Vermont Genealogy

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Vermont Genealogy Research Guide

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Vermont Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Vermont was the first state admitted after the original thirteen, and it arrived with fourteen years of independent nationhood behind it. Its territory was granted twice over — once by New Hampshire, again by New York — before the settlers declared a republic of their own. That history shaped the records, and one structural fact governs nearly all Vermont research: this is a town-record state, and the town clerk, not the county, is the office that matters most.

• Capital: Montpelier, the permanent seat of government since 1805.
• Statehood: March 4, 1791, the fourteenth state and the first admitted after the original thirteen. Vermont had governed itself as an independent republic from 1777, following decades of dispute between New Hampshire and New York over the territory known as the New Hampshire Grants.
• Counties: 14. The first two were created on March 17, 1778 — Bennington in the west and Unity in the east, renamed Cumberland four days later. Cumberland was abolished in 1781 and divided into Windham, Windsor, and Orange, while Rutland was formed from Bennington. The last county, Lamoille, was created on October 26, 1835.
• Land type: Vermont is a state-land state, not a federal (public-domain) state, so there are no General Land Office records. Original title flowed from New Hampshire’s colonial charters, from competing New York patents, and then from the Republic and State of Vermont; the town proprietors divided each township into lots from there.
• Nickname and motto: the Green Mountain State; the motto is Freedom and Unity.
• Where records live: the town clerk holds vital records and deeds — the two record groups researchers use most. Probate is organized by district rather than strictly by county, and the statewide vital-records index is held by the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration.

Libraries and Archives

Vermont’s statewide collections cluster in Montpelier, Barre, and Burlington, but because the town clerk is the first custodian of so much, a thorough Vermont search often ends in a town office. The principal repositories include:

• Vermont State Archives and Records Administration (VSARA, Montpelier) — a division of the Secretary of State; holds the statewide vital-records index, town charters, state land and legislative papers, military service records, and court records transferred from the counties.
• Vermont Department of Libraries — the state library, with Vermont collections and research guidance.
• Vermont Historical Society, Leahy Library (Barre) — the leading manuscript and family-history collection: town histories, published vital records, cemetery inscriptions, church records, diaries, and account books.
• Genealogical Society of Vermont — founded in 1971; publisher of the journal Vermont Genealogy. Its library collection is housed with the Vermont Historical Society.
• University of Vermont, Silver Special Collections Library (Burlington) — Vermont manuscripts, with notably deep Civil War holdings.
• Vermont French-Canadian Genealogical Society and its Vermont Genealogy Library — the specialist repository for French-Canadian and cross-border research; publisher of Links.
• National Archives at Boston — the federal records for Vermont: district court, naturalization, and border-crossing material.
• New England Historic Genealogical Society — holds pre-1850 Vermont probate on microfilm and manuscript indexes to early district probate records.
• Brooks Memorial Library (Brattleboro) and other public libraries, such as the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington and the Rutland Free Library, hold local-history collections for their own areas.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive Vermont microfilm and digital collections, and the town clerks, probate district offices, and local historical societies hold the originals for their own towns.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Vermont records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of Vermont vital, town, land, probate, and military records.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive Vermont vital, probate, land, naturalization, and military collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — Vermont birth records and the Canadian border-crossing collections.
• Findmypast ($) — Vermont marriages and the St. Albans Canadian border-crossing manifests.
• American Ancestors ($) — the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s site, with Vermont births, marriages, and deaths from 1700 to 2008, census substitutes, and the Vermont Genealogy journal.
• Vermont State Archives and Records Administration — free; research guides and the state’s vital-records holdings, with a searchable index to births and deaths registered from 1909 onward.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive, including the Vermont titles digitized through the Vermont Digital Newspaper Project.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Vermont town histories, gazetteers, state papers, law books, and military rosters.
• Vermont in the Civil War — free; regimental histories, rosters, and soldier records.
• Reclaim The Records — free; Vermont birth and death index datasets published through public-records requests and hosted on the Internet Archive.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.
• Vermont Old Cemetery Association — free; a statewide guide to Vermont’s historic burying grounds.

Law and Government

Vermont’s years as an independent republic produced an unusually rich published record, and nearly all of it is digitized and free to read. These volumes reproduce conventions, council minutes, petitions, town charters, and early laws, and they name thousands of settlers.

• Records of the Governor and Council of the State of Vermont (E. P. Walton, eight volumes, 1873–1880) — the general conventions in the New Hampshire Grants from 1775 to 1777, the first state constitution, the Council of Safety, the Board of War, and the Governor and Council through 1836; volume 2 and the rest are free on the Internet Archive, and the set is on HathiTrust.
• Vermont State Papers (William Slade, 1823) — records and documents connected with the establishment of government by the people of Vermont, with the Journal of the Council of Safety, the first constitution, early journals of the General Assembly, the laws from 1779 to 1786, and the proceedings of the first two Councils of Censors, including the sequestration of Loyalist estates; free on the Internet Archive.
• The State Papers of Vermont — the state’s documentary series, including the Laws of Vermont volumes and the journals and proceedings of the General Assembly; the manuscript originals are held at the Vermont State Archives, and printed volumes are digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• The Vermont Historical Gazetteer (Abby Maria Hemenway, five volumes, 1860–1891) — town-by-town civil, ecclesiastical, biographical, and military history, and a standard first stop for any Vermont town. It covers thirteen of the fourteen counties; the Windsor County manuscript was destroyed by fire before it could be published. Volume 1 covers Addison, Bennington, Caledonia, Chittenden, and Essex counties; free on the Internet Archive.
• Session laws, revised statutes, and the journals of the General Assembly are digitized on the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books, and the legislative records themselves are held at the Vermont State Archives.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

In Vermont the town clerk records births, marriages, and deaths, and copies flow to the state — so the town holds the original and the state holds a copy. Town clerks recorded vital events from the 1700s, some towns from settlement around 1760, but the recording was uneven and incomplete. Statewide registration under the present system began in 1857, when clerks began returning copies of the previous year’s events to the state. For events before 1857, work from the town’s own books and from church records.

The state assembled the town returns into a statewide card index, and that index is the standard entry point: search it to establish the town and the date, then go to the town clerk for the original entry. Vermont law places no restriction on public access to its historic vital records, and non-certified copies can be viewed and printed online at no cost; certified copies for legal use are ordered from the town clerk or the Department of Health, where a fee applies.

• The statewide index and images: Vermont, Vital Records, 1760–2008 — free on FamilySearch; index and images of births, marriages, and deaths drawn from the state card index.
• The index cards: Vermont, Vital Records, 1760–1954 — free on FamilySearch; the town-clerk transcription cards, complete for 1871–1908.
• The town books themselves: Vermont, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records, 1732–2005 — free on FamilySearch; browsable by town, and the place to find the original entry rather than a transcription.
• Births, marriages, and deaths to 1908: Vermont, U.S., Vital Records, 1720–1908 ($).
• Births (from 1909): Vermont, U.S., Birth Records, 1909–2008 ($), also indexed on MyHeritage ($).
• Marriages (from 1909): Vermont, U.S., Marriage Records, 1909–2008 ($).
• Deaths (from 1909): Vermont, U.S., Death Records, 1909–2008 ($).
• Free name indexes: Vermont Births and Christenings, 1765–1908, Vermont Marriages, 1791–1974, and Vermont Deaths and Burials, 1871–1965 on FamilySearch.

The Vermont State Archives explains how to obtain copies, and the Department of Health maintains a searchable index to births and deaths registered from 1909 onward.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Vermont’s jurisdictions and records:

• 1609 — Samuel de Champlain reaches the lake that now bears his name.
• 1666 — The French build Fort Sainte-Anne on Isle La Motte, the first European outpost in the territory.
• 1724 — Fort Dummer, near present-day Brattleboro, becomes the first permanent English settlement.
• 1749 — New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth charters Bennington, the first of roughly 130 townships he grants west of the Connecticut River — the New Hampshire Grants.
• 1764 — A royal order in council sets the Connecticut River as the boundary and places the Grants under New York, which begins regranting the same land by patent.
• 1770–1775 — Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys resist New York’s authority; in 1775 they capture Fort Ticonderoga.
• 1777 — The Grants declare independence, briefly as New Connecticut and then as Vermont, and adopt a constitution — the first in North America to prohibit adult slavery and to extend the vote to men who owned no property. The Battle of Bennington is fought in August.
• 1778 — The first General Assembly creates Bennington and Unity (renamed Cumberland) counties.
• 1781 — Cumberland County is abolished and divided into Windham, Windsor, and Orange; Rutland is created from Bennington.
• 1790 — Vermont settles the land-title dispute with New York by payment, clearing the way for statehood.
• March 4, 1791 — Vermont is admitted as the fourteenth state; its first federal census is taken later that year rather than in 1790.
• 1805 — Montpelier becomes the permanent capital.
• 1823 — The Champlain Canal opens, linking Lake Champlain to the Hudson and turning Vermont trade southward.
• 1835 — Lamoille, the last county, is created.
• 1848–1850s — Railroads cross the state, reshaping settlement, feeding the quarries, and speeding out-migration to the West.
• 1857 — Statewide registration of births, marriages, and deaths begins.
• 1861–1865 — More than 34,000 Vermonters serve in the Union army and navy, among the highest rates of service of any state, and over 5,000 die; the Vermont Brigade serves with the Army of the Potomac. In October 1864 Confederate raiders strike St. Albans, the northernmost land action of the war.
• 1860s–1920s — French-Canadian migration from Québec peaks, alongside Irish, Italian, Scottish, and Welsh arrivals drawn by the railroads and the granite and slate quarries.
• 1927 — The flood of November 1927, the state’s worst natural disaster, kills 84 people, destroys well over a thousand bridges, devastates valley town centers, and damages or destroys records in some town offices.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal returns are the backbone of Vermont census research, and two Vermont-specific facts shape how you use them: the state’s first federal enumeration came a year late, and Vermont never took a state census at all.

• Federal censuses, 1790–1950: Vermont was not yet in the Union when the 1790 census was taken, so its first federal enumeration was made in 1791, after admission, and is published with the 1790 census. Every later decennial census survives for Vermont except 1890, destroyed along with the rest of the nation’s. They are free on FamilySearch and on the National Archives 1950 census site, and are searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).
• State censuses: there are none. Vermont took no state or territorial censuses, so there is no state enumeration to search and no state-census substitute for the lost 1890 schedules. Use the record substitutes below in their place.
• Before statehood: the territory lay under New York, which erected Cumberland County over the southeast in 1766 and Gloucester County over the northeast in 1770, and which took a census in 1771. Enumerations of people living in Vermont before 1777 are therefore New York records.
• Census substitutes: the town grand lists, freemen’s lists, tax lists, church registers, and — after 1857 — vital records. Vermont Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1778–1840 ($) gathers many of the early name lists, and Vermont City Directories ($) places families year by year in the larger towns.
• Non-population schedules: the federal mortality schedules ($) for 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 name people who died in the year before each census, and the 1890 veterans schedule ($) survives for Vermont and partly fills the 1890 gap.

Church Records

Because town registration was uneven before 1857, church registers are often the best — and sometimes the only — record of an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Vermont birth, marriage, or death. Vermont’s religious landscape shifted sharply over time, so knowing which church a family belonged to points directly to the right archive.

• Congregational: the dominant church of the early towns and, in the first decades, often supported by the town itself. Its registers are the first place to look for pre-1857 events in an early-settled town.
• Baptist and Methodist: grew quickly in the early 1800s, especially in the hill towns.
• Universalist: historically strong in Vermont, with a substantial nineteenth-century following.
• Episcopal: present from the colonial period onward.
• Roman Catholic: became the largest denomination as Irish and French-Canadian families settled Burlington, Winooski, St. Albans, and Barre. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington archives hold the sacramental registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials; the diocese was erected in 1853 and some parish records begin earlier.
• Quaker (Friends): meetings were established in a number of towns, and Friends kept unusually complete birth, marriage, and death records.

The Vermont Historical Society holds original and transcribed church records from congregations across the state, and thousands of registers are cataloged town by town in the FamilySearch Catalog. Where a Vermont family crossed from Québec — as very many did — the baptism or marriage will usually be found in the Québec parish registers, and the Vermont French-Canadian Genealogical Society holds the Drouin Collection and the standard French-Canadian finding aids.

Court Records

Vermont’s courts have been reorganized more than once, and their records reach well beyond lawsuits into estates, guardianships, naturalizations, name changes, and adoptions. One point governs the earliest research: because Vermont did not exist as a jurisdiction before 1777, court records of people living in the territory before then are New Hampshire or New York records.

• County Court: the historic trial court of each county, handling civil and criminal business.
• Superior Court: the modern trial court, sitting in each county’s shire town, organized into civil, criminal, family, environmental, and probate divisions.
• Probate district courts: probate has been organized by district rather than strictly by county since 1777 — see the Probate Records section below.
• Justices of the peace: handled small civil suits and, in the early years, solemnized many marriages.
• Vermont Supreme Court: the appellate court, whose records document appeals from the counties.
• U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont: federal cases and federal naturalizations; the records are held by the National Archives at Boston.

County-level court records are increasingly transferred to the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration, which is the first place to ask for older case files.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Vermont’s population has been more varied than its rural reputation suggests, and each group left a distinct trail of records.

• Abenaki. The Western Abenaki, including the Missisquoi, are the Indigenous people of the region, long present in the Champlain and Connecticut valleys, and Vermont has state-recognized Abenaki tribes. Records are found among state government files at the Vermont State Archives, in mission and parish registers on both sides of the Canadian border, and in university and historical-society manuscript collections.
• French Canadians. The largest immigrant group in much of Vermont. Migration from Québec grew through the 1800s and peaked from the 1860s into the 1920s, concentrating in Burlington, Winooski, St. Albans, and the Barre area. The Vermont French-Canadian Genealogical Society is the specialist repository, and the Drouin Collection, the PRDH, and the Tanguay and Loiselle indexes carry these families back through the Québec parish registers.
• Irish. Arrived with canal and railroad work from the 1820s onward and built the first Catholic parishes; parish registers and Catholic cemetery records are the key sources.
• Scots and Italians. The Barre granite industry drew Scottish stonecutters, many from the Aberdeen region, and Italian carvers, chiefly from northern Italy — a distinctive Vermont community documented in local histories, parish records, and the collections of the Vermont Historical Society.
• Welsh. Worked the slate quarries of the Poultney and Fair Haven “Slate Valley” along the New York line.
• African Americans. Vermont’s 1777 constitution prohibited adult slavery, and the state has a small but continuous Black community, with documented Underground Railroad activity interpreted at the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh.
• Jewish communities. Established in Burlington from the late 1800s, with congregational and cemetery records held locally.
• The Eugenics Survey of Vermont (1925–1936). Directed by the University of Vermont zoologist Henry F. Perkins, this survey compiled detailed family pedigrees and case files and disproportionately targeted Abenaki, French-Canadian, and poor rural families, contributing to a 1931 sterilization law. The surviving pedigrees and case files are held at the Vermont State Archives; they are genealogically detailed and should be read with an understanding of why they were created.

The Library of Congress Vermont local history and genealogy guide gathers additional community and ethnic resources.

Immigration and Naturalization

Vermont’s immigrants mostly crossed an overland border rather than landing at a seaport, and the records that documented them ended up mattering for the whole country. The manifests of the St. Albans, Vermont district cover crossings along the entire United States–Canada frontier, not only Vermont’s — so they are a national source that happens to be filed under Vermont, and they should be searched for any family that entered the United States by way of Canada.

• The St. Albans lists: the Soundex indexes and manifests of passengers arriving in the St. Albans District, 1895–1954, created by the immigration service and now held by the National Archives.
• Vermont ports and border districts of entry included Alburgh, Beebe Plain, Canaan, Derby Line, Highgate Springs, Newport, Norton, Richford, and Swanton.
• U.S., Border Crossings from Canada to U.S., 1895–1960 ($) — index and images, including the St. Albans manifests; also on MyHeritage ($) and Findmypast ($).
• Free on FamilySearch: Vermont, St. Albans Canadian Border Crossings, 1895–1924 and Vermont Passenger Lists, 1895–1924.

Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record — county, state, or federal — could naturalize, so a Vermont declaration of intention and the final petition may sit in different courts and even different states; after 1906 the process was federalized and standardized. The Vermont State Archives holds naturalization records transferred from the state courts, and the National Archives at Boston holds the federal ones.

• Vermont, U.S., State and Federal Naturalization Records, 1790–1954 ($) — the broadest single Vermont naturalization collection.
• Vermont Naturalization Records, 1908–1987 — free on FamilySearch.
• United States, New England Petitions for Naturalization Index, 1791–1906 — free on FamilySearch; also on MyHeritage ($).

Land Records

Land is where Vermont’s history and its record-keeping meet. Because Vermont is a state-land state, there are no General Land Office records; because the same ground was granted twice over, a single farm can sit at the end of two competing chains of title; and because this is a town-record state, it is the town clerk who records deeds. There is no county deed office in Vermont, and a researcher who goes looking for one will lose a great deal of time.

The three granting authorities.

• The New Hampshire Grants (1749–1764): Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire chartered Bennington in 1749 and went on to grant roughly 130 townships west of the Connecticut River, on a claim that was shaky at best. Each charter named its grantees — the proprietors — and so the charters are a first-rate list of the men associated with a town at its founding, although many were speculators who never set foot in it.
• The New York patents (1765–1776): after the royal order of 1764 placed the territory under New York, New York regranted much of the same land by patent, frequently to entirely different men. Holders of New Hampshire titles refused to buy their farms a second time, the Green Mountain Boys took up the quarrel by force, and the overlapping titles were not finally quieted until Vermont settled with New York in 1790.
• The Republic and State of Vermont (from 1778): Vermont chartered towns on its own authority and granted land itself, including estates sequestered from Loyalists to fund the war. These charters and grants are held at the Vermont State Archives.

The proprietors’ records. Before any deed exists, there are the proprietors’ records, and in Vermont they are the essential first land record. The grantees named in a town charter held the township in common. They met, hired a surveyor, laid the town out in lots, and drew shares by lot, setting aside rights for the first settled minister, for the ministry, and for schools. The proprietors’ book — the record of those meetings, the division of the lots, and the drawing of the shares — frequently names a man years before he appears in any deed, and it explains why an ancestor held land in a town he never lived in. These books are held by the town clerk, at the Vermont State Archives, or in print; many are reproduced in town histories and in the Vermont Historical Gazetteer.

Large tracts and land companies.

• The Onion River Land Company: formed in the early 1770s by Ethan Allen with his brothers Ira, Heman, and Zimri and their cousin Remember Baker, to buy and sell land along the Onion (now Winooski) River and the Champlain shore around present-day Burlington and Colchester. The company held tens of thousands of acres and was the engine of the Allens’ fortune and of early settlement in the northwest of the state; it was dissolved in the 1780s.
• The Two Heroes (1779): Governor Thomas Chittenden granted the large islands of Lake Champlain — roughly 23,000 acres — to Ethan Allen, Samuel Herrick, and their associates as a single township. It was later divided into the towns of North Hero, South Hero, and Grand Isle, and the grant is the starting point for any family in the islands.
• Sequestered Loyalist estates: the Republic confiscated and sold the property of Loyalists, and the sequestration papers — which name both the dispossessed and the purchasers — are printed in Slade’s Vermont State Papers and held in manuscript at the Vermont State Archives.

Deeds. The town clerk records deeds and mortgages, and has done so since the 1780s, when the recording jurisdiction passed from the counties to the towns. Early deed books are worth reading even when land is not the object: town clerks often entered births, marriages, deaths, and livestock earmarks in the same volumes.

• Vermont, Land Records, Early to 1900 — free on FamilySearch; browsable images of the town deed books; also on Ancestry ($).
• Vermont, Town Records, 1850–2005 — free on FamilySearch; the broader run of town-clerk volumes.
• FamilySearch Full-Text Search — free; makes many unindexed deeds and proprietors’ records searchable by every name they contain, including grantors, grantees, witnesses, and abutting neighbors.
• The Vermont State Archives holds the town charters, the manuscript state papers, the surveyors general’s records, and the state land grants.

Military Records

Vermont’s military records reflect its unusual constitutional position. During the Revolution it was neither a colony nor one of the thirteen states, so its soldiers are documented in the republic’s own rolls as much as in Continental records — and a Vermont ancestor missing from the national indexes may be sitting in the state’s.

• Colonial wars: the territory was a frontier fought over by France and Britain, and men who later settled Vermont generally served in the forces of the colonies they came from, so look to those colonies’ records.
• Revolutionary War: the standard compilation is John E. Goodrich’s Rolls of the Soldiers in the Revolutionary War, 1775 to 1783 (1904), free on the Internet Archive and made up largely of payrolls, pay-table orders, and receipts. Also useful are Vermont Men in the Revolutionary War ($) and the U.S. Revolutionary War Rolls, 1775–1783 ($), together with the federal pension applications.
• War of 1812: Vermont militia turned out for the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain in 1814. A List of Vermont Pensioners of the War of 1812 ($) is on Ancestry.
• Civil War: Theodore S. Peck’s Revised Roster of Vermont Volunteers (1892) is the standard roster of Vermonters in the army and navy, free on the Internet Archive; the Reports of the Adjutant and Inspector General, 1863–1866 ($) are on Ancestry; Vermont Enrolled Militia Records, 1861–1867 are free on FamilySearch and also on Ancestry ($); and Vermont in the Civil War hosts regimental histories, rosters, and soldier records for free.
• World War I and later: the World War I draft registration cards, 1917–1918 ($) and the World War II draft registration cards ($) cover Vermont men, and the state adjutant general’s service records are held at the Vermont State Archives.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, guardianships of minors, inventories, and distributions — names spouses, children, and heirs, and is among the richest of all genealogical sources. In Vermont the unit is the probate district, and there are more districts than counties, so identifying the right district is the first task.

• Before 1777: there are no Vermont probate records. The territory was under New Hampshire and New York, and the estates of people who died here before independence were settled in those jurisdictions.
• Since 1777: probate has been handled by probate district courts. Unlike the county courts, whose jurisdiction covered a whole county, the early probate districts covered only part of one. In 1779 the assembly created three districts in Bennington County and four in Cumberland County; after the reorganization of 1781 each county held one or two.
• Fourteen counties, eighteen probate districts. Most counties form a single district on the county line, but four — the southern counties — are each split in two, and the district names do not always match the county: Bennington County holds the Bennington and Manchester districts; Rutland County the Rutland and Fair Haven districts; Windham County the Marlboro and Westminster districts; and Windsor County the Windsor and Hartford districts. Addison and Orange counties were also divided in two for much of their history before being consolidated. An estate in one half of a split county is filed in a different office from an estate in the other.
• What the probate court kept: beyond estates, the probate courts handled guardianships, name changes, adoptions, and relinquishments, so a probate office may hold records you would not think to look for there. Probate is now organized as the probate division of the Superior Court.

Online, Vermont, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1749–1999 ($) is name-searchable across many districts, and Vermont Probate Files, 1800–1921 is free on FamilySearch, with digitized estate files from the probate courts that are added to over time. FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed wills and estate files searchable by every name they contain. The New England Historic Genealogical Society holds pre-1850 Vermont probate on microfilm, together with manuscript indexes to the early Rutland and Randolph district records.

Tax Records

Tax lists put a family in a particular town in a particular year, and reading several consecutive years together can reveal when a young man came of age, when a household arrived or left, and when an estate passed to heirs. In Vermont the fundamental tax record is the grand list.

• The grand list: the town’s property-tax roll, compiled by the town listers and kept by the town clerk. It is the basic Vermont tax record and survives, unevenly, from the early years of most towns; because it is a town record, it is held in the town office rather than at any county seat.
• Freemen’s lists: the lists of men admitted to the freeman’s oath and entitled to vote, kept with the town records. In a state with no state census, these annual lists are one of the best substitutes for placing a man in a town.
• Republic-era and early state taxes: the land and personal-property taxes levied by the General Assembly are documented in the State Papers of Vermont and among the records held at the Vermont State Archives.
• U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862–1918 ($) — the Civil War–era and later federal income, license, and luxury taxes, covering Vermont; the assessment lists are also free on FamilySearch.
• The Vermont Historical Society holds older tax records and related papers, and town clerks hold the grand lists for their own towns.