By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Previous brushes with the Daunais surname [Marguerite Daunais was the mother of Augustin Gingras aka Austin Shangraw, Lost Names in Vermont, Part 10] made me wonder if the surname Doaner evolved from Daunais. Having taught two generations of Doaners at Otter Valley, I needed to work my way backwards in their ancestry to prove or disprove my hunch.
Allan R. Doaner (1948–2016) owned Doaner’s TV Center in Brandon. His father Harry William Doaner, Sr. (1909–1984) married on April 30, 1932 Laura Jane Ploof at the parsonage of the Pittsford Congregational Church. We see variations of the name with Harry’s grandfather, Frank Doney, age 28, as listed in the 1880 census of Shoreham, Vermont, where several branches of his family had settled. It gets even trickier with trying to find Frank as a child in the 1860 census. One had to have cast a wide net to have discovered Francis, age 9, in the 1860 census of Chazy, New York. His father was recorded as Costar Donie, age 50 [sic], born in New York. The garbled family name did not fare much better in the 1850 census when the father’s name was written as Comska Donah, age 30, born in Canada. At least “Comska’s” age was correct in this instance. He proved to be Constant Daunais, son of Constant Daunais and Marie-Josepte Gibeault, born in L’Acadie, Québec, on October 2, 1820. His ancestor, Antoine Duanay, from Lucon, Vendée, France, arrived in Québec by 1661. At Boucherville, he married Marie-Anne Richard on August 24, 1669. All the various branches of Doaner/Doners, etc. descend from this couple.
Like many other Québec migrants we have studied in this series, Constant Daunais, moved first to Chazy, New York in the 1840s, where he married Clara Janot Lachapelle. They had at least ten children, their births unrecorded. After many moves, Constant spent his last days with daughter Belle Oakes in Orwell, where he died on December 10, 1908. A brief death notice in the Middlebury Register exaggerated his age by a decade: “Mr. Doner of Shoreham died at his daughter’s, Mrs. Oakes, in Orwell, last Friday, from a fall. He was 98 years and eleven months old.”
Other branches of the Daunais family also settled in our area. Thomas Donar, brother of Marguerite Daunais [Gingras, above] lived in Peru, New York, before his children moved to Vermont. As recorded in the 1860 census, Thomas’s son Simon, 16, is labeled as “born idiotic” — harsh terminology by our standards today to describe a deaf-mute child. Another son, Andrew Doaner, made his way to Vermont and died in Brandon in 1920. Andrew’s gravestone in Lake View Cemetery in Shoreham has the surname Dones inscribed on its space. Descendants have repositioned to upright the fallen stone. Near Andrew’s stone is one for his daughter, Rosa Austin, with a date of death as 1900. The date is incorrect as she died of pneumonia on March 22, 1902. A few months later, her husband Herman Austin married as his second wife Rosa’s distant cousin, Clara Doner, granddaughter of Constant Daunais/Doner.
Buried with his mother Rosa is Private Archie Austin, who died at Camp Greene in Charlotte, North Carolina on January 31, 1918. In boot camp, he contracted measles which developed into pneumonia. His death notice in the Middlebury Register stated he had enlisted the previous October with his cousin, George Loya of Orwell. That brings us to another changed name. George’s grandfather, Thomas Loya, born in Canada, had married Lucie Doner, sister of Andrew. Some published guides on changed French-Canadian names aver that Loya was Loyer, but how do we know for sure that is correct in this family? Thomas Loya’s youngest daughter, Helen settled in Rutland. Her marriage license to Francis Lepine states her last name as Loya. The priest at Sacred Heart of Mary Church [later Immaculate Heart of Mary], however, recorded her last name as Laurier in the parish register. I have often wondered how this corrective conversation went. Did the priest say to the bride “Loya is not your real name”?
Interesting to note are other name changes of spouses of the Daunais/Doaner family. The 1831 birthdate on dates on the gravestone of Eli Donah of Shoreham is off by two years. Hilaire Donais was baptized at L’Acadie, Québec, on December 10, 1829. He married Marguerite Beaudoin, but in Vermont records her last name was recorded as Margaret Baldwin. Beaudoin to Baldwin stretches back a millennium because William the Conqueror’s father-in-law was Baldwin, Count of Flanders—Beaudoin in French.
After every episode of Lost Names, I still see a dense forest of surnames that need to be restored to their true roots.
