Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question. Today, Ellen Stanley of Enosburg is wondering:
“I live next to a community — Sheldon, Vermont — that has so many twins. Are twins really 'in the water'? What might cause this over generations?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Sabine Poux: From Vermont Public and the NPR network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Sabine Poux.
When I first read this one question in our archive of listener queries, I needed to know if it was true. Thankfully, so did all of you, because it won in a recent voting round we put up to decide the focus of this episode. The question is:
Ellen Stanley: I live next to a community — Sheldon, Vermont — that has so many twins. Are twins really “in the water”? What might cause this over generations?
Sabine Poux: The person who asked this question is Ellen Stanley. She grew up in Bakersfield, a few towns over from Sheldon, in the heart of rural Franklin County.
She’d play sports against teams from Sheldon. And she says that there were so many twins that people would say they were just “in the water” there. Like, there was something about the town itself that made twins inevitable.
As an adult, Ellen started teaching at the tiny Sheldon school. And just as she remembered from childhood, there were a lot of twins. In her class of around 20, alone, there were three sets.
Sabine Poux: It’s only sinking into me that you’re saying 20 kids, three sets of twins. So this is, like, a quarter of your class.
Ellen Stanley: (Laughter) Yes! And I don't think I had 20. I want to say it was more like 18 of them.
Sabine Poux: So it might have been a third?
Ellen Stanley: Yeah.
Sabine Poux: Ellen, by the way — not a twin. The official term for that is “singleton.”
But she keeps coming across these Sheldon multiples. And she’s wondering – Is this trend in her head?
Ellen Stanley: Are there towns that have more twins than others? Is Sheldon in one of them, and why?
Sabine Poux: Turns out, Ellen was onto something.
Twin town
Sabine Poux: Our question-asker, Ellen Stanley, wants to know if Sheldon really is a town with a lot of twins.
My first step — as it almost always is — is to contact the town clerk. In Sheldon, that’s Jane Lanza. It’s a weird email to send cold, just asking if her town has a lot of twins. But within a few days, I get a response.
It reads: “This may be a coincidence, but I’m a twin. And our Town Administrator is also a twin.”
The next line stuns me even more. “My twin sister works at Vermont Public.”
C’mon.
Turns out, Jane’s twin is none other than the host of Vermont Public’s Morning Edition, Jenn Jarecki. I mean, seriously, what are the odds?.
Jane CCs the other Sheldon town government twin, Matt Stebbins. He’s the town administrator, and he’s got a fraternal twin brother. I give Matt a call.
Matt Stebbins: So, it was really funny when you emailed us about it because (laughter) we’re like, really? Well, ironically, you have revealed two twins who work together in Sheldon.
Sabine Poux: Matt says he knows our question-asker Ellen from growing up — they were in band together in high school. In fact, he’s one of the twins who prompted her question.
Immediately, I feel the need to impress him with my own twin credentials.
Sabine Poux: My dad is also a fraternal twin brother.
Matt Stebbins: Oh, yeah, OK.
Sabine Poux: And like any self-respecting daughter of a twin, I know exactly what not to ask.
Sabine Poux: My dad gave me the advice, he’s like, never ask a twin what it’s like being a twin. Because it’s all they know.
Matt Stebbins: Right. Exactly. Right. People do ask me things like, you know, could you tell when he's in trouble? And I'm like, Absolutely not. (Laughter) My brother and I are pretty strongly – have separate identities.
And it seems like with twins, there's always one person who's a little bit more outgoing. And another one who’s a little bit more introverted.
Sabine Poux: Matt, if you couldn’t tell, is the outgoing one.
Like Ellen, he remembers growing up around other sets of twins.
And the bubble seemed to extend right outside of Sheldon, too. There was a set of fraternal brothers in nearby Fairfield. Identical brothers in Enosburg who would play pranks on their teachers, switching places in class. Fraternal twin sisters.
Matt Stebbins: I can always tell them apart because they always have totally different hairstyles.
Sabine Poux: One of those sisters is now married to Matt’s cousin and has moved to Sheldon.
Which is another part of this whole twin thing. Twins aren’t just born in Sheldon. It seems they move there, too. As if they’re pulled in by Sheldon’s twin-y orbit.
Matt says this is something he’s run into when conducting town business, like doing property assessments.
Matt Stebbins: The week after you emailed me about this question, we were looking at a new home, and it's somebody who is moving. And we were talking about, “Oh, this will be the playroom for the kids.” And the assessor just said, “Oh, you've got, you've got kids.” And the guy said, “Yep, twin boys.” (Laughter)
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Vital statistics
Sabine Poux: Early leads are proving promising. But I’m craving some harder data. So I take a field trip to the state offices in Waterbury …
Jessie Hammond: Does she need a pass?
Sabine Poux: … Where the state keeps its vital statistics — records of all the births and deaths and other fun stuff from every year dating back to 1950. They’re compiled into these neat, colorful soft-bound books.
Jessie Hammond: I’m going to go ahead and have you sit in here, and I'll just go grab all the stuff.
Sabine Poux: Sweet, thank you.
Sabine Poux: The state does list twin and triplet births per county. And there are years when twin births in Franklin County – where Sheldon is — do spike. But on the whole, it doesn’t seem to have a significantly higher rate of multiple births than any other county in Vermont.
I zoom in on Sheldon, too, through the annual town reports. But Matt, the town administrator, says this data is incomplete — both because it doesn’t account for all the twins who moved to town after they were born, like him and his brother, who were technically born the town over; but also, he says, because the information in the reports isn’t entirely accurate. Births weren’t always recorded in the right years, Matt says, and that there were times when the town stopped publishing names in the town reports, altogether.
Sabine Poux: Matt says there might actually be a better source — the Sheldon School yearbooks. Those books will include a fuller record of all the kids who actually lived in town — and therefore, a more accurate count of all the twins.
So, we go back to the very place where this question began.
Kalen Kane: My husband’s father is a twin. He’s lived here his whole life.
Sabine Poux: Kalen Kane is the Sheldon school’s administrative assistant. She’s just pulled down a shelf of old yearbooks dating back to 1975, the year the elementary-through-middle school opened.
Kalen Kane: This is the best I can do right now …
Sabine Poux: There are pages and pages of headshots, preserving students in an amber of braces and cheesy quotes. As I flip through the pages, Kalen brings in a parade of other staff members to help me make heads or tails of the yearbooks.
Patsy Hendrickson: I have to go to recess.
Bovat knows everything.
Deb Bovatt: Know who else has a memory like a trap? Comstock.
Chris Comstock: Has anyone got a hold of Debbie Kittell?
Sabine Poux: Once we have the right teachers on the job, we find the book from one of the years our question-asker, Ellen, taught. 2012 to 2013.
Deb Bovat: Alright, let’s count ‘em. Let’s get ready. (Laughter)
Sabine Poux: We count five twins – two full sets and one whose twin was in another class.
Sabine Poux: It’s like a sock without the other sock.
Deb Bovat: Right. Because the other sock is here.
Sabine Poux: That’s five kids out of 18. Almost exactly as Ellen remembers.
But that wasn’t even the biggest year for Sheldon twins, the teachers think. We keep looking.
Chris Comstock: Uh, there’s so many. (Laughter) The Leibowitz girls were twins.
Deb Bovat: No they weren’t. They were Irish twins.
Chris Comstock: That’s Debbie Kittell’s daughter. She had twins.
Deb Bovat: The Provost twins. So, there’s three sets so far in this year. The Snow kids, that’s four sets this year. Casey and Shane Lamont, there’s seven.
Sabine Poux: Do you remember all these kids?
Deb Bovat: Mhm.
There’s the … so how many am I up to?
Sabine Poux: Eight, I think?
Deb Bovat: So that year, 2008-2009 was 8 sets.
Sabine Poux: Eight sets that year. So six percent of the students at the Sheldon school were twins. For context, that’s about twice the statewide rate.
There aren’t always so many twins at one time. This year, the teachers tell me, there are just two sets of twins in the school — though there are also at least two staff members who have twins of their own at home.
But some years, it seems, Sheldon’s twin rate does spike high enough that it really stands out — to our question-asker, town officials, and the gaggle of teachers aiding me in my mission.
Deb Bovat: (Whispering) It’s in the water. Get it tested. It’s in the water.
Sabine Poux: Now, it’s just a matter of why. What’s with all the twins? That’s not information I’m going to find in state tables or school yearbooks.
Twin tour
Sabine Poux: Welcome back to Brave Little State. I’m Sabine Poux.
So, the official twin data sources have come up a bit short. But we’ve figured out from the yearbooks that some years, the number of twins in Sheldon really spikes.
Now, we just need to know: Why? And luckily, I’ve got a growing number of amateur investigators joining the case.
A few days after I call Matt, the town administrator, he sends me another email, with a lead. It’s a spreadsheet. A beautiful, beautiful spreadsheet he made. It’s titled: “Sheldon VT twins.”
Matt’s curiosity is so piqued that he combed through town and newspaper records – and crucially, his own memory — and organized his findings into one document — rows and rows of twins born in and around Sheldon over the years. And it includes something especially important: contact info. Maybe all these twins and their parents can help me understand what the heck is going on.
First on the list is Paul Roy. He and his twin Pauline – that’s right, Paul and Pauline – they’re the oldest twins on the spreadsheet, born in 1944.
Paul married Joan. Who comes from a big twin family herself.
Joan Roy: My brother that passed away, that was a twin — his daughter had twin boys.
Sabine Poux: And then, Joan and Paul — who remember, is a twin himself — they had twins. With just as matchy names.
Joan Roy: Jamie Rainey and Amy Renee.
Sabine Poux: Also on the list are at least three sets of twins born in the last two years. And then there are all those names I recognize from the school yearbooks — including the Churchill girls. Their mom, Kerri Churchill, still lives in Sheldon.
Kerri Churchill: We always kind of chuckled about it because there were so many of us. But nobody really tried to figure out why. We just figured it was more genetics and family rather than something to do with Sheldon. (Laughter)
Sabine Poux: This certainly seems true for Kerri’s family. Her great grandfather was a twin. She has twin aunts.
Kerri Churchill: Oh, and my mom’s brother had twin daughters! I forgot about Jill and Jennifer.
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A dip in the gene pool
Sabine Poux: Some of these Sheldon families are crawling with twins. As if there’s something in their blood.
If we’re talking genetics, I’m in over my head. It’s time to consult the experts. I hit the web and find pages of research papers, penned by authors in England and Australia and the Netherlands — a long way from Franklin County. I give one of them a call.
(Phone ringing)
Dorret Boomsma: Hello?
Sabine Poux: Hi, is this Dorret?
Dorret Boomsma: Yes. Hi. How are you?
Sabine Poux: Hi, Dorret, this is Sabine from Vermont. How are you?
Dorret Boomsma: I’m fine, thank you. What an intriguing question you asked.
Sabine Poux: I’m glad you find it intriguing.
Sabine Poux: Dorret Boomsma is a professor at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. She studies genetics — including twin genetics.
Sabine Poux: You have a very interesting area of study.
Dorret Boomsma: I couldn’t agree more.
Sabine Poux: Dorret says, actually, one of the first big projects she got funding for was focused on the question: Why do some women have twins?
Dorret Boomsma: This funding was over 30 years ago, and it's only quite recently that we finally have the very firm answers to this question.
Sabine Poux: Somehow, I’ve managed to get in touch with Dorret at exactly the right time.
Dorret’s research, by the way, does not focus on identical twins, which come from one egg that splits into two. Identical twins seem to occur randomly, regardless of genetics
But fraternal twins — those that come from two different eggs – those types of twins are genetic. Which means there are indeed twin genes.
Dorret Boomsma: Yes, yes, we are now getting an increasingly clear picture of what is happening. So the most important pathway is related to FSH, a hormone.
Sabine Poux: This hormone, FSH, has long been linked to mothers of fraternal twins. But scientists hadn’t yet determined that it was the cause of twins … until recently. Dorret and her colleagues figured out the genes that increase FSH and cause twinning.
Dorret Boomsma: And we’re now currently writing up our latest results.
Sabine Poux: Dorret says there’s another theory out there about what causes twins, though she says it stands on much shakier ground.
Dorret Boomsma: A major hypothesis was, and still is, to some extent, that this might represent differences in diet. Because there’s one particular food that also tends to increase FSH levels.
Sabine Poux: What food is that?
Dorret Boomsma: Yams.
Sabine Poux: Yams?
Sabine Poux: Yep. Yams.
Dorret Boomsma: Well … let me say again, it's a hypothesis. It’s not a fact.
Sabine Poux: Interesting. Is that something that you all are studying?
Dorret Boomsma: Oh, I wish I were.
Sabine Poux: I tell Dorret about Sheldon. This tiny town and tiny school at the heart of my inquiry.
Dorret Boomsma: Well, okay, being the skeptical researcher, I would first ask the question: Is this coincidence?
Sabine Poux: Dorret says, we know that some families are more likely to have twins than others. Is it possible that a bunch of those families just happened to cluster together in town?
She also wonders if this high number of twins might be more noticeable in a small town like Sheldon.
Dorret Boomsma: I mean, if there were a couple of twin families in my neighborhood in Amsterdam, I very much doubt that I would ever know about them.
And then okay. And then, if I, if I was research minded, I would probably start by asking these families, how long did they live in this particular part of the world? So is there a possibility that a couple of generations back, they all share the same family members?
Sabine Poux: Could they share the same family members?
Dorret’s got me thinking back to Matt’s spreadsheet, with its rows and rows of meticulously organized twins. And scanning the sheet, I see it. Every few rows, one name that pops up. It’s “Kane,” with a K. There are Kanes all over Matt’s spreadsheet – and what I’ve learned from my trips up to Sheldon is that there are Kanes all over town, too. There’s a “Kane Road.” A Kane farm. One of the employees I spoke with at the school is a Kane.
Citizens Kane
Celeste Kane-Stebbins: there were a lot of Kanes so that- (laughter)
Sabine Poux: This is Celeste – who grew up a Kane. Her Kane grandfather emigrated to Sheldon from Quebec with his two Kane brothers. They all had a lot of Kane kids, so there are lots of Kanes, and Kane descendants, around.
And a lot of them are twins.
Celeste Kane-Stebbins: My grandmother had twins, my mother had twins, I had twins. There's three generations of twins. And how does that happen? I have no idea.
Sabine Poux: Celeste’s siblings are twins. And she has twins of her own. Celeste is actually the mother of Matt Stebbins, who compiled the spreadsheet. So, surprise! Matt is a Kane, too!
Matt Stebbins: There are other twins in the Kane family, like your Aunt Florence had two sets of twins. My grandfather’s sister.
Sabine Poux: And the list just keeps going. And going. And going.
Celeste Kane-Stebbins: And, well, my uncle Dennis's daughter, no son, had twin girls. So there was another set on that side.
Meet the Stebbins
Sabine Poux: So, just for the visual, you guys are dressed so differently.
Matt Stebbins: Oh yeah, this is about — pretty typical. I guess I'm kind of dressed down today, my weekend shirt here today …
Sabine Poux: After we visit his mom, Matt Stebbins and I go to visit his twin brother, Sean. We’re standing next to a barn at Sean’s dairy, just outside of Sheldon. And immediately I’m struck by how little these two resemble each other
Matt, the town administrator, is wearing dark jeans and a blue button-up shirt. Sean, a dairy farmer, is in muck boots and a hoodie. They’re in almost exactly the same outfits they wore in their middle school yearbook photos.
They’re functionally opposites. Matt drinks Coke, Sean drinks Pepsi. Matt has a sweet tooth, Sean doesn’t care for dessert.
Sabine Poux: What do you think about you two is the most similar?
Matt Stebbins: It’s a good question.
Sean Stebbins: Well, we may seem different, but if you sat down and we get around a table and start talking, we have all the past same experiences, we grew up with the same values and everything …
Sabine Poux: Can you make each other laugh pretty easily?
Sean Stebbis: Yeah.
Matt Stebbins: Oh yeah. We like to pull pranks on each other.
Sabine Poux: What sort of pranks?
Matt Stebbins: Oh, well, I just happened to be thinking of last weekend, cause it was Green Up Day, I was out with my son on the Kane Road, as it happened …
Sabine Poux: Matt said Sean drove by with his son, and then doubled back. His son threw some trash out the window — for Matt to pick up.
Matt Stebbins: And you know what, if the tables had been turned, I probably would have done the same thing. (Laughter)
Sabine Poux: For the record, Matt says his family doesn’t eat more yams than any other family. So there goes that theory.
I think we can most likely chalk this whole Sheldon-twin thing up to a hearty mix of genetics and coincidence. Twins are in the water here — that water just happens to be the gene pool. A few big families who just happened to settle here a long time ago and do seem to have a propensity for plurals.
Still, there’s a lot we can’t explain. I talked to one fraternal twin whose mom got pregnant twice at the same time — a total fluke. Then there are the twins who married into Sheldon families and moved here, like the town clerk. And of course, there are all those identical twins. Which are totally random.
But one thing I know for sure — the people that are most interested in this phenomenon are singletons, like question-asker Ellen and me.
For the twins themselves, it’s just the way things are.
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Credits
Thanks to Ellen Stanley for the great question.
This episode was reported by Sabine Poux. Editing and additional production from the rest of the BLS team: Josh Crane and Burgess Brown. Our executive producer is Angela Evancie. Theme music by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to: Jamie Roy, Ellen Stebbins, Janet Kane, Kyle Casteel, Jessie Hammond, Hannah Ovitt and Nancy Segal
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