Jean Burrell Russo

Jean Burrell Russo died of lymphoma on Friday 2 October 2026 in Castle Pines, Colorado, where her daughter lives. She was 85. Her family announced her death in obituaries published by The Capital Gazette and The Washington Post. Historic Annapolis published a tribute describing her as a preeminent scholar of Annapolis history, and the Chesapeake Crossroads Heritage Area remembered her on 7 October 2026. A memorial is planned for 2 May 2027 in Annapolis. The family asked that gifts be made to Historic Annapolis or the Friends of the Maryland State Archives in place of flowers.

Jean Burrell was born in New York City on 16 May 1941 to Randolph W. and Jane Porteus Burrell. In 1951 the family moved from Flushing to Chappaqua, New York, and she attended Horace Greeley High School before going to Smith College. Although she lived in Maryland for nearly 60 years, her family said she always considered herself a New Yorker, reading The New York Times and The New Yorker and following the New York Yankees.

In the 1960s she worked as a computer programmer, using punch cards and IBM mainframes at Reader's Digest and the Johns Hopkins Medical Computing Center. After moving from Baltimore to the Washington, DC suburbs in 1972 she served as a staff assistant to Congressman Paul Sarbanes, then completed her undergraduate degree at George Washington University. She earned a Ph.D. in American colonial history at Johns Hopkins University in 1983.

While training as a historian, Russo combined her computing experience with archival research, using computer-based data collection and statistical analysis of primary sources such as probate inventories. Her work examined demography, mortality and the colonial economy, and the daily lives of free and indentured laborers, artisans and enslaved workers in the Chesapeake.

She joined Historic Annapolis in 1982, serving as Director of Research from 1982 to 2001 and as Senior Historian from 2003 to 2009. She also worked with Historic St. Mary's City, the Maryland Center for History and Culture and the Maryland State Archives, where she was Associate General Editor of Archives of Maryland Online. She trained hundreds of docents and tour guides for Annapolis area nonprofits and heritage tourism businesses.

After retiring she continued to support Historic Annapolis, working with its curators and consultants for about ten years on the organization's collections database and the digitization of its whole archival collection.

Her publications included Colonial Chesapeake Society (1982), to which she contributed; Free Workers in a Plantation Economy: Talbot County, Maryland 1690-1759 (1989); The Diary of William Faris: The Daily Life of an Annapolis Silversmith (2003), co-edited with Mark Letzer; Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America (2012), co-authored with her daughter J. Elliott Russo; and Maryland: A History (2018).

Russo was married for 51 years to John V. L. Russo. Together they sailed the Chesapeake Bay, the Caribbean, New England and the Maritime Provinces on their Morris 46 sailboat, and after being introduced to skiing in Colorado in 1974 the family made ski trips an annual event. She loved puzzles of every kind, from difficult historical records to the New York Times games and wooden jigsaw puzzles. Her husband and her sister Ann MacDougall Kolar died before her. She was survived by her son David Russo, her daughter Jean Elliott Russo and four grandchildren.

Russo helped move public history in Annapolis beyond the stories of its leading families, using archival evidence to show the lives of working people and enslaved people in the colonial town. Through her books, her editing work on Archives of Maryland Online and the docents she trained, her research shaped how Annapolis history is presented to visitors. Glenn Campbell, Historic Annapolis's retired Senior Historian, said she set the gold standard for professionalism and freely shared her findings with others.