While the Academy Award-winning film, 12 Years a Slave, has recently been the subject of articles in Vermont newspapers, stories about Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, first appeared in Vermont papers during the 1850s. A search of Chronicling America titles indicates that Vermont papers printed articles about Northup’s rescue and also covered the subsequent arrests and trials of his kidnappers and the man who sold him into slavery.
>From 1898 to 1903, Henry C. Whitaker edited the Barre Evening Telegram, which will soon be available in Chronicling America. Barre was the center of Vermont’s thriving granite industry, with a significant population of Scottish and Italian immigrants, and the Telegram reported on the granite business, union and labor issues, and immigrant activities. For a very brief period during Whitaker’s tenure, the Telegram included an Italian language section, “Parte Italiana.” Whitaker invited Salvatore Pallavicini to compile the section for the city’s rapidly expanding Italian colony. Pallavicini was an interesting choice, as he was active in the transnational Italian anarchist network. Continue reading The Barre Telegram, Parte Italiana, and S. Pallavicini→
Now available on Chronicling America, our first French-language title,Le Patriote canadien! Published from 1839 to 1840 by the well-known French-Canadian printer and journalist, Ludger Duvernay, Le Patriot!
e canadien is an enduring chronicle of the ties between Vermont and Québec during an important period of history. The Rebellion in Lower Canada / La rébellion du Bas-Canada in 1837-1838, marked the culmination of a long political conflict between the civil population of Lower Canada (now Québec) and the forces of the colonial British government. As tensions mounted, armed clashes erupted between the rebels or ‘patriotes’ and the British. Martial law was declared, and many patriots were exiled under pain of death. Claiming civil rights and the establishment of an independent Canadian Republic, many of the exiles fled across the border to Vermont. In the wake of these circumstances, in August 1839, Le Patriote canadien emerged in Burlington, published by Duvernay, a prominent exile and consummate journalist, as an organ of dissemination and communication to flame the fire of rebellion again!
st the injustices of the colonial regime. Continue reading Our first French-language title, Le Patriote Canadien→
Often marriages are printed in varying detail in historic newspapers. This notice appeared, among others, in the Bennington Banner and Reformer, October 15, 1903.
The search for ancestors, while generally rewarding, can be difficult and time-consuming; as an amateur genealogist I can attest to this. For genealogy research, certainly, historic newspapers contain a wealth of information about relatives, for newspapers can include local news, marriages and deaths, participant lists (military recruitment lists, organizations, meetings, parties), advertisements, social and political functions, local individual updates (e.g., “Mrs. William Johnson received her parents this past Wednesday”–these may or may not be helpful!), and legal notices (deeds, court happenings, divorces, estates). This is, if you can find it amid hundreds of thousands of pages. Generally, this has often meant hours of scanning newspaper microfilm or going through actual newspapers at a historical society or library.
Thankfully, Chronicling America provides an online platform for searching historic newspapers from across the United States. Chronicling America is an accessible and free search tool that greatly eases the search of newspapers for traces of the past. Currently, thirty-eight states, including Vermont, have over 6.6 million pages from 1,105 newspapers available for search on the website from the years of 1836-1922. Continue reading Genealogy Search Tips for Chronicling America→
Periodically, we’ll be interviewing researchers and showcasing projects that are using content from Vermont historical newspapers on Chronicling America.
Our first interviewee is Frances Gubler, a graduate historic preservation student at the University of Vermont, who has been conducting research this fall on historic industrial and manufacturing buildings on Flynn Avenue in Burlington, Vermont, as part of a class research project. Fran graciously agreed to meet and share some of her newspaper findings.
To start, I asked Fran what she found valuable about Chronicling America.
“Chronicling America is easy to use. Microfilm is interesting, but it is also intimidating. With Chronicling America, you can do a quick keyword search and get results,” said Fran. Continue reading User Spotlight Series: Vermont Milk Chocolate Company→
Continue reading Vermont Papers Tell the Story of Solomon Northup 
