A Basic Toolkit for Vermont Immigrant Research: BECOMING NEIGHBORS

I spent many happy hours this past winter as part of a team project with the Old Stone House Museum & Historic Village in Brownington -- two staff members and I and four more volunteers chose people from the 1920 Census who had immigrated to Orleans County, Vermont, and looked for their family histories in both directions: going back in our research to the nations where their parents had been born (Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, even Russia; we could also have chosen Finland, Norway, Scotland, England, and of course French Canada). 

We used the 1920 Census because it's astonishing. Pogroms chased people out of Eastern Europe, the Great War relocated others, and of course, Irish people still had reason to leave British domination. Soon we found there were many other reasons for migrating to America, including national poverty and freedom of religion. 

Step 1: Choose someone from the Census page for your town-of-interest whose background or family structure intrigues you.

Step 2: Begin to ask questions, based on what you see on your Census page and what you already know about Vermont, America, or world history. 

Step 3:  Use resources like Ancestry, Newspapers.com, friends and neighbors, social media, geographic chat groups, and more, to trace this person's ancestors, movement around the country, and more.

Step 4: If you haven't already in Step 3, find resources that bring you toward the present -- with a goal of finding a living descendant who can tell you more about this family and how and when it began to feel like Vermonters, or Americans, or other ways of belonging.

Here's the worksheet we used to keep ourselves asking questions. You can read what we discovered, when you visit the website this summer: https://oldstonehousemuseum.org, and use the search box at the top to find "Becoming Neighbors." You'll also see regional publications telling the stories we found, for the rest of 2026.

Narrative Worksheet: Fill in the gaps, to have a great first draft ready for the story of the immigrant(s) you’ve looked into. Feel free to write more on another page!

 

________________________________ shows up on the 1920 US Census as a resident of the

town (or village) of ___________________________. Following the lines across the page shows that he/she came from __________________________ . Other neighbors listed in that survey came from ____________________ and __________________ and _______________.

I wondered when I saw this: [what did you wonder about your person?]

 

 

Searching for family stories from a hundred years ago isn’t simple. But I figured I could start with these resources:

 

When I discovered this about “my person’s” family, the next things I wondered were:

 

To look for answers, I tried these investigations:

 

So today, I am pretty confident that important members of this person’s family were:

 

 

I tried looking farther back, and I discovered:

 

 

It looks like this person’s arrival in my town was usual/unusual, considering that:

 

 

I found evidence that this family stayed in XX County OR left XX County (when?), and this is how the family made a living:

 

 

There is still some evidence of where this person lived. My best guess at the location in town or for nearby descendants is:

 

 

I have copies of some documents or photographs that connect to this story. Here’s a list, with how they connect:

 

 

 

The most surprising thing I discovered in this search was:

 

 

We are eager to hear what you discover!

 

Click on this Census page to see some amazing information.

  

This project is supported in part by the Vermont Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, www.vermonthumanities.org.

A Poem for Mother's Day, 2026

Here's a photo that speaks to my New England roots, for sure!

I wrote this for one of my amazing "daughters-in-law" this morning. My family seems to put both work and love at the top of the list. I'm grateful!

 

This Pause

In another time, another country, we might know the calendar

with its weekly sabbath day within our very bones and breath:

the sweet halt of work, the pause to contemplate, to renew

acquaintance with old stories of grace and courage, accompanied

by music braided golden with emotion.

 

But we are grown children of immigrants, people who hold work

as salvation, strength, the sure thing to save us from the world’s

forceful fist. Our lists summon attention, effort, tasks and goals,

so the shimmer of sunlight at the window, rain’s rhythmic call,

reliable thump of the heart evades

 

our notice so often. Then, sister, let us reclaim this day: Let us

taste love with our coffee, savor peace with our pastry. Mothers

we are—noticing the time, the laundry, meals to plan, prepare,

all attached to the same clock that will call us back to work

when Monday circles toward us—

 

but this is the moment we choose for ourselves. We hold it

tenderly; we laugh at how absurd it is to “take time off” when

so much is waiting for our capable hands, our clever minds.

We hear the others waking up, know the only way to hold

joy and rest is with both hands.

 

Here is the Mother’s Day we didn’t plan, didn’t expect,

inner admission of how much we give … outer recognition in

a phone call, a kiss, a smile, someone’s thanks expressed.

Vital intention: We choose our lives. We sweeten our own

celebration. We sing.

 

BK

 

On the Final Day of National Poetry Month -- Here's a Poem (Out Loud!) from THRESHOLDS

It's #pocketpoem day -- so I'm glad to share a reading of "Everything Is All Right" from THRESHOLDS, my new book of poems exploring some of the transitions we experience. What are the Big Ones in your life? Wishing you strength and courage for the next one.

 

Two Books of Poetry for Your "Ready to Buy These" List

The cover photo is from the 1960s ... the author's family.

 

It's a tough time economically in America. That's not new. Sure, a lot of people owning houses and raising children in the 1950s and 1960s felt like their American Dream had come true, and they even had retirement packages for later.

But the 1930s involved plenty of crushing poverty and despair, and the 1940s saw Americans sacrificing for global warfare. The 1970s? After the Vietnam War ended, it seemed things would get easier. Buying a house with a young family felt normal then.

Things have changed. 

For a lot of us (outside the billionaires group), spending money can be kind of scary, because it's so hard to know whether we'll "have enough" to see us through the years ahead. 

Do you keep a list -- on paper, in your phone, or in your thoughts -- of the treats you're going to indulge in?  I have a very basic wish list that includes upgrading my mattress and, when I can't push the lawnmower as well, maybe opting for a riding version. 

Fortunately, as a writer, books aren't on the optional list. They are necessities. I recharge the word fountains by savoring the really good stuff that other people put on paper.

If you get discouraged, have days when "the blues" settle in, are still recovering from some challenges of childhood or adult "big losses," books might be on your necessities list, too.  Or, of course, among the "let's have a treat today!" options.

Recently I bought new mysteries by Jane Harper (superb Australian writer) and Tana French (Irish, and because I reread her books once a year or so, they are really worth spending for), as well as Charles Todd. I did buy this year's Louise Penny Three Pines novel. And I have some things to say later this weekend about Sujata Massey's fifth mystery that features young woman lawyer Perveen Mistry (this one's 1922).

And sure, I recommend those authors, and often review crime fiction at KingdomBks.blogspot.com, one of my other blogs.

But I'm slow to purchase poetry, because I want it to always be the kind I'll be re-reading. (Did we mention economic tough times?) I want to savor it, maybe learn from it, feel grateful that the poet can pull together thoughts and feelings in ways that confirm my own, even lift me up.

Which brings me at last to the point: Get yourself a copy of AMERIGUN by Anne Marie Macari.

Never heard of her? Well, how many of those crime fiction novelists I listed have you heard of? One or two? That's not because the others aren't terrific ... it's because advertising budgets get slanted to the books that the publishers figure will make a Big Profit. Which might not be the case for this slim 67-page collection. Since it's amazing, beautiful, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking, I guess we'll have to share word of AMERIGUN with each other!

Writing forty years after her brother Edward's death by self-inflicted gunshot -- which he explains, maybe through a "medium," was an accident -- Macari faces the role of firearms among us. Yes, of course, the clever machine called a handgun (my second husband, R, a gunsmith, adored their mechanisms) can't fire its deadly round without a person's hand involved. 

But Macari allows the American gun -- AMERIGUN -- itself to take on personality. One of the poems reads:

Sometimes I see the gun entering
the room   it is smiling and has come

from a different world made
of materials I don't

understand.    When it calls you
with its steely music how

can you resist its metal grip grazing
your skin like another

hand warming yours —

Macari goes on to the sexuality of the gun (the way cigarettes have been; remember those Marlboro ads, the ranch hand leaning back provocatively against a horse, cigarette in his fingers, held low by his hips and holster or close to his lips). She touches discreetly, feather-light, on the firearm as American symbol. Spills some sorrowing statistics of children's gun deaths, lets anger flicker among her fireworks of phrases. Weaves in the losses of people who've shaped her life since her brother's death -- including other poets you may recognize. 

And at last, because she is one of our poets who values and can sing the words of life's enormous beauty, she brushes her fingers against forgiveness, that sweetener of painful memory.

Go ahead, treat yourself. The book costs less than dinner out, and will satisfy much longer. 

* * 

Oh, that second book to carry on your list and get around to buying soon? It's mine -- THRESHOLDS -- where you and I get to share and reflect the transitions of our lives. Let me know if you'd like a signed bookplate mailed to you, wherever you are, or visit northeastern Vermont and maybe we will cross paths. No firearms involved in this collection, but I promise to salute my "ex" by allowing them into a later group of poems, already gathering. 

 

"This Is the Real Thing": THRESHOLDS, an Exploration of Transitions

My new book of poems. Available in bookshops and online.

My buddy B and I shared a long lunch at a community restaurant today, and wrapped it up with identical slices of coconut cream pie. It was very satisfying, as we talked about wide-ranging topics that matter to us.

Running through much of the hour and a half was a repeated theme: If we're not looking into mirrors, we forget that we've become "old." Of course, it depends on how you define that -- but we're over 70, and when we were young adults, 70 was the edge of Old Age, something that seemed foreign and even spooky. What if you fall down and break a hip? What if your mind starts to slide? What if your relatives and friends think you are boring?

None of those have happened to either of us (*yet*).  But we walk in a landscape that can be mysterious, baffling, and hard to predict. And yes, we watch our footing literally. I climbed a steep ridge before lunch, and on my way back down, I held my arms out to both sides, for better balance.

Aging as a transition is not as drastic as leaving home for college, or falling in love, or experiencing pregnancy or (gulp) loss of a child at any age. It happens that B and I have both experienced loss of a much-loved spouse, to a fatal illness. Time has passed since those losses began, and we mention our husbands' names with affection, more often than with sorrow or pain.

Transition. With it comes the magic of the "liminal," the borderland where things aren't quite confirmed. In poems I often pull up imagery like mists, rivers, boundaries. This is what it is to walk forward into change. To walk up to, and then across, a threshold.

What have you learned from facing and walking into transitional times in your life? This is open for your comments (although they get screened, so you won't see them post right away). Conversation.

Thanks, B, for today's shared and sweet adventure. 

* *

A bit of the poem "Wilderness" from the book:

 There could be worse

wilderness to walk, you know; others have had it hard too, and
they didn't have such good boots to wear. The little things.
Let's count them now, together. 

April Is National Poetry Month -- and I'm All In on This One!

Today you can read "Hometown" in RockPaperPoem literary magazine -- I wrote it when translator Tony Hao, a resident artist here with Catamount Arts, suggested ways to write about our home towns, and I realized I didn't have one. Where I grew up is so different from where I live now, and my roots are confused. See what you think: https://rockpaperpoem.com/current-issue/

I'll be at the St. Johnsbury PoemTown reading at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on Saturday April 11, at 4 pm -- my two poems displayed downtown for this year's Poem Town are "Voices in the Night" (at Momentum Business Solutions at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Railroad Street), and "Revolution" at Caledonia Plant Shop (nearby at 18 Eastern Ave). I'll post photos of them soon, but you can stroll the town and read these, along with many other wonderful insights.

I'll be at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier on Sunday April 26, 4:30 pm, along with other Northeast Kingdom writers including Judith Janoo and S.J. (Steve) Cahill, as well as my old friend Garret Keizer and long-ago Kingdom Books ally Chard deNiord, and others. 

Last but not least, on April 27 there will be four of us reading online with the Vermont Jewish Poets -- if that's meaningful to you, do look into it.

Watch for a BIG announcement about my poetry collection THRESHOLDS later this week. 

So ... am I working hard enough? 

After all that, you've earned a bit of a poem, right? This is from "Voices in the Night":

   

                            Here, the language of trauma (reddened, sore)

and the language of regret (tender apology for a path not seen) mingle,

soft balm to burned fingers. We always wanted to hear each other,

didn’t we? But accent and origin, animal nature, our canine, feline,

equine coughs of distress fell like rough echoes. What you say at night

your voice uncovering, discovering, slicing, even scarring: I hear you

with an organ centered just below my beating heart. 

BK 

"Juggling Parenthood at Seventy" -- My Poem in New Feathers Anthology

There are many forms now of having a poem published, and some of them are online -- but New Feathers Anthology also produces a printed collection each year of some of its poems. I am very excited that "Juggling Parenthood at Seventy" is on page 133!

If you are a poetry nerd, you may recognize the form "underneath" this poem: It's "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and begins, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." One of the techniques that the formidable poetry professor Ellen Bass teaches is taking such a poem and writing your own version, a sort of homage but also a set of training wheels. Since I love "One Art," I chose to work from its pattern.

Then, as you might pick up, I also was thinking of those "directions" for how to juggle. I tried once! I was hopeless. But I suspect that, like parenting, you can read tons of instructions but the reality will always be different, and you have to adapt and get used to it. I never gave the juggling enough of a chance ... but parenting, well, yes, I'm still doing that. Many of you will know exactly the feeling.

 

Juggling Parenthood at Seventy 

[published in New Feathers Anthology, August 2025]

 

The diagrams suggest it isn’t hard:

you start with all three balls, and toss the first

release the second, pass the third—it’s art—

then you believe you’re ready for the next.

 

I start the day with all the balls in hand

prepared to just confirm I’ve found the art

where I believe I’m ready for the next

demand for help from one of my grown sons.

 

Release my expectations, trust the art:

I set them free to fly, I gave them wings.

I ache each time they cry for help, grown sons

who stumble and who bleed, for love’s own sake.

 

I raised them well and saw them claim their wings,

each full of confidence and boundless hope—

convinced that love could raise them like an art.

I blame myself each time they crash and cry.

 

How can I feed fresh confidence and hope?

Release them, give them freedom, though it hurts—

when will they rise, instead of crash and cry?

The diagram suggests it isn’t hard.

 

 BK

 

"Getting Published": Cover Reveal, and Lambs

It's lambing season! Photo taken at Too Little Farm, 2022.

Most days, I'm focused squarely on the next poem, with notes on scraps of paper scattered around my desk, and a brisk morning walk to get the mind delving into new (or treasured old) ways to see, and to speak about it. I'm loving this.

But poetry can be meant, much of the time, for sharing. I'm not a person who memorizes her own lines. Robert Frost did that, I know -- so did Vermont's Ruth Stone, so that when her vision completely failed, she could still share her work. 

Faint excuse, I know, but true: It's easier to memorize a poem when it rhymes, with lines that match in length. We all know song lyrics, a great example of that. Limericks, too. 

For me, sharing a poem means "submitting" it to a literary journal that's looking for similar work. Pull that apart and there are three challenges: Reading enough of the publications' already-printed work to see whether "my stuff" might fit, then choosing a set of three to five of my poems to send, and then waiting ... and waiting ... because it takes time for any person or group to go through the dozens or hundreds of arriving poems and choose their favorites.

 That's the stage I'm usually in. Today I have more than 40 sets of poems "out there" for editors to consider. Maybe three will get chosen, and that will be worth celebrating.

 

In fact, in the past few months, I've had a big YES from two wonderful publishers taking on groups of my poems to turn them into the slim softcovers called chapbooks. The first, THRESHOLDS, is filled with writing about transitions, big and small changes in life. For me, some of those include walking through breast cancer discovery and treatment, and walking into widowhood. (Why yes, I do see life as walking, a lot of the time.) The poems also open doors to other transitions that we all experience, like going to school, or taking a job, even raising children or bonding with pets.

The second collection, PORTRAIT STUDIO ON THE RIDGE, gathers work that speaks to this place where I live, which I love dearly, even in March and November.

THRESHOLDS will be published by Kelsay Books around the end of May or early June. PORTRAIT STUDIO aims for next January. For each of these, there are now very very long lists from the publishers on my share of the tasks -- pulling together all the pieces of the books (cover, words from other authors) and preparing for book orders from individual readers and stores. It's a complicated set of labors, and isn't likely to spark the joy that writing a good poem creates.

Still, this is what the poems are for: heading out to you all. I'm on it. 

What do lambs have to do with all this? Hey, it's March ... in like a lion, out like a lamb. I'm in mid-month as I write this, looking forward to those playful lamb-ish moments after more work. Wishing you the same. 

The Astonishing Variations of "Poetry World"

My first published poem, "October," came out in YANKEE magazine -- which meant a lot to me (and still does), because more than any other, this magazine captured what my mother loved and valued. In the enormous gap that her premature death left (she was only 53), I could at least feel that she saw my poem this way.

For a long time, the only other place my poems appeared (under the surname Dugger, which I'd kept from a college marriage) was the Green Mountain Trading Post. In its wide and welcoming pages, I wasn't afraid to write about my Northeast Kingdom world as I saw and treasured it. To be read by my neighbors seemed the best reward ever. And it shaped me "forever," because when I went (twice) to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference and met poets whose work often seemed very complicated, very hard to understand, and made them famous, I made a decision:

I want to write what my friends and neighbors might want to read.

And that's still my goal today, although I write differently than I did back then.

This morning, out to a relaxed diner breakfast with a buddy, I learned she'd connected with one of my poems that Ginosko Literary Magazine published this week. (I'm still stunned that the magazine editor chose ALL TEN of the poems I'd sent to him. And very much honored.) My friend's reaction to the poem reassured me that I'm not just writing to "be creative" or to "vent" -- I'm writing poems about parts of my life that might mean something to someone else. It feels right to me.

"My" Dave, the man I happily married in 2003 after we'd met in a bookstore, chose poets for who they were in his life. That meant Galway Kinnell, deeply connected to the Northeast Kingdom and a neighbor to Dave's beloved Lyndon State College, was the most essential poet in Dave's life. But you know how it is -- married people start to notice each other's interests more, and soon Dave was insisting that we go to poetry readings all around the Kingdom, and even to The Frost Place in Franconia, NH, as well as to a reading in San Francisco when we went there for our honeymoon.

Bobbie Bristol and Donald Hall at The Frost Place (Dave took the photo).

 

Even though he wasn't a poetry reader by preference, he had a great ear for strong work, and his highest compliment was "He (or she) is the real thing!" That's how he felt about Maxine Kumin, too, and Ruth Stone, who was nearly blind by the time we met her -- she responded to his warmth, flung an arm over his wide shoulder, and inscribed a book to him, "To My Darling David." He treasured signed poetry -- here's a poem Galway inscribed to him.

 

 There are a lot more of my poems coming out this year, including a book of them, THRESHOLDS, around the end of May or early June. I did have a small collection in print way back before I met Dave, thanks to a friend who thought they should be "out there" for others to read ... most of those included in the pretty chapbook "Mud Season at the Castle" came to life first in the Green Mountain Trading Post.

 But this will be my first poetry collection with a national/global publisher, Kelsay Books, and as Dave would say, I'm "more than thrilled."

To add to today's joy, a rather distant cousin of my mother's got in touch this morning because of the poems in Ginosko ... and gave me a long email about my mother's New England family roots in various locations. I had no idea getting the poetry out there would mean this kind of reconnection. Dave would have loved every minute. 

* * 

Consumer

 

Grocery shopping was my late husband’s delight:

his quick scan of what’s on sale, his seasonal urges insisting,

cherries, melon, organic farmed turkey—he prowled the grocery aisles.

heaping the cart, sending me back to aisle number two for olives, sardines.

In widow world I miss his pulled-pork mandates, his fragrant coffee grinds,

the newspaper stains on his thumbs from sorting coupons. Yes, I kissed

those fingers anyway. Ate his enthusiasm, spread thick on toasted

sourdough bread. Savored kisses redolent of sautéed onions, of fresh garlic,

smiled at belches, farts, and his well-fed contented groans.

 

BK

 

Business Plan: Meet the Robert Frost and Mary Oliver Goals

"I can buy myself flowers" -- Miley Cyrus

This morning I carried my painfully totaled business figures -- income, expenses, proof of everything, except I forgot the documents for the college savings accounts for the grandsons -- to the careful and smart woman who's minded the math for me since a few years after I married my Dave. Before that, I copied the numbers onto tax forms myself, but Dave had more complicated details, and we needed her help. I still immensely value her careful stewardship, and it's worth every penny of her fee to see the neat and professional results of her work.

Along the road today, I met some "my" deaths in this community, the ones that matter so much to me. One that's still raw is the murder of a young mom, who worked two jobs, had a toddler, was targeted by a truly insane and cruel murder plot. I took time to picture her smile, her attentive gaze, her quick movements, as I passed the place where she was taken prisoner. It's important to me to remember her.

 In that moment, I felt as though my dead are always attached to me. There are the terrible tragedies, like the not-yet-sober woman whose body was found in a snowbank, the crib-death baby, the Covid-stricken aging mother who could not hold the hand of her grown son as she passed, because the virus was still new to us and there was no vaccine at that point. And there are the gentler ones, the heartache of friends whose health signaled the approaching end. At this season, I also walk again toward the death of my husband Dave, because with deep snow still around the house at the end of one February, we asked for a hospital bed, to physically assist us through his steady loss of mobility.

 But this is also a time when spring begins to tease. I won't even start tomato seeds for another month, but I'm thinking about rotating garden beds, moving the strawberry plants (which month?), fertilizing the plum trees that began to bear fruit last summer. The seasons, like the night sky, provide an arc of reliable change. 

So it is that holding death as a long chain behind me -- or perhaps a slowly dissolving hard sweet candy on  my tongue? -- also means holding life, and love. It is a marvelous thing to be able to say, "I have loved and been loved, with all my heart and all of his."

 But I was going to tell you about the poetry goals. I told them to the CPA, as proof that even my poetry writing has an organized nature to it. Here you go:

 I have a casual friend in the next village who often posts snippets of others' poems, especially Mary Oliver's. I know others who post Robert Frost lines. It is my goal that one of these days, they will post words and images from the poems I've written.

 In case you are moved to help me toward that ambitious goal, here's a set of ten of my poems in the newly published issue of Ginosko Literary Magazine. I hope one of them, as my Quaker mom would say, "speaks to your condition."

Here's to a life of love for each of us.

Groundhog Day, and I'm Thinking About Woodchucks

The woodchucks, aka groundhogs, are still deep in hibernation in this part of Vermont, according to naturalist Mary Holland. So you get an early-light bluejay photo for the day!

I spent some time with Alfred Godin's guide, Wild Mammals of New England, to craft this poem.

    

The Woodchuck: For Groundhog Day

 

Clover. Alfalfa. Sprouts from the early garden, carrot,

peas, squash, corn, even cabbage although you might think

those could make a woodchuck’s farts stink, swirling

in a poorly ventilated burrow. Deep hibernators, fasting

through dark winters, they dream of asters, dahlias, hostas.

Their hungers pulse up from the deep midwinter snow

and desire is what the mother woodchuck knows, frantic

hunger, a poor preparation for a month of pregnancy: April

devours her body for fetal growth, until at last the babies

pass from the womb, fasten their desperate lips to nipples,

tiny and pink, fattening in five weeks to furry rompers. Diets

meant to deprive can’t connect to such needs; it is one thing

to spend months curled around some inner emptiness

(lost love, or radiated organs), when it can’t be helped. But oh,

what a feast the mama groundhog greets in June: grunting,

squeaking, sucking on succulent specialties. Suspecting,

in her wordless appreciation, that you planted this all

for her vegetarian vocalizing delight.