By MICHAEL F. DWYER
This penultimate segment of “Lost Names” has some unexpected twists. In my four decades in Vermont, the question occasionally recurs, “Are you related to the Dwyers who lived in West Rutland?” The mother of Brandon teaching legend Mary Force was Nora Dwyer, born in Ireland, lived in West Rutland, but did not prove to be a relative. Though I have chased down other Vermont Dwyers, I doubted I would find any of my Dwyer kin here. My father’s grandparents, Patrick and Kate Dwyer, emigrated from County Kerry, Ireland, in the 1880s to Newport, Rhode Island. To the extent that surviving records allowed, I have traced their collateral relatives, all of whom stayed in southern New England or migrated west. Taking a long historical view, Dwyer was a changed name, an anglicized version of the original Irish, O’Duibhir, which meant “grandson of the dung-colored one.” I’ll stick with Dwyer, thank you!
Finding Dwyers (and variant spellings) getting married in Middlebury between 1870 and 1900 naturally piqued my curiosity. Where did they come from? Olive Dewire wed Alfred Phelps on December 30, 1870. Their marriage, as recorded in town records, revealed her father’s name was Philip Dwier, a frequent first name in my family. Surprisingly, the register of St. Mary’s Church in Middlebury spelled the name Dourion, a French name! Philip Dwyre and family appeared in Starksboro’s 1870 census. Tracking Philip back to Canada finds him as Philippe Doiron, baptized at St. Hyacinthe, Québec, [once again!] on February 16, 1825. Moving to the United States, he adopted Dwire/Dwyer as his new surname, probably because it was easier to pronounce than Doiron, (“dwa-ron”). Philip’s son, John, along with his brother Philip, alternated between Dewire and Dwyer, the latter more frequent near the end of their lives. These non-Irish Dwyers descend from Jean Doiron (ca. 1649–1736), an Acadian from present-day Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. His descendants were expelled from l’Acadie during the Seven Years War and moved into the Eastern Townships of Québec.
Philip Doiron/Dewire’s grandmother was Genevieve Phaneuf. By 1900, several Canadian-born Phaneuf families lived in Vermont, the surname more prevalent in the mill towns of southern New England. This time, Phaneuf represented a changed name from Farnsworth. Mathias Farnworth, born in Dover, Massachusetts, on August 6, 1690, was captured at the age of fourteen in an Iroquois raid. Taken to Sault au-Récollet, Québec, he aroused the interest of the priests of St. Sulpice in Montréal, who purchased him with two goals in mind: to convert the boy to Catholicism and to integrate him into French culture. They succeeded on both counts. He was soon baptized as Claude Mathieu Farneth, which eventually devolved into Phaneuf. The baptismal record has remarkable details as abstracted below:
Sunday, the tenth of January 1706, I the undersigned priest performed the baptism of Mathias Farneth born in Grotten [sic] New England in the year 1690, the son of Matthias Farneth, weaver, deceased and Sara Nutting, taken to Canada in August 1704 and presently living at Notre Dame de Lorette on the island of Montréal…godfather, Claude Ramezay, Knight of the Order of St. Louis, Governor of Montréal, whose name will now be added to Mathias…
Claude-Mathieu Phaneuf married Catherine Charpentier; they had 12 children, and he lived to be 83. This couple are the progenitors of all who bear the Phaneuf surname. Meanwhile, all the American Farnsworths, like Frank Farnsworth of Brandon, trace their ancestry to the grandfather of Claude-Mathieu Phaneuf, Matthias Farnsworth (ca.1612–1689), one of the early proprietors of Groton, Massachusetts.
Céline Aylwin’s name conceals a similar story. As a twenty-year-old domestic servant, she arrived in West Rutland from St. Basile, Québec on July 9, 1888 to marry forty-year-old widower George Bartlett. Aylwin does not sound like a French name, and it wasn’t. Céline’s father, Joseph Aylwin was born at the Huron Mission of Loretteville, Québec. His grandfather, Jean Joseph Annaouil, was also baptized at the same Huron mission in 1762, son of Jean Baptiste Annaouil, who had lived among the Hurons for four decades. Was he a native? Jean Baptiste Annaouil, was, in fact, John Hunnewell from Black Point, Maine. At the age of 13, John was abducted in an Abnaki raid and taken to the Jesuit mission at Ancienne Lorette in Québec, never to return to his family in Maine. Annaouil, later Aylwin, represents changes in pronunciation from the English name Hunnewell.
When Celine (Aylwin) Bartlett of West Rutland died in 1932, she was survived by 45 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren—none of whom likely knew then that her Canadian roots reached back to days of violent warfare on the Maine frontier.
