By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Our new year begins with a sequel to the last installment on the Stone family that is partly the recovering of a lost name and the unraveling of a complex mystery. Emma King (1870–1962) bore five children with Nelson Stone and five with husband Fred Smith. Identifying her parents has long confounded her descendants. As Laura King, daughter of Nelson King and Aurilla Dudley, Emma took out a marriage license in Ripton on February 23, 1888 to Alverton Harrington. She did not, however, marry him because later that same year, as Emma “Cane,” naming the same parents, she married Fred Smith as discussed in the previous article. Both records concur that she had been born in Schenectady, New York, a puzzling fact.
Failing to find a record of marriage between Nelson King and Aurilla Dudley, my search turned to learning more about Aurilla. I found her as Orilla Dudley, age 4, in Salisbury, Vermont’s 1850 census with her parents, Moses and Rosella Dudley, both of whom were born in Canada. Assuming the parents were married in Québec, I located the marriage record of Moise Daudelin and Rosalie Boucher at Henryville on August 4, 1845. Shortly thereafter, the couple moved to Addison County, where Aurilla was born. At the age of one, the parents brought Aurélie to St. Jean-sur-Richelieu for baptism. Their other children born in Vermont were baptized at St. Mary’s Church with the surname listed as Dodelin.
Aurilla’s father Moses Dudley volunteered to serve in Company C of the 7th Vermont Volunteers on January 21, 1862. He was granted a medical discharge on February 25, 1863, and soon gained a disability pension. Moses’s extensive pension file extends over 130 pages and chronicles his physical examinations and subsequent payments until his death on December 5, 1905 at the age of eighty-five. Surprisingly, it took Rosella several months to obtain her widow’s pension. The problem: the agent supervising her claim wrote to Canada seeking documentation of her marriage. Of course, there was no document with the name Dudley. In the second round of inquiries, someone realized the name had been changed from Daudelin, and the priest sent transcription of the church record from the original French. The file contains this revealing deposition from Rosella, her story typical of many other Vermont immigrants from that era:
Neither my husband or myself could speak English when we lived in Henryville, Canada, from which place we moved to Vermont and neither of us could read or write. The name change in pronouncing our name, called Daudelin in French, to Dudley in English was brought about by our Vermont neighbors who could not speak French, and we accepted the change as a natural consequence. My husband enlisted as Moses Dudley because he was so known and so called. That is the real truth about the change in pronouncing our name. Not being able to read, I cannot tell anything about the spelling of our name in French or English.
These explanations won Rosella her widow’s pension which she collected until her death in 1907.
Back to the troubling story of their daughter: On November 24, 1865, Aurilla married Frederick Fales, twenty years her senior. They had a daughter Loraine Fales born on September 11, 1866. Evidently, Aurelia drifted away from Fred Fales because their daughter Loraine was living with her Dudley grandparents in 1870. In December 1876, several Vermont newspapers brought to light that Nelson King was “found in bed with one Aurilla Fales, a married woman.” Under Vermont’s 1872 so-called Blanket Act, Nelson King was brought to trial and sentenced to one year of hard labor at the Vermont State prison in Windsor.
A marvelous repository of documents with a helpful staff, the Vermont State Archives [sos.archives@vermont.gov] holds some court records from the trial as well a copy of the prison register which gave a description of Nelson at the beginning of his incarceration. He was 29 years old, born Canada, height 5’11,” with black eyes and black hair, dark complexion.
Amid this turmoil, Aurilla died of consumption on January 1, 1877, just a week after Nelson’s sentencing. She was interred in her parents’ lot at Prospect Cemetery in East Middlebury, Vermont. Only her first name and dates of birth and death appear on the monument. Nelson served his year in prison. Upon his release, he changed his name to Nelson Metcalf and wed Elsie Hier on May 6, 1878. On his marriage license, he disclosed the names of his parents as Betal and Selena Metcalf. Yet, in the 1880 Middlebury census, he reverted to Nelson King, with his household consisting of new wife Elsie, and his daughter Emma. Oddly enough, he lived only a few doors away from Moses Dudley. There was no happy ending for Elsie. She was granted a divorce from Nelson Metcalf in 1886, stating he deserted her in December 1882. Elsie remarried but died in Middlebury’s Poor House in 1904. We know the rest of Emma’s story from the previous episode.
Determining Nelson King’s parentage remains a work in progress, made more complicated because of his alias and absence from Catholic records. Certainly, he was born Narcisse Roy or Leroi [a translation of “king”] possibly with one of the dit names that accompanied Roy such as Desjardins or Lauzier. My search will continue among the several Leroi/Roy families that lived in Henryville, whence the Daudelins came. Perhaps by the next installment, I will have cracked the case.
