By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Over twenty-five years ago, after reading one of Christian Wideawake’s by-lines from the Rutland Herald, I commented to George Valley, “I wonder if Wideawake is a Native American surname?” George, raised in a Francophone family, did not speak English until he went to school. He said, “I bet it was Leveillé.” “L’éveillé” [pronounced Lev-vay-yay] means an alert or lively person in French. George proved correct. Chris Wideawake and his father Gil had long been aware of the name change. Their ancestor, Gilbert Leveillé was born on April 25, 1837 in Contrecoeur, Québec, about twenty-five miles northwest of Ste. Hyacinthe. Alone among his siblings, Gilbert moved to Vermont in his late teens. In the 1860 census of Danby, Vermont, Gilbert Wideawake worked as a quarryman. Why Wideawake? The Wideawakes were a young band of marching Republicans supporting Lincoln’s ticket in the contentious Election of 1860. I speculate that Gilbert either chose or had Wideawake bestowed on him because it was a name in the news.
Shortly after this census, Gilbert married Emelie Moreau, her name anglicized to Amelia Morris. Their first child, Sophronie, born in 1861, died as a teenager, but a second Sophronie was born in 1876. The baptismal register of St. Jerome’s Church in East Dorset records only two of their other children, Addie in 1864 and Peter in 1885. The twenty-one-year gap reflects the family’s return to Québec. The 1871 Québec census for the town of Ste. Rosalie, just east of Ste. Hyacinthe reveals two Leveillé households, those of Gilbert and his parents, Pierre and Rosalie. I suspect that Gilbert went home to help his parents with their farm, and after their deaths, Gilbert’s family returned to Manchester, Vermont, where they resumed the Wideawake name. The 1900 census attests that of Gilbert and Addie’s ten children, five had died. One last puzzle, as yet unsolved: Gilbert made a will in 1921 and signed his name as Gilbert Wideawake de la Vergne.
Like most of his siblings, Gilbert Wideawake Jr (1869–1940), eldest of Gilbert and Addie’s sons, did not marry into a French-Canadian family. He wed Minnie Wilkins on September 4, 1888 in Danby. They are Chris’s great-great-grandparents.
Vermont’s 1860 census turned up another Widewake: Joseph, working as a farmhand in Shoreham. His first name also alternated between Hubert and Herbert! Digging deeper into his complex history proved that he was a first cousin once removed of Gilbert. He was baptized as Hubert Leveillé, son of Hubert Leveille on October 15, 1839. He enlisted as a Civil War soldier on September 24, 1861 and served all four years in two companies of the First Vermont Regiment. Civil War. He was discharged in 1865, earning a partial disability pension for a bullet wound to the neck and shoulder. Whenever I see a Civil War pension index card from the National Archives with a name and an alias, it screams to unpack the story. Fascinating details emerge from 119 pages of his pension. After the war, Wideawake assumed the name Herbert Lavey. Why? Lavey approximates a two-syllable rendition of Leveillé. From pages in the file, Herbert claimed that he used the Wideawake name to enlist because he did not want his father to know he signed up as a soldier.
Tragedy stalked Herbert’s postwar years. In 1869, he married seventeen-year-old Marietta Selleck, who died from tuberculosis just six years later. Their only child, Ada, married in 1890, but she and her infant child both died in a diphtheria epidemic. A fire destroyed their Middlebury home in 1875. In the meantime, Herbert’s disability pension was revoked in 1872. It took several years, many forms, and depositions for him to gain it back. Perhaps disheartened from these afflictions, Herbert moved to Florida and left the care of his daughter to his Selleck in-laws in Middlebury. His second marriage to Susan Robinson also ended with her early death. He wed third wife, Louise Grannine, in Brunswick, Georgia, on November 12, 1890. Herbert died on July 22, 1901. Sadly, no stone marks his grave. Widow Louise collected his pension until her death in 1924.
Gilbert and Hubert/Hebert Leveillé descended from French immigrant Etienne Leveillé from Rouen, France, who wed Elisabeth Lequin in Québec in 1671. Etienne was baptized in the Cathedral of St. Maclou, whose façade was immortalized in a series of paintings by Claude Monet.
Casting a wider net for other Leveillés who touched down in Vermont, I came across the Joseph Smart family counted in the 1870 census of Swanton, Vermont. Studying them further, I discovered they were Leveillés—the adoption or imposition of the name Smart certainly represents a loose translation of l’éveillé! Undoubtedly, other Smarts elsewhere in Vermont were not born with the name! They were not of the same clan as the Wideawakes because their immigrant ancestor was a French soldier, Joseph Fourquin dit Leveillé deployed to Canada during the Seven Years War. While some of Joseph’s family maintained Smart as their surname, he ended his days in Palmer, Massachusetts. His gravestone in St. Anne’s Cemetery returns to his original name.
