By MICHAEL F. DWYER
On town or school rosters, the names Shackett and Shambo might have followed each other on an alphabetical list, but as you have come to expect in this column, neither of their original names started with the letter S. Let’s start with unpacking a lost name with Shackett. I remember a conversation with my student Ethel Shackett, OV Class of 1991, that she was named for her grandmother, Ethel (Swenor) Shackett, who married Leon Shackett Sr. on April 4, 1916. Grandmother Ethel lived to be 102 years old, with her longevity perhaps coming from her grandfather, Montréal-born Pierre Chouinard/Peter Swenor who died in New Haven on December 20, 1920, age 100. [Pronunciation of Chouinard Shwee nar explains how the variant spelling evolved.] At some point in Peter’s long life, he left his native Catholicism and joined the Baptist church.
Ethel’s husband, Leon Pearl Shackett (1893–1944), who died suddenly of a heart attack, ran the Town Farm in Leicester for many years. Leon’s father, Peter Shackett (1865–1918), was the first generation born in Bridport, Vermont. Peter’s parents, Frank Shackett (1841–1919) and Mary Brow (1844–1904), both born in Canada, were married in Cornwall on January 26, 1863 by a justice of the peace — an anomaly for Catholics later rectified with a rehabilitation of the marriage by a priest before the baptism of their first child in August. Their second child, Peter, listed only by last name Shackett by the town clerk of Cornwall, had his baptism recorded at St. Mary’s Church in Middlebury with the original spelling of his name, Peter Choquette. [Pronounced Shah-ket]. Frank and Mary Shackett were prolific, with eleven children born over a span of twenty-four years.
Frank Shackett was baptized as Francois Choquette, son of Edouard Choquette and Francoise Alard, on September 23, 1841 in Marieville, Québec, about 20 miles southwest of St. Hyacinthe, Québec, from whence so many other French-Canadian families emigrated to greater Brandon. His parents had two sets of twins, including Israel and Isaie, the later known in Middlebury as Isaac Shackett, who died in 1935, age 95. Along with Frank, two of his brothers married two sisters of Mary (Brow) Shackett.
By 1900, over 60 individuals in Vermont carried the Shackett surname, excluding those already dead or married with a different surname. From their origins in Québec, they descend from Nicolas Choquette dit Champagne, a soldier from Amiens, Picardie, France. He came with the Carignan-Salière Regiment to New France, leaving La Rochelle, France, on May 13, 1665 aboard the ship L’Aigle d’Or [Golden Eagle] and arriving at Québec on August 18, 1665. Today Shackett Road in Leicester bears evidence of Nicolas Choquette’s descendants who lived there.
Two obelisks in Brandon’s St. Mary’s Cemetery, one for Isaac Archambault and the other for J.B. Shambo, take us into their story. They descend from Jacques Archambault, a winegrower from Dompierre-sur-mer, France, who came to Montréal in the 1660s. The American version of the name Shambo derives from the last two syllables of Archambault [Ah sham bow]. Three brothers, sons of Joseph Archambault and Catherine Bernier from St. Hyacinthe, all touched down in Brandon by 1850. The first, born as Jean Isaie Archambault, earned his living as a stone mason. He remained in Brandon, where censuses consistently recorded his last name as Shambo. On his gravestone, the name is carved as Archambault. The second brother, Joseph Shambo, married Esther Baril in the early 1840s in Vermont. His occupation, as recorded in the 1850 census, was a cabinet maker. Joseph left Brandon and moved to Hydeville, Vermont, where his last-born son Denis was born on Christmas Eve, 1856. A record of Joseph’s death has not been found, but widow Esther returned to Canada with her children before moving to Lowell, Massachusetts, where all of the family, including Esther, found employment in the cotton mills. Within Lowell’s densely populated French-Canadian enclave, their last name reverted to Archambault.
Now to J.B. Shambo, who died in 1896 from a “liver complaint.” He was born in Brandon on September 3, 1849 to the third of the Shambo/Archambault brothers, known alternately as Leo, Leon, or Leonard Shambo. This family left Brandon and moved to Northfield, Vermont, where John married Exilda Bashaw [Bachand] who had many relatives in Brandon. Leo, his wife, and his younger children made one more move to Cohoes, New York, where they all worked in the mills. John B. Shambo, however, undoubtedly through the pull of his wife’s family, moved back in Brandon by 1874. John earned his living as a blacksmith. He and Exilda leave many descendants in the area.
