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I am looking for information about the family, ancestry and descendants of one Gilbert Wakefield who was born circa 1792-3 in Vermont, U.S.A., and who was enumerated in the 1850 U.S. federal census of Hopkinton, St Lawrence county, New York State, as being the head of a household composed of himself, aged 57, wife, Mary, 26, born in Canada, children: Sarah, 13, born Vermont, Nathan, 10, born Vermont, George, 7, born New York State, William A., 5, born, New York State, Lucretia, 3, born New York State, and Alva [sic, for Alvah], 1, born New York State.
It may be that Mary was a second wife and that some of the elder children listed here were born to an earlier wife of Gilbert Wakefield, though Mary could have been a child bride of 12 or 13 and very young when first a mother if one pushes the age differences to the limit.
Of the children listed in the 1850 census, I
have found IGI and Ancestral File references to Alvah Gilbert Wakefield, born 7 June 1849 at Parishville, St Lawrence county, New York State, U.S.A. His parentage is curiously truncated in the IGI entry for his birth, with his father unnamed and his mother's name simply listed as Brasseau with no forename. From the 1891 census of Rossburn, Manitoba, Canada, I found that Alvah's sister Lucretia, who was 3 in the 1850 census, has a household headed by her husband Joseph Merritt (a.k.a. Joseph J. Merritt), which includes a man, Peter Brusseau, 56 in 1891, born in the U.S. of a U.S.-born father and a Quebec-born mother. When combined with the brief IGI reference to Brasseau, it would appear that Peter Brusseau (or perhaps originally Pierre Brasseau) was a younger brother of Mary, wife of Gilbert Wakefield, and that she was originally, Mary (or rather Marie) Brasseau, who was born in Canada (probably in the current province province of Quebec when it was designated as Lower Canada) and that her family migrated back and forth over the border between British North America and the U.S. living in Quebec's eastern townships and nearby Vermont settlements. It seems likely that Gilbert Wakefield, met her during her time in Vermont or that he too may have sojourned in that corner of Quebec which served as a second home to so many 'late Loyalist' and land-seeking Americans from Vermont and nearby New England.
Gilbert Wakefield seems to have died, not surprisingly, before the U.S. 1880 census, for listed among the family of his daughter Lucretia, and her husband Joseph Merritt (whom she had married at Hopkinton, St Lawrence county, New York State on 4 February 1866) is one Mary C. Hancock, aged 55, listed as widowed mother-in-law of the head of the household, i.e. Joseph Merritt. This would make Mary C. Hancock Lucretia's mother, now, seemingly a widow for the second time. To reinforce this supposition, the age of the widow Hancock jibes with that of Mary, wife of Gilbert Wakefield given in 1850, i.e. 26. I posit that Gilbert Wakefield died sometime after the 1850 census listed above at that at some point before the 1880 census, his much-younger widow Mary remarried to a man surnamed Hancock who, in turn, died before the 1880 census of Rushford township, Winnebago county, Wisconsin, where Joseph and Lucretia Merritt's household is enumerated as containing the widow Mary C. Hancock, mother-in-law of Joseph. To flesh out this identification of Mary C. Hancock a little further, the only registration of a child of Joseph Merritt and wife Lucretia that has been found to date in Wisconsin lists the former name of the mother as Hancock, which would seem to indicate that Lucretia Wakefield's father Gilbert Wakefield had died when she was still quite young and that some or all of the children listed as Wakefield in the 1850 census aforementioned went by their stepfather Hancock's surname.
After at least 14 years in Wisconsin, the family of Lucretia née Wakefield and her husband Joseph Merritt moved on to Manitoba and settled next to Lucretia's younger brother Alvah in Rossburn municipality, Manitoba in October 1888 in the area known as Ranchvale. There their final child, William Allen Merritt (perhaps named for his maternal uncle William A. Wakefield, aforenamed) was born in 1890, but not before the immigrant Merritt family lost 5 children to the 'black diphtheria' within a month of their arrival. Only baby Chester Alvah Merritt born 19 September 1888, who had been
a babe in arms when his family left their last U.S. residence at Pleasant Valley, St Croix county, Wisconsin and entrained for Canada along with one other son, Judson W. Merritt (who drowned in 1893) survived this epidemic which wiped out most of his siblings. He had been cared for along the way by a cousin, Chester Blanchard, who wrote of the journey of the departing Merritt-Wakefield brood when the train passed through Cookston, Minnesota, where the Blanchard's then lived (this recounted in a letter from Chester Blanchard writing to Chester Alvah Merritt from his home in later life probably somewhere in Hawaii. Chester Blanchard calls Chester Merritt, cousin, and says that he, Chester Blanchard was born on 22 June 1868, but does not state how exactly the two are related. It may be that their mothers were both daughters of Gilbert Wakefield), and, when the epidemic struck, was cared for by the neighbouring Wakefield family (presumably his uncle Alvah Wakefield born 1849) til the danger passed.
The religious affiliation of the Wakefield family may have been Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian. Of course if Gilbert Wakefield's young wife Mary was indeed a French Canadian named Marie-C. Brasseau, then some details such as their marriage record may be listed in Roman Catholic records too in Vermont, New York or modern-day Quebec. Peter Brusseau, her probable brother, is listed as a Baptist in the 1891 Manitoba census, but that may be due to intermarriage with Protestant anglophones or earlier biculturalism.
Many thanks, in advance, for any help.
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