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.

Recently Published Poems, Stories, More

Rise Up Review, winter 2022 issue, "Psalm for Gaza."

Medium Day tutorial video on writing novels (and more): Make a Promise In Your First Chapter. 

Persimmon Tree, poem, "Forget-Me-Nots."

Written Tales Magazine, poem, "Storm Surge."

RitualWell, poem, "Ten Plagues Sestina." 

Gyroscope Review, winter 2023, poem, "Letter from This Morning's Burdock Plant."

Lilith Magazine, Feb. 2022, "Knit. Purl. Repeat."

Journal of Radical Wonder, "Rescuing the Abandoned Property in Vermont."

Lilith Magazine, "Mythic Under the Radiation's Red Eye."

Mystery and thriller reviews being added steadily at New York Journal of Books.

Galway Kinnell: It's the poem ... it's the story ... it's the poet

Word online is that our "neighbor" (about 30 miles distant) and gentle friend Galway Kinnell died yesterday -- and since The Poetry Foundation and Wikipedia have already closed his entry with that date, I suppose there is no real chance that the word is wrong.

What a loss ...

These photos (thank you, St J Academy -- were these taken by Denise? Jean?) are from the last time we helped create an event at St. Johnsbury (Vermont) Academy for Galway, in November 2007. He read just five poems -- but braided them together with generous stories about each one that kept the students (and the rest of us) captivated. I learned a lot that day about what it is to care about your audience: the people you write for, and the people you read your poems to.

There will be many longer pieces written in the days to come about this great poet who has left us with such treasures. I wish he could have stayed longer ... and with my husband Dave, we offer sympathy to his family and to his many friends and readers around the world.

If you don't yet know the poems of Galway Kinnell, here's a place to start.

Learning to Write Better, Because My Co-Author Teaches Third Grade

East Barnet Schoolhouse, courtesy Janice Boyko

--> I'm working on the second draft of CHARLIE'S PLACE, a book for third and fourth graders -- and my co-author, Sue Tester, is behind many of the details in this revision. (I wrote the first draft, based on our plotting and character sessions together.)
Sue teaches grade 3 now and has taught others, and she taught me some Common Core Standards vocabulary to go with what we're now doing to the text: working on rich vocabulary that takes readers into the text. On my own, I then poked into Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning, Webb's Depth of Knowledge, technology in classroom learning ... 

I also took a course this January on the "arc of the story," and it helped me zoom through my plot twists and focus on character in fresh ways. But Sue and I are writing the kind of book where every word matters. Partly that's because it's for younger readers. Partly it's because I care about words as a poet does. And now it's also because Sue is showing me how to carry this into her classroom effectively.

Some of this is new names and frames for what good writers/storytellers do, and all of it is pushing me to dig deeper, think harder, write better. Here's a small example of the changes happening, as we take 8-year-old Charlie into school for his first time, around 1956:

First draft: Charlie looked around. Big windows made the schoolhouse very bright inside. Two windows had small screens at the bottom of them. Air from outside came to Charlie through the window screens.

Second draft: Charlie looked around. Big windows made the schoolhouse very bright inside. Two windows had small screens at the bottom of them. Charlie noticed the late summer breeze slipping into the room. Some of the outdoors came inside this way. 

Good.  It's exciting for me to see my own writing and revision process as part of what's happening in US classrooms where teachers are using the new Common Core standards. I like this chart from teaching coach Tracy Watanabe (http://wwwatanabe.blogspot.com), showing the deliberate changes that teachers are aiming for.

PS to Barnet, Vermont, and Ben's Mill readers and fans: The East Barnet schoolhouse photo is a good one, a bit earlier than the time when this story takes place.  I'm actually picturing for the story the West Barnet schoolhouse, which, when I moved to town in 1986, was the home of K&M Sales and I believe had been a Grange hall as well. If you have photos, I'd love to see them! 

Finding the Personal in History

photo courtesy of anna

Whether in a classroom or a community group, with youngsters or adults, when I talk about American history and the stories I write, I'm talking PERSONAL. A fascination with the timeline of history begins as we see our own lives pinned to the numbers. So that's where I like to start.

1. Draw a number line of from the year 1900 up to this year. Mark your birth year and "today."

2. For adults, this next part is easy -- for youngsters, it may require a homework item "interviewing" parents at home or by e-mail or phone (be aware that 50% of American youngsters eventually live with both a birth parent AND an adult who is not their birth parent -- which means some other parent is "off site"). Mark the birth year and, if applicable, the marriage year and (if it's already happened) the death year for each of your parents, step-parents, and grandparents.

3. Make a list of the "big wars" from 1900 until today, with their years. If you need to do some research (or help a classroom do some research) on the actual years, that's great. You're becoming accurate! Be sure to include at least World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, and your view of the most recent wars that America has participated in. Mark the years of the conflicts onto your timeline.

4. Pause and reflect: For each of the important family members on your timeline, connect the person with the "big history" of the nation's conflicts. Ask yourself: How was my father (grandfather) affected by the start of that conflict? What did my mother (grandmother) know about it? How did she or he cope with family changes taking place during that time? What happened to family finances there? What marriages or births were scheduled around those larger events? What "stories" of my personal history could I discover by asking family members or examining documents? What "stories" would I prefer to imagine and use as creative writing prompts? 

5. Not writing a story or history yet? Add another layer to your timeline: Brainstorm the big inventions and social changes that took place during that time. Here are some examples: electricity arriving at homes in your town, invention of plastic, women's right to vote, Prohibition, the invention of "Social Security," x-ray machines, milking machines, home telephones, antibiotics, polio vaccines, artificial knees, co-ed colleges, the Civil Rights movement, assassinations of key political leaders, long-distance trucking, home refrigerators, personal computers, electric cars, space travel, movie theaters, cell phones. Now consider how each of those changes affected the people you've marked on your timeline.

You've now created a project that interweaves math, history, sociology, critical thinking, and, most of all, your own personal history. Do what professional historians do at this point: Photograph your timeline and place that photo in an archive of some kind.

Then make a plan: What do you want to know more about? What do you want to tell or write about from your discoveries? Your curiosity and your capacity to reflect and question will be your biggest assets in this project. And guess what -- we all have those two assets, and the more we use them, the stronger they become.