By MICHAEL DWYER
Edward Bird and his wife Mary are buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Brandon. As immigrants from French-speaking Canada in the 1840s, they were both hard to trace because they lost their original names and, as their story will reveal, they remained outside the Catholic Church for most of their lives. Like thousands of others just north of the Vermont border, they helped fill the void left by native-born Vermonters moving west. Though he traveled only some 150 miles from his birthplace in the move to Vermont, Edward had to adapt to a different world from church-centered village life in rural Québec.
Teenagers Edward Bird and Mary Audet wed in Benson, Vermont, on 28 August 1847, their service officiated by Rev. Azariah Hyde, longtime minister of the Congregational Church there. This Protestant marriage would have resulted in de facto excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, unless a priest later blessed the marriage. Indeed, none of their seven children were baptized as Catholics. Edward’s struggles to earn a living found him working in the mills of Auburn, Massachusetts in 1850, then to Putnam, New York, before Edward, Mary, and their children finally settled in Hubbardton, Vermont in 1864. The year proved pivotal for Edward in several ways. First, the birth record of their youngest son, Leander, disclosed Edward’s birthplace as “Bushnellville, Canada.” Secondly, Edward accepted the bounty offered by the Town of Hubbardton and enlisted in Company F, Fifth Vermont Infantry. Edward’s wife Mary used that money to buy a farm in Hubbardton in a section called Hortonville. He did not return home unscathed. His various disablities eventually earned him a Civil War pension in 1890. The marvelous personal details within Edward’s pension file, however, did not shed any light of his birth or parentage.
In connecting Edward to his Québec roots, I surmised his original surname was Loiseau, which translates into English as “bird.” Coupled with the correct surmise that Bushnellvile was a garbled version of Boucherville, Québec, I had now had a precise geographical location to search. Other pieces started to fall into place with the identification of “Lewis Casavaw” [Leandre Casavant], described as Edward’s “father-by-law” in the 1880 census. Leandre Casavant left Boucherville and moved to Benson by 1840. He and his wife, Sophie Galaise, had no children. Sophie’s sister, Anastasie Galaise, married Jean-Baptiste Loiseau. While the Loiseaus had no son named Edouard, their son Antoine Loiseau, born 29 November 1829, fits Edward Bird. Yes, “Antoine” sounded like “Edward” to some ears! Undoubtedly, Edward’s uncle-by-marriage, Lewis Casavaw, was instrumental in the younger man’s move to Vermont.
Edward Bird’s assimilation into a world of Yankees was born of out necessity. Later immigrants from Québec retained more of their French-Canadian identity and Catholicism when they joined established communities, such as those in Rutland, Burlington, and Bennington. No evidence survives that Edward retained any ties to his siblings in Boucherville. As the United States celebrated its centennial in 1876, Edward Bird, an alien and “Frenchman,” became a citizen of the United States.
Part Two of this series will take up the story of Edward’s wife Mary and explain why her date of death is not on her gravestone.
Michael Dwyer is a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogist. This article is adapted from “The Path to Edward Bird: A Story of Identity, Assimilation, and Discovery,” published in American Ancestors magazine, Spring 2012.
