By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Faded and slightly sunken stones of Peter Bush and his wife Lucy in Brandon’s St. Mary’s Cemetery beckoned me to delve deeper into their identities. Bush, like the surname of our father-and-son Presidents, usually denotes a Yankee name, but in this case, Vermont censuses from 1860 and1870 list Peter and Lucy’s birthplace as Canada. By 1870, they had nine children, including their own George W. Bush born in 1869. However, only one “Bush” child, Lucy, born in 1866, had her baptism recorded at St. Mary’s, begging the question of if or where the other children were baptized. From the birthplace of their eldest child, Martha, born circa 1853, I sought in vain to find a Vermont marriage record for Peter Bush around that time. Peter’s wife Lucy died on March 11, 1873, age 39, a week after the birth of her eleventh child. Her death was not recorded in any town record, so her gravestone remains the only evidence of her life span.
Elsewhere in Vermont at this time, some Bushes born in Canada proved to derive from the French name Boucher, with Bushey as its most common variant. No Vermont document indicated Peter’s exact birthplace in Canada. He became a United States citizen in February 1887, a year before his death. His declaration states that he came to the U.S. at the age of 17.
The first helpful clue for discovering Peter’s parents emerged in the record of his second marriage to Margaret Mayhew in Brandon on December 8, 1878. Peter stated his parents’ names as Peter and Pauline Bush. With that information, I thought I could find a Québec baptism of Pierre Boucher, born circa 1832, with the names of those parents. That search proved unsuccessful and still left me puzzling over the original name. My next strategy was to search deeper for Peter’s first wife Lucy, whose maiden name, as remembered by her children was Bollio or Bulow. Those names I recognized as phonetic renderings of Beaulieu [beautiful place]. St. Mary’s Church in Brandon had several Beaulieu marriages from the late 1850s, but none for Lucy/Lucie. Remembering that priests from St. Joseph’s Church in Burlington made regular missionary stops in Brandon before the establishment of St. Mary’s Church in Brandon, I looked for the marriage of Lucie Beaulieu in St. Joseph’s published marriage repertoire. Eureka! A rehabilitation of an earlier non-Catholic marriage was found for Lucie and Pierre Bousquet on November 11, 1852. That was anomalous because in Vermont Bousquet [Boos-kay] usually became Booska or Buskey. The last piece of evidence fell into place with the baptism of Pierre Bousquet at Rouville, Québec, on March 8, 1830, son of Pierre Bousquet and Appoline [Pauline] Privé. Peter’s parents remained in the vicinity of St. Hyacinthe, Québec, for the remainder of their lives, but in moving to Vermont by himself, Peter would have known dozens of families who came from the same area he did.
Peter’s second marriage to Margaret produced four more children, the youngest born more than thirty years after Peter’s eldest daughter, Martha. While many of Peter’s descendants can be found in Vermont today, his son George W. Bush moved to Minneapolis by 1900, and son Rock Bush ended his days in the state of Washington.
Lucy Bush, née Lucie Beaulieu, represents another family from St. Hyacinthe who settled in Brandon in the mid 1840s. Her parents Peter “Bullion,” with wife Lucy and seven of their children appear in the 1850 census. Vermont records over the next forty years never captured the correct spelling of their name; however, Pierre Beaulieu and Lucie’s name are accurately carved on one side of the Anoe obelisk in St. Mary’s Cemetery. For now, we’ll look at just one more of the Beaulieu daughters who married into early migrating families to Brandon.
Now to the facing side of the Anoe monument: Marie Beaulieu, sister of Lucy Bush, married Joseph Enaud at St, Mary’s Church in Brandon on September 28, 1857. The spelling in Vermont changed to Anoe, as reflected on their gravestone. Even in Québec, variant spellings exist for the name. Joseph was baptized as Cléophas Hainault at St. Hyacinthe on October 26, 1836. Not surprising that he dropped the Cléophas! A marriage contract, with rich detail, survives for Joseph’s father Francois Eneau who emigrated from the Chateau-Gontier in the Anjou region of France. Did he flee the upheavals of the French Revolution? That’s another story waiting to be told! As Francis Anoe, he died in Brandon in 1874, age 85—no gravestone survives for him. His son, Joseph Anoe, died in 1910, with barely two sentences in his published death notice. But when his wife Mary (Beaulieu/Bolia) Anoe died in 1928, a headline in the Brandon Union proclaimed her as the oldest resident of Forest Dale. My research has uncovered an extended web of families connected to the Bushes, Bolias, and Anoes, and they will appear in the next installment of Lost Names.
