By MICHAEL F. DWYER
A visit to Brandon’s old Catholic Cemetery on Maple Street last December seemed to underscore how much history had been lost in its empty spaces and broken stones. The cemetery opened in 1852, when the first Catholic Church—Our Lady of Good Help—was completed on what was then known as Canada Street. Earliest burials, mostly French-Canadians and some Irish immigrants, date from that year and continued through the 1860s and 1870s until the construction of the new Catholic church on Carver Street was completed in 1888. When a cemetery is no longer active, it can easily fall into disrepair. Marvel Swan first copied gravestone inscriptions in the 1950s, noting the cemetery was “in very poor condition. Completely covered in a blanket of poison ivy.” By the time Margaret Jenks copied the inscriptions again in 1994, she noted the cemetery was now mown but many stones needed repair.
A return visit to the cemetery last week allowed me to take more pictures and retrieve some history of three families buried there. Compared to the present St. Mary’s Cemetery, with its frequent use of monuments that inscribe the dates of multiple family members, nearly all the single stones in the old cemetery mark the resting place of individuals. A pair of stones in fairly good condition belong to Salomon Sird and his wife Angeline. Born as Bernardin Salomon Cyrard in Assomption, Québec on June 15, 1807, son of Louis Cyrard and Marie-Anne Dugai, the family lived principally in Lavaltrie, Québec, about 40 miles northeast of Montréal, along the St. Lawrence River. Louis’s grandfather, Jean Cirard came from Tressaint, Britanny, to Canada before 1753.
Salomon and Angeline had thirteen children born between 1831 and 1855. Absent from Vermont’s 1860 census, most of this family settled in Brandon by the early 1860s. Behind their graves is a barely readable stone of their daughter-in-law, Saphronia Dudley, wife of Dennis Sird who died in May 1862. Angeline’s gravestone gives her maiden name as Rase, but her descendants have mistakenly conjectured that her maiden name was LaMorder or Normandin. [See Lost Names #38] The marriage record of Solomon Sirard and Angeline Desrosiers in L’Assomption, Québec, on May 18, 1830 conclusively settles the question of her maiden name. Rase was heard in the second syllable of the name Desrosiers. As noted in Lost Names #38, their son Lewis Sird married Ellen LaMorder in Cornwall, Vermont in 1866. Together they had eleven children. Widow Ellen Sird later married Lewis’s brother Joseph Sird. A Civil War veteran, Lewis established himself as a blacksmith in Sudbury and later in Leicester. He applied for a patent for a sled brake he fabricated. The Orwell Citizen published a detailed obituary for Lewis on November 12, 1903. His two youngest sons, Carl and Ira Sird, opened an automobile repair garage in Rutland in 1929.
Looking at the cluster of stone for the Gordon family reveals a very interesting phenomenon. The earliest gravestone, written in French, reads “Louis Napoleon, son of Alexander and Josephine Goden, died September 9, 1856, age eight months and 25 days.” To the left is the stone of Louis’s infant brother Zeb Gordon, who died in August 1863. The remaining stones in the family plot record the name as Gordon, proving that within a few years, they lost their French spelling. We find evidence of this family in Brandon’s 1860 census, where it was headed by blacksmith Alexander Gordon. Looking within the family group, it would appear that Napoleon Gordon, age 89, “gentleman,” and Sophia, age 56, were Alexander’s parents. One immediately is struck by the disparity of their ages. Two errors needed to be untangled to locate this family and their true name in Canada. The first lies in an unusual name reversal. Most men born in Canada with Napoleon as their first name modified it to Paul, coming from the second syllable of Napoleon, but Napoleon Gordon was actually Paul Gaudin, who wed Sophie Giroux in Vaudreil, Québec, on March 1, 1824. Why would Paul choose to be known as Napoleon? Likely, national pride coming from Napoleon III, Emperor of the French in the 1850s and 1860s. Moreover, Paul Gaudin was baptized in Montréal on September 13, 1792. Thus, in the census he should have been recorded as age 69, not 89! Henceforth, anglicized as Gordon, his descendants spread northward to Jericho and Burlington, with some of the family venturing to Montana.
One more glimpse into a French-Canadian family with the gravestone of Josette Clyne, wife of Mitchell Clyne, who died July 28, 1867, with a purported age of 84 years, five months, and six days. Her age at death was off by 20 years. She was Josephte Bonin, born in St. Hyacinthe on February 1, 1805. She married Michel Claing at St. Cuthbert, Québec, on September 19, 1825. They skirted the Vermont border in the early years of their marriage before settling in Brandon by 1850. Claing/Clyne/ Cline does not sound French. True! Michel Claing/Mitchell Clyne, was the son of Protestant immigrant to Québec Jacob Klein, who wed Josette LaRocque in Montréal’s Anglican Church in 1788. His origins have not been ascertained, but my guess would be he was a German soldier who fought for the British during the American Revolution and chose to remain in Canada.
