-born Caroline Baker, say around 1843. She had a son named Cornelius who adopted the surname Gearwar as a child but in adulthood used the name Baker. In 1850, they lived in the now defunct village of Sterling, near Morrisville, Vermont. Unlike many immigrants who never owned land, Mitchell eventually purchased a farm with over one hundred acres. Mitchell spent his final years living with his granddaughter, Ellen Thayer.
Giroir/Girouard is a recognizably Acadian name. Mitchell’s grandfather, Joseph Girouard, was born in St. Antoine sur-Richelieu in 1762, several years after the family had been forcibly exiled from Beaubassin, present-day Nova Scotia. Casualties of the struggle for empire between the British and French, several hundred villagers watched as soldiers set fire to their homes as well as their church. The ensuing diaspora scattered families to rebuild their lives, some settling in Louisiana. [For more about Acadian families in Vermont, see Lost Names, Part 20, Brow].
A comparison of the population of New France, circa 1700, with that of Acadia, suggests that families in the cluster of villages from Québec to Montréal and other settlements along the St. Lawrence, outnumbered the Acadians about fifteen-to-one. Nonetheless, progenitor of the Vermont Gearwars, Francois Girouard dit Lavaranne who married Jeanne Aucoin [another name in our area, virtually unchanged] circa 1647, leaves ten of thousands descendants today, including tenth-great-grandsons George Valley of Pittsford and my friend and fellow genealogist Greg Childs of Clamart, France, who assisted me with research.
