The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick has a fabulous website with links to many digitized records accessible online. One of their smaller databases – with only 405 entries – is Records of Old Revolutionary War Soldiers & Their Widows.

While browsing the records, I came across an entry for one Gould Crouse. There was only one Crouse family living in New Brunswick, Canada during the first 70 or so years after the American Revolution.

That was the family of Phillip and Sarah (Burt) Crouse, parents to seventeen children, one of whom was Gould Crouse, born 1792 in New Brunswick and who died in 1894 in Washburn, Aroostook, Maine.

Family lore provides no parents’ names for Phillip, but adds that he had a couple of brothers, unnamed. No one has ever proven that the few Crouses in North Carolina – Phillip’s home before the Revolutionary War – during the colonial era were related to Phillip. They might have been, but no proof has been found.

Canadian records identify Phillip Crouse as the only adult male of that surname during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found this entry for a Gould Crouse among the Records of Old Revolutionary War Soldiers & Their Widows:

Gould is a very unusual given name, in any time period, so I have no reason to doubt that this Gould Crouse is part of Phillip Crouse’s family.

However, this list is dated 30 October 1851 and identifies Gould Crouse as the recipient of £5 as a pension payment.

There is no Gould Crouse among the early land grant applicants. Phillips’ son Gould, born in 1802, was in the midst of moving his family from Keswick Ridge, York, New Brunswick, Canada to Crouseville, Aroostook, Maine in 1850. He doesn’t appear in the 1850 U.S. census nor in the 1851 Canadian census.

Here is the mystery: Was there a Gould Crouse, perhaps a sibling of Phillip Crouse, who perhaps was a tradesman and never bought land, who lived long enough to receive this payment, but who died before the 1850 census?

I have to say I rather doubt this scenario because early New Brunswick newspapers included many death notices of the early Loyalist settlers. Phillip Crouse himself was mentioned in a short obituary when he died in 1857. There is no mention of any Gould Crouse in those early years – not in marriage or death notices or in land records.

It is said that Gould Crouse moved his family to Maine in several stages. What I think perhaps is more likely is that, in between the trips moving to Maine, Gould signed for a payment meant for his father, who would have been 89 years old in 1850 and perhaps unable to travel to the courthouse or wherever pension payments were handed out. The official making the payments then erred and listed Gould as the recipient of the pension, rather than Gould accepting the payment for his father.

Given the lack of any mention of a Gould Crouse except for Phillip’s son, this is the only scenario that seems credible.

Too bad – I was really excited when I found this list, hoping that maybe I’d found some evidence of one of the purported brothers of Phillip Crouse.