By STEVEN JUPITER
PITTSFORD—After two years, 50 installments, and approximately 50,000 words, Pittsford-based genealogist and historian Michael Dwyer has brought his much-appreciated series “Lost Names in Vermont” to a close.
“It’s like a good TV series,” Dwyer said in a recent conversation. “You want to end it while it’s still at its peak, before it gets tired.”
Dwyer’s “Lost Names” series traced the histories of 121 French-Canadian names, from their original forms in Quebec through the myriad transformations they underwent after migration to Vermont. He shared his discoveries with the infectious enthusiasm of a detective who finally cracked a tough case.
“I like solving puzzles,” he said. “Getting at some of these names was like opening a set of Russian nesting dolls.”
To write the 50 pieces in the “Lost Names” series, Dwyer threw himself into the “three C’s” of genealogy: cemeteries, censuses, and churches. Undaunted by sleet or snow, or even by the macabre, he visited cemeteries all around the area to find the gravesites of the families he was researching. He tracked baptismal and marriage certificates back to the 1600s. And he didn’t give up until he found what he was looking for, even if the eureka moment came just before he needed to submit the piece for publication.
And now he will put those skills to use in a new series to be called “Coming to America: Immigrant Stories.”
Rather than focus on names, the new series will focus on the people who immigrated to Vermont, sharing the unique trajectories that led them from their homelands to the Green Mountains.
“Irish and French immigrants saved Vermont in the 1840s and 50s,” said Dwyer. Many of the earliest European settlers in Vermont, mostly of English origin, left the state in the 1830s to head out west, where farming was easier. The immigrants who took their places kept the state’s population relatively stable.
In addition to the Irish and the French-Canadians in the mid-1800s, Vermont attracted a lot of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late-1800s and early 1900s. Many of these immigrants came to work in the state’s many marble and granite quarries. In fact, the Vermont Marble Company of Proctor drew thousands of European immigrants in its heyday. And many people in Rutland County can still trace their lineage back to these stone carvers and miners.
Michael Dwyer wants to tell their stories.
“It’s an opportunity to recover a larger swath of history,” he said, clearly excited by the prospect of new lines of research. “How did they get here? How did they make a new life here? A lot of Vermonters don’t know the histories of their own families.”
One of the first local families Dwyer will research is the Elnickis, whom he got to know in his decades-long career as a teacher at Otter Valley. The Elnickis hailed originally from Slovakia (one half of the former Czechoslovakia).
“Everyone has a story to tell,” said Dwyer. “In the sweep of history, we all need to find our pages within the larger chapters.”
Keep an eye out for “Coming to America”!
