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 (stories still being added): https://oldstonehousemuseum.org/collections-research/becomingneighbors. 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.

History, Historiography, and Mom: A Meditation for Indigenous Peoples' Day

Real history.

My mother wasn't a historian. She remembered her own life, of course, and some of the stories told by her relatives about earlier years. Descended on her mother's side from Quakers, who kept good records, she owned one small book written by a Quaker ancestor. Otherwise, her exploration of family history took place via letters exchanged with her cousin Alice -- who, as a professor, might have been expected to be more tuned in with the standards of history. But Alice's interest was in religion, and she too mostly provided family history via stories, letters, and some photographs, as well as her personal experience. Some of those details appear in my Winds of Freedom series of historical novels set in the 1850s in Vermont.

On my grandfather's side -- Mom's father's side -- there are better records because many of the ancestors were merchants on Cape Cod. Those folks are well documented and date back quite neatly to emigration from England on the Mayflower and other notable ships. And in England, church records allow good reliability for tracking the family tree, too.

The most fragile part of Mom's stories about the family turned out to be its connections with Native Americans. I wasn't yet asking "the right questions" at the time of Mom's death -- I was only 28 then. But I have one of her excited letters, splashed with exclamation points, suggesting that my four-greats grandmother Love Perkins in Wells, Maine, might be of Native American ancestry.

Thanks to marrying historian Dave Kanell, I've become a researcher, and I question everything in the family tree, especially connections to America's pre-1600 people. It took a lot of work, but I've demonstrated that Mom was wrong about Love Perkins. But another branch of her tree, the Hopkins line, seems to have descended in part from Wampanoag members based around Nantucket and Cape Cod. I would love to be sure about that, because it would certainly be a source of great interest. But ... the historian part of me doubts that I'll ever have enough evidence.

Still, I am thinking of Margaret Diguina today, on what has been a date recently to contemplate Indigenous peoples of our continent. If she was indeed the Wampanoag person that some records suggest, she had an amazing heritage herself. I hope that her marriage to Gabriel Weldon was both willing and happy. "Historiography," the study of the writings of history, suggests I won't get answers to my related questions during my lifetime. (Also, DNA from back then is far too diluted at this point to show up in my own genetics.)

But for the sake of a bit of history today, I recommend this article on Ruth (West) Coombs of the Mashpee Wampanoag. And for the sake of my grandsons, who may read this post some day, here's a reminder: The Wampanoag did not wear those massive feather headdresses that you see in old movies. Dig into the history of your people, and your nation, and this continent. There is so much to learn!

Real postcard but fake history and garb.

 

A Little Kanell History: From Russia, With Love

I spent a while working on my husband Dave's side of the family tree today. It's almost five years now since Dave's death, and I'm rusty on details, so it took half an hour of document diving to confirm what I thought I remembered: that Dave's grandfather Joe Kanell had been a grocer in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1930s. I didn't want to accidentally pass along a mistaken detail ... and I had a poem in mind.

This photo of Joe Kanell, at age 47, shows him on board a ship in 1935, circling the globe, going to see his relatives in Vilna, also called Vilnius. The city was part of Lithuania, which at the time was governed by Russia -- when Joe immigrated to the United States in 1905 he declared himself "Russian," and later Census documents show that both Joe and his wife Yetta considered themselves to have been Russian before they became American. They described their parents as Russian, too.

In addition to being Russian, they were Jews, and knew the risk of pogroms, organized massacres that targeted people who identified with this religion. Yet in 1935, when Joe came from America to visit the rest of the family, they must have felt "safe enough," because none of them kept Joe company on his return to New Haven. The photo here shows Joe on his way to Vilna, Dave wrote.

In 1941, German forces occupied Vilna and liquidated -- that is, murdered -- its Jewish population. Imagine murdering a quarter of a city ... despite fierce resistance from the Jews of Vilna, that's what took place. (Read more here.)

When I met Dave in 2001, his grandfather was long gone -- died in 1969 -- and in Dave's mind, just a few Kanells were slaughtered in Vilna during the Second World War. A few years after we married, one of his cousins from outside New Haven, someone he hadn't known well, showed him a photo taken in Vilna of grandfather Joe and the Kanell family there: more than 30 people. Dave's concept of what had happened needed to be completely shifted, and I'm not sure he ever stopped reeling at the new knowledge of how many of his family had been killed.

So here is a poem for Joe and his family. I hope I have most of the pertinent details right. And I hope this wondering is of use to others along the way.

 

Unasked Questions

 

He leans on the ship railing, white collar buttoned,

tie and a cardigan, gives a wide smile—

no clue now to who took the picture, and Joe,

forty-seven then, gone such a while.

 

Nine decades later, wondering who

watched his grocery— wife Yetta, still well?

What did it cost to sail around the world?

The ship fare, the store losses—no way to tell.

 

But this is the story passed down for years:

His family lived in a Russian city

and he tried to persuade them to leave, to come

to America’s freedoms—alas, what a pity

 

that nobody wanted to follow him back.

For decades we thought there were two or three lost

then saw an old photo of Joe and the crowd

who vanished soon after, and found out the cost:

 

Two dozen or more of the Russian Kanells

were gone in a decade of war and disaster.

How did he bear it? How did he go on?

Yet we know he delighted in grandchildren after—

 

tossing a baseball, applauding their skills,

launching them upward, helping them grow.

We who are wondering how we’ll survive

try to live with our losses, like grandfather Joe.

[What Dave wrote when he posted the photo on his Facebook feed:

This post is in honor of my Grandfather Joseph Kanell (July 4, 1888 to Oct 18, 1969) who chose his birthday to be on July 4th because the United States was a land of opportunity & freedoms. From Vilna, Lithuania to New York City & then New Haven, Ct area. Have a great 4th today. I should also note that my grandmother Kanell also chose the 4th of July for her birthday. My grandparents always had the American Flag flying at every holiday.
This is a photograph of my grandfather aboard a ship on the way to visit his relatives in Vilna, Lithuania in 1935. This was the last time that he had any contact with his family from the Vilna area and in all probability they all perished in the Holocaust.]