Meet John Vanek
I am a historian and author from Minnesota. I have a master's degree in history from the University of Delaware and for most of the past fifteen years, I worked as a museum exhibit developer and writer. My exhibit work appears across the country, from rural Montana to New York City. Several of my exhibits won national or state-level awards for interpretation and good history.
For a few years I also earned a living as a professional genealogist. I helped clients solve complex cases using a mix of archival research and DNA.
Whether creating exhibits or writing reports for genealogy clients, I excel at finding captivating human stories, placing them in historical context, and explaining them to readers in clear, accessible language.
So how did I end up writing a book about a couple of French-Canadian pioneers to Minnesota?
A curiosity became a passion. That passion will soon be a book.
The book tells a story no one thought could be told.
For a school project in sixth grade, I did my family genealogy. It was revelatory. Talking to my grandparents, looking at old photos, and seeing lists of ancestors back to the 1600s, opened by eyes to the magic of history and helped me understand my place in it. Now, I never do things halfway. In the decades since, I have spent thousands of hours researching, documenting, and endeavoring to understand the lives of my ancestors at a deeper historical level.
Two individuals always stood out as the most interesting of the bunch: my 5x-great-grandparents Benjamin Gervais and Genevieve Laurence, founders of both St. Paul and Little Canada, Minnesota. Their lives before coming to Minnesota are teased in a tantalizingly few sentences in a local history book published in 1876. Once I completed my master's degree, I took it as a challenge to see if I could uncover primary sources that might confirm or add to those few sentences.
Because the Gervaises were illiterate, I expected to find very little. Indeed, no one believed it was possible to write a comprehensive biography of an illiterate habitant or voyageur (much less an illiterate Canadian woman like Genevieve) because the sources just aren't there to support it. I certainly did not set out to write a book.
Yet what I found astonished me. My protagonists always seemed to be in the middle of—and often shaped—important historical events. Out of sheer good fortune, someone literate was usually at hand to record it. Not only does my research contain tons of new information about the histories of the fur trade, the Red River Settlement, and early Minnesota, for the first time we get to see these events through the eyes of an ordinary, unlettered working-class man and woman.
As I began to tell people parts of the stories I'd uncovered—including many folks who are not particularly interested in history and who couldn't care less about French-Canadians—I kept getting responses like "That should be a TV mini-series" and "You have to publish that!"
So that's what I'm doing. I am writing a double biography that is brimming with historical insights, but one that reads like a novel.