Did the Swans and Calderwoods know each other in Vermont?

Both our Calderwood and Swan ancestors lived in the same small region in northern Vermont in the 19th century.  This raises two questions: 

• Did the two families know each other there?
• Is it just coincidence that the two family branches from Vermont would merge in 1921 in Ontario, California with the marriage of grandparents Joe and Margaret Sandford?

Regarding the first question, it is unlikely the two branches encountered each other in Vermont even though the towns where they lived were only dozens of miles apart.  But it is possible.

Third great grandparents Silas Swan and Sally Burroughs, both born in Vermont, were married in 1824 in Derby, Vermont, and almost immediately moved to Melbourne, Québec where they started their family. They later moved on to Ohio, and never returned to Vermont.  

John Calderwood did not arrive in Vermont from Scotland until 1841, long after the Swans had left.  But his wife Elizabeth Smith was born in Vermont in 1826.  Her parents were married in Scotland in 1807, so came to Vermont sometime between then and Elizabeth’s birth.  

Although the two families mostly missed each other by a decade or two, there are a couple of ways the two families might have overlapped in Vermont.  For example, Silas Swan or Sally Burroughs could have had siblings who remained in Vermont after they went to Canada and Ohio.  I do not have any information to support this, and it is a less interesting possibility since it would not involve our direct ancestors.

A more compelling possibility is that if the parents of Elizabeth Smith came to Vermont before 1824, they would have lived in a town near the Swans for a few years before the Swans left.  This would involve our direct ancestors on both sides.  It is not a completely remote situation because we are talking about the parents of Elizabeth Smith Calderwood and the grandparents of Henry Edson Swan plausibly living a few miles apart in the early 1820s.  Both Elizabeth and Henry lived in Ontario at the same time and both would have been there for the 1921 wedding joining the two families, so they must have compared notes about Vermont at some point.

The answer to the second question is that it is probably coincidence that the two families came together in California.  Even if the families crossed paths in Vermont, it seems unlikely that they would have maintained any kind of correspondence over the years (through Québec, Ohio, Minnesota, and California) that could have eventually contributed to the introduction of Joe and Margaret. 

One more slightly less remote possibility, impossible to prove or disprove, is that Henry and Elizabeth could have met each other in the early years in Ontario, realized they both came from Vermont families, and become friends, resulting in a later introduction of Elizabeth’s grandson Joe and Henry’s daughter Margaret, to each other.