By MICHAEL F. DWYER
The first three surnames, all ending with “o,” represent modified spellings from their original Québec names. Remarkably, all three families hail with the throng of émigrés from St. Hyacinthe who settled in our area. Let us consider for a moment the communication network that brought French-Canadians here. Many of the immigrants could not read or write. Most settled here before railroad lines were completed. Therefore, the train of migration was communicated literally by word of mouth with individuals traveling by horse cart or boat to Vermont telling their friends back home that labor was needed here.
Grave markers for Ambrose Poro and his second wife Sophia lie at the edge of the car path in Pittsford’s St. Alphonsus Cemetery. As inscribed on the stone, 1794, Ambrose’s year of birth, suggests that he lived to the age of 98. Pittsford town records claim he was 102! In fact, he was born as Ambroise Porreau in St. Hyacinthe on June 10, 1807, thus he was 87 at the time of his death. Ambroise’s father, with the same name, died at the age of 29. His widow soon married Jean Plourde who raised the Porreau children. In fact, some of the Porreau children went by the Plourde name. At age 21, Ambroise married Marriane Gauthier [Gokey in Vermont]. Together they had 12 children before Marianne died early in 1851. One can see the variant spellings when they were counted in Pittsford’s 1850 census.
Soon after Marianne’s death, an “Andrews Powrreau” married Sophia McIntyre, a descendant of a Scottish immigrant to Québec, in a civil wedding on December 29, 1852. Three months later, the marriage was blessed by a priest from St. Joseph’s Church in Burlington. Five children were born to them, their three sons all dying in infancy. They moved back to Québec for about a decade before returning to Pittsford by 1870. The penury of their last years found them housed on Rutland’s town farm. Their dismissal was described in the Rutland Daily Herald on February 25, 1888.
Rutland, being a central town, poor people who are chargeable to other towns are continually applying for help. Soon after Mr. Beatty’s [overseer] election, he found a man and his wife who belonged in Pittsford, but upon whom had been expended nearly $200 by this town. The overseer of Pittsford was notified; and he took them away and thus saved this town a large future expense.
Among those discharged, “Ambrose Poro, Mrs. Ambrose Poro.” Sophia and Ambrose ended their lives supported by the Town of Pittsford. Three of Ambrose’s sons from his first marriage all served in Company G of the 12th Vermont Regiment: “Jock” Poro (1837–1914), Alexis “Chig” Poro (1839–1865), and Felix Poro (1843–1867). Note that Jock was the only son who lived past middle age.
A monument, with its orb missing, in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Brandon memorialized the Civil War service of Frank Shoro in the Fifth Vermont Infantry. He was born as François Charron on August 7, 1833 in St. Hyacinthe, son of Hyacinthe Charron dit Ducharme and Marie Mousette. You guessed it—some in this family went by the dit name Ducharme. Other descendants spelled it as Shorey, Shore, and Sharrow. Frank came to Brandon in the early 1850s; he married Rosella Beaulieu, her name recorded as Bolio. [See Lost Names #33.] Frank’s enlistment record in 1861 gives his birthplace as Moscow, previously explained in past articles as an earlier name for St. Hyacinthe. He was captured at Savage Station, Virginia, then paroled and hospitalized with a heart condition which earned him a disability pension. In spite of illness, Frank lived to the age of 85. His detailed obituary was published in the Brandon Union.
With these surname variations, I wondered about the ancestry of longtime Otter Valley teacher and administrator, Robert “Bob” Sharrow (1931–2000), who kept ties to OV long after his three retirements. I knew him as a man with a wicked sense of humor! Born in Malone, New York, Bob returned with his family to Rutland by 1940. His parents, Earl and Irene, and his grandparents, John and Lydia, were married at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Rutland, where their surname was recorded as Charron. Bob’s great-grandfather Alexis Charron, also known as Eli Sharrow, came from Napierville, Québec.
Lastly, we have another prolific family in the area, the Gallipos. Ancestor of the Pittsford and Proctor branch of this family, Henry Gallipo was baptized as Irenée Galipeau in St. Hyacinthe on May 3, 1834, son of Joseph Galipeau and his fourth wife, Sophie Rémi. [Note Irenée, French for St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, a second century theologian]. This family experienced a complex migration path as revealed in the 1850 census when counted in Holden, Massachusetts, where most of the men were employed in factories. In Pittsford, Henry married Delia Poro, granddaughter of Ambrose Poro. Henry’s brother, Remi, born in Pittsford in 1840, bore his mother’s surname, Remi, eventually settled in Proctor, where he and two generations of his family worked for the Vermont Marble Company. Their ancestor from France, Antoine Galipeau (ca. 1646–1722) married at Pointe-aux-Trembles, Québec, in 1688. From the Old French, galippe, “galley,” was the nickname of a seaman.
