By MICHAEL F. DWYER
The burgeoning of spring inspires me to reunite these anglicized French-Canadian names with their original birth surnames.
Joseph Oakes, born around 1835, in Québec, had lived in Addison County since his teens. He married Mary Lorrain in 1863; she died just seven years later. Their marriage certificate gives us the first clue in revealing his true name. Joseph disclosed his birthplace as Moscow, Canada, which we have repeatedly known as St. Hyacinthe. Highly unusual among Vermont naturalization records is that Joseph used his original name, Duchesne with Oakes in parentheses. Oak[s] is a direct translation of chesne [pronounced “shane”] of oak tree. Joseph’s gravestone in St. Genevieve Cemetery in Shoreham records his date of birth and death, yet the informant on his death certificate left blank the names of his parents. A caveat for deeper research on this family. Following the ancestral trail leads us to the Messier family. Antoine Messier dit Duchesne takes us to the ancestor from France: Michel Messier de St. Michel who married in Montréal in 1658.
Joseph Ash and Catherine Dimo [sic] also married in New Haven on April 19, 1855 by a Justice of the Peace. Their marriage was eventually blessed by a Catholic priest. Joseph became an American citizen in 1858 and registered to vote the very next day. Among their ten children, son Henry Ash (1868–1935) moved to Massachusetts in the 1880s. Joseph lived to the age of 94 and died in 1915 with his obituary noting that he had been totally blind for the last 13 years “but aside from this did not suffer from the infirmities due to old age, being up and about the house till the day he died.”
Longevity ran in the family. Joseph’s father, “Brazil” Ash died in Charlotte on January 12, 1899, supposedly age 92, but in fact 88. He was, in fact, Basile Dufresne, who married Eleanore Tetreau in Marieville , Québec, on January 27, 1829.His remote ancestor Antoine Dufresne dit St. Antoine came from France and married in Montréal in 1668. “Frêne” means ash tree. Two generations of the Dufresne/Ash family moved to Vermont in the 1840s and in public records consistently recorded their name as Ash. Basile’s first name was variously listed as Russell, Roswell, Brazie, and Boselle!
Fred Plumtree fought for Vermont in the Civil War as part of Company 1 of the Vermont 7th Infantry for eleven months. He signed his enlistment certificate with an X. Who was he? Born in Burlington, circa 1826, as Hippolyte Prunier, occupation scieur [sawyer], he returned to St.-Hyacinthe where he married Edwige Tetreau dit Ducharme on July 15, 1851. They had nine children and moved from West Haven to Bennington and then in the 1880s to Chicopee, Massachusetts, where he died in 1902, age 77. His ancestor, a latecomer from Malzéville, France, Martin Prunier dit Vadeboncoeur, arrived in Canada around 1760, probably as a soldier in the Seven Years War.
Joseph Hickory, age 62, born in Canada, and his wife Ellen, age 53, appear in Shoreham’s 1920 census. Ten years earlier in the census, he was listed under his original name Joseph Desnoyes. [Noyer blanc d’Amérique, “white walnut of America,” translates to hickory.] In Vermont since the mid 1880s with his original name, why would Joseph have, in this instance, adopted the Americanized version of his name? The 1920 census seems to have been a one-off, perhaps because the census enumerator, Ernest Larabee, was French Canadian, and upon hearing Desnoyes, he wrote “Hickory.” On the other hand, when Joseph died in 1932, the name on the death certificate was written as Desnoyer, but the death notice from the Rutland Herald headlined “Joseph Hickory, 74, E. Shoreham, Died.” The American-born generation such as Joseph Hickory Jr. (1887–1952) did not revert to their French-Canadian name.
A final note: though Duchesne/Duchane and Dufresne/Dufrane sound alike, they are indeed different trees!
