. The family history indicates that it was stored indoors for decades and the wood while solid, seems pretty dry. Maybe oil after stripping?
"Dry" is an ambiguous term with respect to wood. When green wood is seasoned by air or kiln drying, water is lost. Over time, the moisture of wood will seek equilibrium with the moisture (humidity) of the atmosphere. The average atmosphere indoors in most places is drier than out-doors -- because of heating and air conditioning. So canoes stored indoors for extended periods of time will generally be drier than those stored outside and paddled regularly. As wood loses moisture, it shrinks a bit and becomes less flexible.
Putting your canoe in a pond, or leaving it out in the rain, will rapidly increase the moisture (water) content and flexibility of the wood of your canoe; leaving it out doors will more slowly accomplish much the same thing.
Putting any oil on wood will do little, if anything, to change the moisture content of wood. except, perhaps to slow any change in the moisture content of wood as it adapts to reflect the humidity of ambient air.
However, wood can have natural oils -- real turpentine is obtained from pine; teak and some other tropical woods are very oily and so they resist water intrusion and moisture-induced rot, and cedar, like most conifers, has some amount of sap which has, I believe, oily components which, over long periods of time, can diminish, and this can contribute to the wood seeming to be "dry."
Some folks apply a drying oil to the outside of the hull of old cedar canoes to counter this. Some folks prefer to use a coat of thinned varnish (which traditionally is based on a drying oil). Some folks don't apply anything. Drying oils such as linseed or tung oil do not really "dry" -- they chemically cure and become more-or-less dry to the touch. Using linseed oil (boiled or otherwise) can lead to the wood turning very dark. Tung oil will not likely turn dark, but it is more costly than linseed oil. Using a drying oil will make the wood seem less dry and will add a slight bit of weight to the canoe. And it will slow the absorption of water and the resultant increase in weight that occurs when the canoe is put in water and used; so will applying a coat of (thinned) varnish to the hull exterior. Some folks think this is unnecessary, noting that most canoe builders did not, and still today generally do not, oil the outside of a hull.