The Baronettes: An Acadian Origin, and a Signer Who Was Not Ours
The family says Sarah Barnes came of French Acadians expelled in 1755, and that her mother was first cousin to a signer of the Declaration. One of those is likely; the other does not survive checking.
Every family keeps a story about where it came from. This one keeps two, and they are worth telling together — because one of them is almost certainly true, and the other one, it turns out, is not.
The Baronettes
Sarah Barnes married William Lucas Plaskett in Van Buren County, Iowa, in October 1845, and outlived nearly everyone, dying in 1923 at ninety-six. She is the woman the miners of the Santa Lucias handed their gold to for safekeeping.
Her mother appears in the family records under a name that keeps slipping: Betsy (Baronette) Barnes — sometimes Barnett, and by Sarah’s generation simply Barnes. The family’s account is that the name was originally Baronette, and that they were French Acadians, driven out by the British.
What the histories say
The expulsion is not family lore. It is one of the documented catastrophes of North American history.
Between 1755 and 1763 the British removed roughly ten thousand Acadians from Nova Scotia — French-speaking farmers who had refused the loyalty oath and were known, half-contemptuously, as the French Neutrals. Their farms were burned and their property confiscated, and they were scattered down the Atlantic seaboard: to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia.
And to Maryland. In November 1755, four ships carrying more than nine hundred Acadian exiles arrived there — the records give figures between 860 and 913. They came ashore at Philpot’s Point in Baltimore and were dispersed through the colony: Annapolis, Oxford, Princess Anne, Snow Hill, Chestertown, Upper and Lower Marlboro, Port Tobacco.
Which matters here, because the same family tradition holds that Sarah was a granddaughter of Leonard Barnes of Maryland.
So the setting is exactly right. An Acadian family landing in Maryland in the mid-1750s, anglicising a French name over two or three generations — Baronette → Barnett → Barnes — and drifting west into Ohio, Pennsylvania and finally Iowa is not a fanciful story. It is the ordinary shape of an Acadian survival.
What we have not been able to prove
Honesty requires the other half, and here it has to be blunt.
“Baronette” does not appear in the standard rolls of Acadian family names — not in the Acadian Memorial’s list, not in the Nova Scotia Archives’ Acadian families, not among the Boudreauxs and Bourgeois and Brauds.
More tellingly, it does not appear in the one list that ought to settle it. In 1763 the Maryland authorities took a census of the exiles among them — Etat des gens neutres acadiens — enumerating the Acadian families at Annapolis, Baltimore, Oxford, Georgetown, Fredericktown and Princess Anne. It is the closest thing to a roll-call of the people who came ashore in 1755. Sixty-odd family names are recorded in it: Landry, LeBlanc, Hébert, Trahan, Blanchard, Thibodeau, Braud, Broussard, Richard, Melanson, Doiron, Babin, Granger, Forest, Benoist, Poirier and the rest.
There is no Baronette in it, and nothing close. Searched in August 2026 for Baronette, Barronet, Baronet, Barrieau, Barriault, Baron, Bernard and Barnett — not one match anywhere in the document.
The Maryland State Archives gives the same answer. Its full-text search — which readily turns up the colonial Acadian material, the neutral French of the Council proceedings and the Acadians in Governor Sharpe’s correspondence — returns no colonial Baronette at all. The only thing it finds under that name is a death index from 1999.
That is not the same as proof against the tradition. The census counts those still in Maryland in 1763; families who had died, scattered, or already gone on to Louisiana would not appear. Names were taken down phonetically by clerks working across a language barrier, and Acadian surnames were mangled freely in English hands. A family could be Acadian and still be missing from that page.
But it is the best test available, and the tradition does not pass it. The Acadian origin therefore stands where it has always stood — as the family’s own account of itself, set in a history that certainly happened, in a colony that certainly received these exiles, and still waiting for the record that would fix it to a name.
The claim that does not survive
The tradition carries a second boast: that Sarah’s mother was a first cousin of Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Checked in 2026, it fails three times over.
It is on the wrong side of the family. The Rush name comes into this family through the Plasketts. William Lucas Plaskett’s own mother was Marie Rush. Sarah’s mother was a Baronette.
It is the wrong Rush family. Benjamin Rush’s people were English Quakers — his great-great-grandfather an officer in Cromwell’s army who took the Quaker faith in 1683 and brought his family to Byberry, outside Philadelphia. The Rushes in this line are German, traced back through Rockingham County, Virginia to Charles Risch, born at Idar in Birkenfeld in 1725, and behind him to Oberstein and Dudenhofen in Hesse. The name travelled Resch → Reish → Risch → Rush. Two unrelated families, one English spelling.
And the arithmetic refuses. Benjamin Rush was born in 1745; Marie Rush about 1791. Forty-six years apart, they are not first cousins.
Why keep telling it
Because a family’s mistakes about itself are part of its history too. Somewhere in the nineteenth century a Plaskett noticed that Grandmother’s maiden name was Rush, and that a famous Rush had signed the Declaration, and drew the obvious line. It is exactly the error a proud family makes, and it survived four or five generations of retelling.
What survives the checking is quieter and, to my mind, better: a French family with a name nobody could spell, put on a ship in 1755 for refusing to swear an oath, landed on a Maryland wharf with nothing — and five generations later one of their daughters is keeping the gold of the Los Burros miners in a coast cabin, and living to ninety-six.