I have a set of Super8 home movie films that were digitized to DVD-Video by my Dad a few years ago before he passed away.

I used dvd::rip to rip the disc to .vob files and then imported them into Kdenlive.

One of the inherent artifacts of Super8 film is the "jutter" effect caused by the very small sprocket holes. It seems like the technology advanced by the late 1970s / early 1980s because with the same camera the jutter is not there as much.

I know there is a "Stabliize" feature in Kdenlive, but that is more used for camera shakiness, not "jutter".

So what effect could I use to stabilize these earlier films from the late 1960s, which are mostly of me and my parents, before my siblings were born?

I'm on Kdenlive 16.12.3 in Fedora 24.

Just try the stabilizer and see, maybe tweak some parameters.
I think it should work, image shift is image shift.