Mightier Acorns

My Kids’ Great Eight: An Appraisal

February 27, 2026

My kids have eight Great-Grandparents. That’s not unique – everybody does!

But if you look at family trees as a generational benchmark, my kids fall mostly into “Generation Z” and their great-grands fall into what is known as “The Greatest Generation” – the people who fought back the Axis Powers in World War II.

I find this interesting because their Great Eight were born within a relatively tight cluster of years, beginning in 1920 and ending in 1928, a trend which is statistically unlikely to continue as we go further back. They also came from a relatively small number of U.S. states: most from Iowa, two from Ohio, and one each from Minnesota, New Jersey, and Arizona.

The G.I. Generation

Three of the four Great-Grandfathers we’ve talked about (Bob Callin, Russ Clark, and Bud Holmquist) were born in 1920, with Bob the youngest (December), Bud born in September, and Russ the oldest, being born in March. The odd man out was Bob McCullough, who was born in 1927 and is the only one of the four who was too young to fight in World War II. (He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1946 and 1947, and served a tour in the Korean Conflict.)

Each of these men married someone slightly younger than themselves. My grandmothers, Nancy and Alberta, were both born in 1925; my wife’s grandmothers were both older than mine (Merilyn was born in 1923) and younger (June was born in 1928). Merilyn and June were both married at 19, while Alberta was nearly ancient (according to the way she told her story¹) at 20, and Nancy was only 17!

All eight of them came through the Great Depression, but here their individual experiences differed somewhat. Merilyn was the daughter of an Omaha-area businessman who owned a filling station and oil company, and she married Bud, the up-and-coming son of a Swedish immigrant. Bob Callin’s family also had some success with teaching and running businesses in Ohio before moving down to Florida to build cottages near Orlando. Bob McCullough and his eventual wife, June, came from families that worked on the railroads, and Alberta’s father was a New Jersey grocer, which meant they were probably shielded from the worst of the Depression. Nancy’s father and mother struggled in their early years, but ran a dairy and sold beef in Arizona during the 1930s. It was Russ Clark’s large family who may have been worst off during those years, and I do remember him often talking about the hard times his mother had feeding a dozen children.

Politics and Religion

While you can often find references in old local histories to people who identified with a particular political party, I get the impression that most people in this generation didn’t make their politics as central a part of their identity as people do today. Similarly, their religion wasn’t a matter of identity as much as it was a factor of how the community organized itself.

I’ve talked before at some length about the fact that both of my grandfathers were ordained in the Southern Baptist tradition. Neither of them grew up in a Southern Baptist church, as far as I can tell. When Bob and Nancy met, Nancy attended the First Christian Church in Glendale (the full name of the denomination is “Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)”), where her mother was a charter member. Alberta’s family were Methodists, and many of the men on Russ’s maternal side, the Reynolds, were itinerant Baptist preachers, but Bert and Russ became Southern Baptists during the 1950s.

Bob McCullough and June Shuffler were married at Our Savior’s Lutheran church in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and as far as I know, that’s the church they grew up in. In contrast, Bud Holmquist’s family was also Lutheran, but Merilyn’s family was Christian Scientist.

All Families Great and Small

Several major trends affected families between the generations of the Great Eight and their children. Public sanitation – like water treatment programs, public hygiene, and local vaccination efforts in some states – and industrialization after the Civil War meant that “farm families” did not have to have as many children to guarantee that some would survive. Fewer children died of childhood diseases, and as families moved to cities where the men found work in factories, they didn’t need large families to help with the family farm.

Here is a table showing the number of children in each family for two generations, and the range of birthdates for those children. (In the “siblings” column, I counted the person along with their siblings, so Bob Callin and his two siblings give us three total.)

The Great Eight	Siblings (span of birthdates)	Children (span of birthdates)
Bob Callin	3 (1907-1920)	2 (1943-1946)
Nancy Witter	2 (1921-1925)
Russ Clark	11 (1899-1920)	3 (1947-1956)
Alberta Tuttle	2 (1920-1925)
Bob McCullough	9 (1908-1927)	6 (1949-1967)
June Shuffler	2 (1926-1928)
Bud Holmquist	4 (1915-1923)	2 (1945-1950)
Merilyn Martin	3 (1920-1928)
Total	36 (1899-1928)	13 (1943-1967)

I notice that except for Bud and Merilyn, who were “middle children” (Bud was 3rd of 4 siblings), everyone was the youngest in their family.

Of the 36 children in the families of the Great Eight, only 4 died in infancy.

Different Circles

I never met either of my wife’s grandfathers, and only met her grandmothers a few times. Both sets of grandparents knew each other, but I don’t think they saw each other very often. Bob and June most likely met Merilyn at their children’s wedding in Council Bluffs, but since the McCulloughs lived in Minnesota, I doubt they interacted much beyond that. And Bud was in prison by then and had no contact with anyone after the mid-1960s, as far as I know.

Russ and Bert did know Bob and Nancy, but despite all they had in common, I don’t think they spent much time together. Bob and Russ were both Southern Baptist ministers, but they were very different in how they thought about the world and how they practiced their faith. Both couples spent a lot of their time in RVs exploring the Southwestern United States, but for Bob and Nancy, this was more of a hobby, while Bert and Russ made their home in their campers and treated their travels as a calling.

I find it interesting to think about how different these eight people were, and how unlikely and random it is that their children met each other and decided to have families of their own. As we continue this journey, I expect we will see examples of families who lived closer to each other and shared a lot more in common than the people in more recent generations do, even as the different family groups become more distant from each other as we go back in time.

As we continue this journey, we will have to learn more about our history to understand the people we study. We will have to get to know them through the context of their time, use what we know about ourselves to imagine them living through events, and puzzle out what choices they made that led to us.

Next week: we start with my “Great Eight” – the first half of my childrens’ Sixteen great-grandparents!

see Grandma Bert’s Travelogue ↩︎

Those Who Remained III: The Campbells

February 25, 2026
Picking up from last time: John Callin (1870-1835) and Elizabeth Simon (1780-1864) were born and married in Pennsylvania, according to The Callin Family History, published in 1911 by their grandson, George W. Callin (1846-1921). Anything George knew about his grandparents probably came from his father, William, or aunts and uncles who remained close enough to Ohio for him to meet them.

Rainbows in a Mental Prism

I’ve been poring over that 1911 Callin Family History (the “CFH”) for three decades, now. I’ve lamented for 30 years that George did not include any of his sources, and I spent the years 2015 and 2016 using my full Ancestry membership, FamilySearch.org, and old digitized local histories found on sites like the Internet Archive to find sources that could support or refute George’s information.

Ann Callin‘s story in the CFH is pretty straightforward, and George seems to have been confident about the information he recorded:
Record of Ann Callin Campbell, who was the 2nd daughter of John Callin, who was the 2nd son of James 1st.

Born Sept. 16,1806, died Mar. 18, 1889.

Married Henry Campbell Aug. 20, 1833.

To this union four children were born:

Cyrus, born Mar. 23 1834, died July 21, 1873, at Ashland, Ohio.

Harrison, born Dec. 8, 1837, lives at Tipton, Mo.

Elizabeth, born June 30, 1840, died at Ashland, O., Feb. 8, 1897, unmarried.

Francis, born Mar. 30, 1842, died Mar. 27, 1905.

Cornelia, born Oct. 13, 1843, died Mar. 13, 1849.
Of course, confidence does not correlate to correctness. Stating “four children were born” and then listing five children undermines your credibility a little bit. Still, records seem to bear out most of that information – census records show those children in the household of Henry Campbell, a shoemaker in Milton Township, and various vital records support those dates and name the parents.

So George Callin’s account mostly holds up, but there are small details that don’t add up. It reminds me of trying to drive into the morning sun with a cracked windshield – you can mostly see to drive, but there can sometimes be unexpected refractions, casting distracting rainbows across your vision.

Speaking of vision, we do have some photographic evidence for Ann:

We don’t have any birth records (for Ann or any of her siblings), and we don’t have Ann and Henry’s marriage record (even though we do have records for her siblings and cousins who married before she did). We do have Census records from 1840-1870 that definitely fit the family George described, and we have Ann and Elizabeth living in Ashland in 1880.

Within these records, there is an interesting trend in which Ann’s name transitions from plain “Ann” to “Mary Ann” and, in 1880, to “Mary A. Campbell.” What we do not see is a similar trend with Henry’s name – he is Henry on all the records I have found (sometimes misspelled as “Hery” or “Henrey”) – but that raises the question of which facts are facts, and which are phantom rainbows coming from the cracks in between.

Just Who Was Henry Campbell?

I don’t think this will be a shocking announcement, but “Henry Campbell” is an extremely common name. I’m not even sure that I can say whether or not this mention of a Henry Campbell in Milton Township in 1825 in the History of Ashland County, Ohio¹ is the man who married Ann Callin:
Chapter XXXIII. “The Pioneers of the Year 1825.”

“…since we will not have space for a personal notice of each pioneer, at a later period, we have concluded to give the name of each voter and male citizen, so far as possible, at that date.”

Milton township (range 17): includes [a long list, I selected these three to make my point] –

William Callin

Hugh Callin

Henry Campbell
The records we have (census records and his headstone in Ashland Cemetery) tell us Henry was born in 1812. 1825 minus 1812 equals 13, and a voter in 1825 would have had to be at least 21, but the only William and Hugh Callin I know of who lived in Milton Township would have been Ann’s brother, William (b. 1813) and Hugh (b. 1817)…so I’m not sure what to make of this list of “1825 Pioneers”.

The point I’m making here is that we have to be careful about making sure that the records we find match what we already know. We have to be more careful about making assumptions in this case, because there could be more than one Henry Campbell of unspecified age or parentage in play.

The three Census records that name everyone in the household (1850, 1860, 1870) name the children who survived childhood, and the 1840 census counts the number of children we expect to see (two boys, one girl, of the right ages). The latter three records all give Henry’s occupation as a shoemaker. The first two (1840 and 1850) put their home in Milton Township (Richland County before 1846, Ashland County, after), and the latter two put their home in Ashland, which incorporated as a city in 1844.

As a shoemaker in Ashland County, Henry may have mentored Thomas Jefferson Callin, the son of his wife’s cousin, Thomas. You might recall that Jeff Callin also lived in Milton Township and Ashland, and his father, Thomas, died when he was young. I find it likely that Henry may have stepped in as a father figure for the young man, maybe taking him on as an apprentice.

But there are no clues in there to tell us who Henry’s own parents might be, or where in Pennsylvania he was born. I’ve done what I know how to do, and I added Henry to the Campbell Name Study. Perhaps someone will find him coming from another direction one day.

Where the Children Remained

Of the four children who survived to adulthood, Elizabeth remained unmarried her whole life and died in 1897 in Ashland. Frances (Campbell) Hoot married John B. Hoot in 1862, and they had nine children in Ashland, eventually moving to Mount Vernon in Knox County. Frances died in Columbus. The two boys, Cyrus and Harrison, grew up in Ashland, but many of their children ended up moving away from Ohio.

Cyrus Campbell (1834-1872) fought for the Union in Missouri, and his younger son, Howard, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in July 1864, probably during the Battle of Nashville. Cyrus left his wife, Ursulla, to raise his two sons when he died in 1872 or 1873, and she remarried and lived with her second husband, Robert Sutton, in Ohio. Elder son, Alden, became a farmer in Illinois, raising a son and two daughters. Howard moved out of Ohio and became a farm hand in Texas, eventually marrying his boss’s daughter and raising eight children.

Harrison Campbell (1837-1924) enlisted on 15 Sep 1861 and mustered in as a private with Company I, New York 59th Infantry Regiment on 19 Oct 1861. After returning from the Civil War, he married Catherine Hoot, a half-sister of John Bently Hoot, who married Harrison’s sister, Frances. They lived in Missouri, where most of their children were born, and farmed until about 1914. By 1920, Harrison and Catherine had moved to Forest Grove, a small farm town about 25 miles west of Portland, Oregon.

A CFH Post-Script

When I embarked on my mission to update George’s CFH in 2015, the Campbell descendants were the first major research challenge I faced. I suspect now that George got the information for his book from Elizabeth Campbell before she died in 1897, or from Francis Hoot, who died in 1905.

So when it came to chasing down records for the Campbell children and grandchildren who left Ohio, I found myself constantly losing track of people and then having to double back and double-check what I thought I knew, and what the records actually said.

And I learned many lessons that would serve me well when I moved on to Ann’s sister, Eliza, and her many, many Ferguson descendants!
1. Hill, George William; History of Ashland County, Ohio, published by Williams Bros, page 84 (Internet Archive). ↩︎
Ahnentafel #15: Merilyn Martin (1923-1997)

February 20, 2026
My wife’s maternal grandmother was someone I met, but not someone I could say I knew. The few times we visited felt very formal, and I could tell that whenever we left, unspoken tensions would slowly drain out of my wife, along with stories of the ways she disappointed or offended Grandmother Martin when she was a child.

When you don’t know someone, but you learn about them from those who did, the impressions you form become that person for you. And in the case of Merilyn Martin, everything I have been told came with a caveat not to repeat what I had learned, because it would displease her. Naturally, I learned that Displeasing Merilyn was a Very Bad Thing – but I’ll never know whether that is because of how she was or whether that was how those around her treated her.

All I have are some facts, some memories, and a vague sense that she wouldn’t be happy to be the subject of an essay like this one. So be it.

Growing Up In Between

Merilyn Martin was born on 17 August 1923, the only daughter of Howard and Aletha, and a middle child between Douglas (1920-1997) and Charles (1928-2016). Doug passed on a 28-page memoir when he died, in which he described his childhood in some detail. But as he was three years older than Merilyn, who was five years older than Charles, he didn’t recall having much to do with them as children.

According to Doug’s memoir:

“My father was raised in the Methodist Chruch next door to where they lived and my mother was raised a Christian Scientist in New Albany, IN. before moving to Council Bluffs. I can’t remember either of them ever going inside a church of any kind after I was born. After I was able to drive a car, Dad would let me drive his car only to the Christian Science Sunday School if I would drive Merilyn and Charles. He finally found out that I only left Merilyn and Charles at Sunday School and then I drove all over town till it was time to pick them up. After that any driving of his car ended rather abruptly. That was the end of my church-going days too. Merilyn later was married in a joined the Lutheran Church in the Maplewood section of Omaha and Charles joined the Episcopal Church, I guess.”

The three Martin children seemed to be insulated from the Great Depression, as they were young enough not to be aware of most of the hardship, and their father’s oil business was successful enough to keep them fed and warm. He ran several filling stations, as well as the KOIL radio station, established in 1925, where Howard was an on-air personality and program director.

And thus, Merilyn grew up between the Depression and the War, mostly shielded from both by the privilege of her well-to-do family. Then, as mentioned last week, Merilyn married Arvid Wesley “Bud” Holmquist in February 1943, and by 1950, they were living the dream of every post-war couple.

Three Sides to Every Story

From Merilyn’s point of view, she did nothing wrong, and I don’t intend to suggest that she did.

She had what seems to have been a happy childhood, and when she got married, her husband seemed capable and willing to provide the same kind of lifestyle she’d always had. She was almost certainly part of the upper layer of the society she moved within. She was a classic Midwestern Lutheran mother, doting on two daughters during America’s post-war economic boom.

And then he ruined everything.

At least, as I first heard the story, that was how it felt.

Just imagine being in your thirties, having never felt the touch of real hardship, and then, suddenly, seeing your husband’s name in all of the newspapers. The shame of having the end of your relationship published on the front pages instead of buried at the bottom of page 62 of the Omaha World Herald under the “Divorce Court” section¹. The panic of realizing that your house, your clothes, your food, the health of your children, things that you’ve never really had to worry about before, are either gone or at risk.

I certainly don’t blame Merilyn for Bud’s choices. She earned a lifetime of anger from what he did, and he earned a ticket out of her life. But… that divorce was in court in May 1960, half a year after his crime spree started, and a full year before he was caught and convicted.

So, maybe there is something unresolved there that nobody ever required her to think about. Maybe their lifestyle was unsustainable, and maybe there were choices made and demands not met long before Bud Holmquist decided to start robbing people.

There are almost certainly three sides to that story: hers, his, and the path that no one chose to take.

The Happy Ending

Obviously, as painful as the experience was, Merilyn and her daughters survived it. They grew up in Omaha, married, and have families of their own. By any fair measure, that’s a success.

I don’t know when Merilyn remarried, but when I entered the story, I was introduced to her and her second husband, Todd Rossiter. Based on the photo I have, I would guess they were married by the 1970s.

Todd and Merilyn Rossiter

As I said when I began, I have the impression that Merilyn would not be happy for Bud’s crimes to be the center of her story. If I were in her place, I wouldn’t be happy about that, either. But the choices she made – the life she chose to live, and the way she chose to share it or not share it – left me with no other stories to put in its place. And so, while that’s the last thing she probably wanted to be remembered for, that’s the only thing I have to remember.

Looking in from the outside, the best I can do is tell you that Merilyn (Martin) Holmquist Rossiter lived her life on her terms, she seemed to enjoy it, despite her hard times, and we are not owed more than that.
1. Omaha World-Herald, Omaha, Nebraska, Fri, May 6, 1960, Page 62. ↩︎
Eating the Elephant

February 18, 2026

An update on the Callan Name Study

They say the only way to eat an elephant is “one bite at a time,” but there is also a pretty good story out there about the blind wise men trying to describe the elephant. That’s about where I am in this project.

How to Describe an Elephant

To do a comprehensive study of a surname, you have to cast a wide net and find out about all of the variants of that name, where they came from, and who made up the population of people using that surname.

Most of the people I have found so far are Irish folks who spelled the name “Callan.” (“This elephant is like a wall,” said the monk who felt the elephant’s broad side.)

There are also many Scottish records for people with several variations of the name, usually “Callan,” but also “Callen,” “Callin,” and “Callon.” (“This elephant is like the trunk of a tree,” said the monk who felt the elephant’s leg.)

Of course, a large number of Callan folks emigrated to the Americas and Australia, using all of the possible spellings. (“This elephant is rather like a snake,” said the monk who felt the long, flexible trunk.)

Naturally, the surname pops up in small numbers in Finland, Sweden, and Germany, usually as “Calen” or “Calin,” to keep us guessing. (“This elephant seems to be very like a rope,” said the monk who caught the tail.)

There is also an African-American population that carries the name, but we must be mindful of the dark history of how and why they carry the name and, in some cases, the DNA. These cousins deserve some respect for the painful history they carry. (“This elephant is like a saber!” cried the monk who felt the hard, curved tusk.)

This Elephant Is Like a Spreadsheet

Actually, the elephant I’m compiling is a spreadsheet. You should be able to explore it at this link, if you’re interested.

The first tab (bottom-left) is called “WikiTree links,” and I pulled the data from WikiTree using the One Name Trees app I talked about briefly in “Harmonizing With WikiTree.” I’ve begun the process of harmonizing by adding columns for FamilySearch profiles and Ancestry pages, and I’m adding links as I find them.

The “Scotland pre-1855” tab may prove to be a failed experiment – I ran queries on Scotlands People (https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/) for “Callan” with the “fuzzy search” parameter, and I ran it across the Church registers for births, marriages, and deaths, hoping that I could find a way to match records belonging to the same person using the spreadsheet’s sort and find functions. Despite nearly 2500 lines, I’ve barely been able to match anyone.

I’ve also got the “Louth c. 1910” tab, for residents of County Louth who appeared in the 1901 and 1911 Ireland census records. Those for whom I’ve found WikiTree profiles are already in the “WikiTree links” tab, as well.

And that last tab, “Early Americans,” has proven to be the most elusive, since “early” is in the eye of the beholder, and I haven’t found a good way to pull comprehensive data out of Ancestry.

What I’ve Learned

The most exciting discovery was the One Name Tree app, which gives me a pretty solid understanding of what is in WikiTree. As I match WikiTree and FamilySearch profiles, I should be able to start categorizing the WikiTree pages so I can take advantage of some of the Connectathon events and Projects that already exist and have a lot of participants.

For example, I know there are several profiles connected to Asberry Piner Callen in Kentucky:

Callen, Asberry Piner 1833-10-00 1903-10-16 LC37-YZB Callen-415 Atwood, Kenton, Kentucky

I’ve got links to an Ancestry profile, a FamilySearch profile, and a WikiTree profile here, so if I added Categories to the WikiTree page for the Kentucky Project that indicated which profiles “Need improvement” or “Need family profiles made,” that would help their project members find these pages that could use their attention. And, if they need sources, they may be able to find some already on the other linked pages.

Another family I found using the One Name Tree app was centered on this man:

Callen, Alexander 1900-11-02 1982-01-00 GTKG-M3B Callen-391 Virginia, United States

This is an African-American family, and so far, they don’t appear to be connected to the World Tree. This would be a good starting point for someone looking to help out with the US Black Heritage Project.

How You Can Help

If you have any experience running a Name Study, any advice would be helpful. I feel like there is a lot of preparation and organization left to be done before I will be comfortable reaching out to ask folks in overlapping projects for help, but that may be precisely what I should do!

I still need to figure out how the work I’m doing can benefit the other, existing Name Studies I found:

The Guild of One-Name Studies has a Callan project with about 50 names listed. And Stan Courtney, who manages the Callan DNA study on FTDNA, maintains a Callan – Earliest Known Ancestors database, both at that link and on Ancestry. Callan households in Louth gives a pretty cool overview of the available data.

The important thing, I guess, is that there is progress, and I’m enjoying the work. And that is all I could really hope for.
Ahnentafel #14: Bud Holmquist (1920-1996)

February 13, 2026
My wife’s maternal grandfather was many things: a wartime pilot, a suave businessman, and a notorious interstate stick-up man. He was handsome and charming, the son of Swedish immigrants, and until he was convicted and sent to prison, his was the kind of success story people remember from the 1950s.

There is probably a lesson to be learned from that story.

Growing Up in Lake Wobegon

For some 30 years on public radio, Garrison Keillor would tell stories about a fictional “hometown, out there on the edge of the prairie,” ending each week by saying, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Mahtomedi, Minnesota, where Bud Holmquist was born, sits about 20 minutes northeast of the state capital, St. Paul, and calls itself “A Very Large Town City.” It is about 10 times larger now than in 1940, so one has to wonder whether stories like Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales might not have resonated on the shores of White Bear Lake, where the Holmquists kept their home.

Christmas in Mahtomedi – Bud is in the center/back.

Bud’s full name was Arvid Wesley Holmquist, and he was born in Mahtomedi on 6 September 1920. He grew up with two older sisters, Ruth and Lillian, and a younger sister, Dorothy. Their father, Arvid William, was a custodian in the public schools. He had immigrated from Sweden when he was in his late twenties, and became a naturalized citizen in 1921.

As Bud was William’s only son, we can imagine how proud he was when the young man landed an engineering job, which sent him to Iran for a year in 1942. When he came back from his year abroad, Bud married Merilyn Martin, the daughter of Howard Martin, a prominent businessman in Omaha. They were married in February 1943, and soon after, Bud was inducted into the air corps at Fort Snelling.¹

Down In Flames

By all accounts, Bud enjoyed the adventure of being a pilot in the war. Afterward, he came home with prospects. He went to work for his father-in-law and was a successful salesman. He and Merilyn had two daughters, and by the end of 1950, one might think he had attained the American Dream.

The story, as it was handed down to me, is that his girls wanted for nothing. Pretty dresses, expensive toys, including a child-sized car with a working gasoline motor for them to drive around! But by 1959, something gave way. In May 1961, newspapers across the Midwest reported the capture of the “Executive Bandit”²:

Omaha (AP)–Arvid Wesley Holmquist, a 40-year-old salesman who told police he gave up a $13,000 a year job [about $144,796.77 in 2026] to become a bandit, was arrested Sunday as he sipped coffee in an Omaha restaurant.

Police said he made statements about a dozen holdups in 7 states, including one Lincoln stickup. The loot ranged from $45 to $26,000. The biggest take, Holmquist told police, was in his first holdup at the Younkers-Davidson Department Store in Sioux City, Iowa [on September 29, 1959].

The victims of the robberies listed had described the bandit as a calm, executive type.

He said his formula was to wear a business suit and walk slowly, adding: “I always dressed good. If you want to be a stickup man, don’t wear a black leather jacket.”

Referring to his formula, he said in the Sioux City holdup, he was walking out of the store with most of the day’s receipts in a bulging satchel and an employee opened the door for him.

Bud admitted to about a dozen holdups he committed in seven states in 1960 and 1961:
- Kilpatrick’s Store, Omaha, April 21, 1960, $1,900
- Interstate Finance Co., Omaha, Aug. 1, 1960, $1,000
- American Loan Co., Omaha, Sept. 19, 1960, about $100
- Murphy Finance Co., Lincoln, Aug. 23, 1960, $1,700
- Murphy Finance Co., Wichita, Kan., fall 1960, $200
- Interstate Finance Co., North Kansas City, fall 1960, $200
- Dial Finance Co., St. Joseph, Mo., April 1961, $850
- A finance company in Rock Island, Ill., in the fall of 1960
- A finance company in Phoenix, Ariz., in March 1961
In total, Bud stole about $35,000, equivalent to about $389,837 today. “Asked what he did with the money, he replied, ‘I was trying to drown everything that happened.’ He added that he bought some race horses and did ‘quite a bit’ of betting.”

I had always been told that his arrest ended his marriage, but the newspapers suggest that things happened the other way around. According to Bud, he was working as a salesman for an Oshkosh, Wis., clothing firm when he “got disgusted…. I gave up working…There was a divorce coming up. I didn’t care what happened and had a rather negative attitude at the time.” By the time he was arrested, he was living in a residential hotel, and said, “I was almost hoping I’d get caught and get it over with.” Detectives said he had $20.01 on his person when he was arrested.

Paying the Cost

Bud pleaded guilty to all of his crimes. He was sentenced to nine years by the Douglas County District Court on 25 May 1961, and the Lancaster County District Court sentenced him to another 11 years on 12 September. In 1965, newspapers reported that he was being considered for “commutation to detainer,” which meant that he could be given clemency in Nebraska, only to answer to other jurisdictions. Authorities wanted him in Phoenix, Arizona, and Wichita, Kansas.

It’s hard to know when he was released from prison, but there is a 1974 divorce record for an Arvid W. Holmquist in Orange County, California, that might be him. Clark County, Nevada, records from 1979 and 1982 suggest that he was married to Hallie Harp for three years, and public records show him at a Las Vegas address in 1991.

Bud Holmquist died in Las Vegas on 10 August 1996. He is buried in Union Cemetery in Maplewood, Ramsey County, Minnesota.

As far as I know, he had no contact with his family, even though his sisters, Lil and Dot, outlived him until 2004 and 2008, respectively. I do know that his wife and daughters never forgave him.

But that isn’t my story to tell.
1. The Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, Iowa; Sun, Feb 14, 1943, Page 11. ↩︎
2. Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, Iowa; Monday, May 15, 1961, Page:1. ↩︎
HAMP: Harmonizing with WikiTree

February 11, 2026
part of a series, “Harmonizing Across Multiple Platforms“

When we last talked about harmonizing our research efforts using multiple online platforms, I said I would talk next about “why-to” use WikiTree. That was last summer, and since then, WikiTree and Family Tree DNA (ftdna.com) have partnered up so that users can connect their WikiTree accounts to their FTDNA accounts more easily, and I’ve been waiting to see how that works.

I’m still not sure what I have to say about the FTDNA-WikiTree partnership, but a few months have passed, so let’s take a look at some of the other ways WikiTree might fit into your overall strategy of guiding and preserving your family history research.

Why It Is Free

WikiTree is 100% free to sign up for and to use. As their internal Help pages explain, they use ads that display to non-members to support the costs of running the platform, and they rely on volunteers to develop data analysis apps, to mentor each other, or to run the various Projects that seek to improve the information on the platform.

Unlike other free services we’ve already talked about (Find-a-Grave and FamilySearch.org) WikiTree does not give you direct access to any records. What you do get is access to two halves of a single, collaborative family tree: the “wiki” and the “g2g” (short for “Genealogist to Genealogist”).

G2G is a forum for asking questions, finding help, volunteering to help, and coordinating on Projects. When you first sign up for a WikiTree account, you should receive emails with instructions for finding the introductory tutorials on using the forum and the wiki.

When you reach out for help with a question, or guidance on how to do something, just keep in mind that with an all-volunteer workforce, it can take some time to get a response – and sometimes the response will be “I don’t know that, either – let me help you figure it out.” In this case, the “cost” of a free platform is that you need to be a little more patient and be prepared to deal with Other People.

One World Tree

The “killer app” at the heart of WikiTree is the wiki – a single tree for all users, highly flexible, and editable by everyone. (We talked before about how scary “editable by everyone” can be in the first HAMP post.) Like the World Tree on FamilySearch, the goal is to have a single page (a “profile”) for every individual, instead of countless separate trees with conflicting or unsupported information. Privacy rules are in place to protect the profiles of living people and the recently deceased.

Some people find the wiki markup language and editing features easy; others, less so. This is where the G2G forum and various Projects can come in handy: that’s where you can ask questions and learn.

And there is a LOT to learn. But the cornerstone is the “Biography” section of each profile. That is where you should be putting your standard narrative paragraphs and source citations. When you sign up for your free account, you get your own profile, which is an ideal place to practice. Since you control your own privacy settings, no one has to see how many times you have to rewrite your own story, or how many tries it takes for you to learn how to format your citations!

Once you have the basics of editing a profile down, you can move on to either finding or creating profiles for your family. Building out “My Sixteen” was an early goal for me. That meant creating or linking to 31 profiles (me, my “Great 28,” plus “My Sixteen”), and usually, by the time you’ve done that, you should have at least one ancestor linked to an existing WikiTree profile – connecting you to that One World Tree.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hole

From there, you can really start to take advantage of some of the interesting data analysis apps developed by enthusiasts around the world.
- Connection Finder
This is probably the app most people have come in contact with – plug in your profile handle (mine is “Callin-50”) and any other profile on WikiTree, and the app will figure out how you are connected to each other. If you sign up for the weekly email from WikiTree, or for Watchlist notifications, they will include links based on a theme of the week (themes like “Famous TV stars” or “Founding Fathers’), but you can try this any time on the Connection Finder page.

I’m only 20 degrees from Kevin Bacon – but I’m no movie star!
- Sourcer App
Probably the most useful app – once installed into your web browser, you can use it to create an inline citation for (almost) any source record you care to put in a biography. For example, if you see a source in FamilySearch, follow the link to the record page, create the citation, and paste it into your biography. For most sources on free sites, it should create links to the record and, in most cases, to the image of the record, making your WikiTree page more useful.

Note: you always want to proofread the output of any app like this. You may have formatting preferences different from the app developers, or you may need to add details (like page numbers) that the app can miss.
- One Name Trees
This one is fun for the data analysis piece of your favorite One Name Study.

You can find it by clicking the pulldown menu from your name on your profile page, opening the Tree Apps page, and clicking the pulldown in the “Tree Apps” box – “ONE NAME TREES” is alphabetically sorted, about halfway down the list.

I needed a way to access all of the profiles for the surname variations in the Callan Name Study, and this app allowed me to export them to a spreadsheet (using the “Sheet” button).

The Magic of Harmonizing

As with all of these family history tools, your mileage may vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish. WikiTree has become, for me, an End Goal – once I have done what I can to pull together the evidence to support what the Biographies and Profile connections claim, WikiTree is where the “finished” work resides.

I see it as the anchor point for what I can do with all of the other sites and tools.

And, of course, for people like us, it can be a lot of fun!
Ahnentafel #13: June Shuffler (1928-2010)

February 6, 2026
My wife’s paternal grandmother, June (Shuffler) McCullough, was the youngest of her four grandparents, and the last one to leave us. My wife inherited Grandma June’s “oatmeal butterscotchies” cookie recipe; our son inherited Grandma June’s eyes; and our youngest inherited her name. Someday, I expect, one of our descendants will inherit her fiery red hair.

You may have heard of “Midwest nice,” but June was, by all accounts, “Midwest kind,” too. When her kids share memories of her, they revolve around the way she worked hard to raise them, especially the loss of Bob McCullough in 1983. Her grand-kids speak of her warm kitchen, her playfulness, and her welcoming nature.

Much of what I know sounds like a stereotype of the Midwestern Lutheran church lady: the elongated “O”s in her speech, the inventive casseroles designed to stretch a budget, the warm kitchen always full of treats. These are the qualities that make impressions, but rarely find their way into family histories. Unless someone writes them down.

A Child of Wartime

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1928, she and her older sister, Elaine, grew up there. Her family were members of Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church, where June was confirmed at age 13 in 1942. Her four years at Thomas Jefferson High School were bracketed by the beginning and ending of the Second World War.

June and Elaine had no other siblings, and they grew up only knowing their mother’s side of the family. Their father, Don Shuffler, was the oldest of four brothers, and the only one who stayed in Iowa when their mother remarried and moved to Maryland. (You may recall The Ballad of Mrs. Steele talked about that family.)

On the surface, it might appear that June’s family wasn’t touched by the war in the same way that others were. And it is true that none of the men in her family were of an age to serve in the military; but when your family is small and you are part of a large community, the parade of classmates who graduated and enlisted, the older brothers and younger uncles who never came back, has to make an impression.

And it is evident that those years taught those who stayed behind how to cheerfully adapt and overcome whatever hardship came their way.

The Hardship Heritage

One of the hardest things to know about our ancestors is “how much did they know about their family history?”

It is easy to look at the eight people in my grandparents’ generation and see that they were all impacted by the Great Depression and the Second World War. To us, looking back, they were living through history; but to them, they were just living. And the stories they knew about their grandparents gave them a sense that those were the people “living through history.”

June and Elaine knew their Danish immigrant grandparents, Tom and Lena Thompson, and their aunt Dagmar. Their grandmother, Virgie Steele, probably visited, and their father probably remembered the loss of his father, Frank Shuffler, in a rail yard accident during World War I. But how much did they know about earlier generations?

Did they know about the drama their Ballard great-grandparents went through, or about the Rupes¹? Did they know about their Quaker heritage², or the Shufflers who settled the Midwest before the Civil War? I know from talking to June and her kids that they recognized the name “Tiny Shuffler,” but did they know who Valentine Shuffler was³?

We are all made up of the stories we know about those who came before us. But we never really know for sure how those stories shaped us.

The Life Lived

When we write biographies for WikiTree, or for our blogs, we display a bias for those stories that are unusual, or tied to specific historical events. It’s hard to write about a “normal life” (a phenomenon that disappears under scrutiny, I find) in an interesting way.

We know facts about June and Bob McCullough from the Census, from city directories, from mentions in local newspapers. We know the impressions they left on their families. And we know scattered facts about things they did, though we don’t tend to think of those as “stories” the way we probably should.

Take these two sentences from June’s obituary:

“She was very involved with her church, Faith Lutheran Church, where she was active in choir and the guitar choir, Bible study, and she also helped clean. She also served Meals on Wheels.”

She sang, she played guitar, and she was active in her church in a way that focused on helping others. That’s a story that struggles to break through our biases towards drama.

As we continue to move up the Ahnentafel tree, this struggle becomes more and more difficult. As we move back in time, the obituaries, if there are any, will leave out “domestic” details and hobbies, especially of women. In a couple of generations, we’ll be lucky to know their names, let alone what they were like, or how they behaved.

Hopefully, in the future, our descendants still have some sense of what it meant to bake cookies for grandkids and spend your retirement bringing food to your neighbors. And maybe as we study our past, we can find ways to remember and celebrate the ordinary lives of those who didn’t get lengthy hagiographies printed about them.
1. See “Raising the Rupes” for those stories. ↩︎
2. See “Records Don’t Tell the Stories” ↩︎
3. See “A Valentine for Iowa” and “A Valentine for Indiana” ↩︎
Those Who Remained II: Uncle George

February 4, 2026
To recap part I:

John Callin (1870-1835) and Elizabeth Simon (1780-1864) were born and married in Pennsylvania, according to the scant information given about them in The Callin Family History. The good old CFH was published in 1911 by their grandson, George W. Callin (1846-1921), who was born a decade after John’s death. Most of what George knew about his grandparents probably came from his father, William. George may or may not have remembered Elizabeth, because she moved to Auburn, Indiana, with George’s aunt, Eliza (Callin) Ferguson, in 1849, when George was 3 years old.

But Those Who Remained would have remembered his ancestors, too, and probably shared stories with him.

Those Who Departed: John “Jr.”

The oldest child of John and Elizabeth was also named John Callin. This John Callin was born in Pennsylvania about 1802 and came to Milton Township with the rest of his family in 1816. He died there in 1825, according to the CFH, but we don’t have a Find A Grave memorial or any information about his cause of death.

Amazingly enough, young John was the only one of John and Elizabeth’s nine children who did not survive long enough to marry and have children. We already talked about the three sisters who left Ohio:
- Sarah (Callin) Scott – the next to eldest child, left about 1837 for Winnebago County, Illinois.
- Eliza (Callin) Ferguson – left about 1849 for Auburn, Indiana.
- Margaret Jane Callin – married their first cousin, James Callin, and moved to Iowa with Alec, Aunt Mary, and the others about 1840.
That leaves five Callin siblings who stayed in Ohio, although, as we’ll see, they spread out through Huron, Richland, and Ashland counties, and many of their children went further than that.

But let’s begin with the oldest surviving son: George Callin (1804-1879).

George and Polly, Likely Abolitionists

George’s wife was Mary Ann “Polly” Lewis, whose family moved to Ohio from New York. Our cousin from this branch of the family, Megan, wrote to me last time I posted about this family and offered additional info about Polly’s family:

“[Polly’s] older sister, Hannah Simons, nee Lewis, also came to the Firelands, right to the same area the Callins settled. It is my guess that they brought Mary Ann [aka Polly] to Ohio. I have no idea who got here first, the Callin or Lewis girls…Hannah Lewis’s husband, Cyrus Simmons, came to Peru in what may have been inherited ‘Sufferers Lands’ or Firelands” (they were from Litchfield, Connecticut, his father was on the NY line in the revolution)…The Simons also had a daughter, SABRA Ann (1835-1930), and another [named] Mary Ann (Polly) (1821-1882), nieces to Geo and Mary Ann Callin.”.(of course a George, too.)”

We have talked before about George and Polly’s faith¹, and about the memoir by their grandniece, Rosemary Callin², that claims their farm was a stop on the Underground Railroad, so this may not be new information for you. But Rosemary recalled being told this story by her father, George W. Callin:

Father said they were warned not to say nothing at school about it, but their cabin was a station on the Underground Railway. I don’t know whether it was William or Elizabeth, probably the latter, who awakened them softly in the middle of the night and led them to the window. The moon flashed out and they saw a white man, maybe William, leading a string of blacks through the clearing around their cabin and into the woods. They were on their way to Great Uncle George’s barn. From there he would take them onto the next stop.

Records of their marriage and where they lived before 1850 are elusive, but the 1850 Census places George and Polly in Peru Township, Huron County, Ohio. William – George’s younger brother and George W.’s father – had cleared his own farm in Milton Township (which was in Richland County in 1840), and moved to Peru Township in 1849. So Rosemary’s account almost certainly describes something that happened in the 1850s. If the story about Elizabeth taking the children to the window happened in 1855, George W. would have been about nine years old, and the youngest of the children, Zimri, would have been about five.

Peru Township is north and west of Greenwich Township, on a diagonal with one other township between them. Greenwich Township was where the Society of Friends (Quakers) operated the Firelands “Underground” Railways. Early activity would have begun in the 1830s, and increased through the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Echo of the Past

As I write this post, America in 2026 is experiencing something similar to what George and Polly, and William and Elizabeth, experienced in the late 1850s. Political divisions over who we should be as a country created sharper and starker dividing lines as a minority of people who believed that a corrupted system based on treating human beings as property pushed for nationwide enforcement of laws that the Callin family (at least THIS Callin family) considered to be immoral.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 explicitly put our two Callin families, and anyone else running an underground railroad, on the wrong side of the law. Slave patrols could cross into free states and kidnap enslaved persons, even those who were legally free, as in the case of Rosetta Armstead in 1855. Studying this time in American history, I can’t avoid seeing parallels with the 2025 surge of Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) operations to kidnap people who are in the U.S. legally, operations that exceed their legal charter, and lead to examples of violating the rights of due process guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and attacking U.S. citizens who object to this.

As more of my friends and neighbors across the country are caught up in the protest movement against ICE, I also see family and friends who are choosing to ignore the immorality and illegality of what the federal government is doing. I am gaining a new understanding of the long, slow unfolding stresses and anxiety that families like George and William Callin endured as they resisted immoral laws without knowing when or how a coming war might affect them.

The Next Generations

George and Polly had two sons and four daughters. Two of those daughters did not have children; Amelia (Callin) Horton was the youngest child, and was described as suffering from “delicate health” before her death at age 50. The other was Sabra Ann, who we discussed not long ago³.

Only one son, John C. Callin (1830-1905) had male descendants, but he only had two kids (a son and a daughter) and one grandson, Arthur James Callin, who never had children. John C.’s two children were James Callin (1855-1930) and Jennie M (Callin) Clausin Strohm (1857-1924). James raised his children in Huron County, but later moved to Chicago, Illinois, and then to Elkhart, Indiana. Jennie lived in Denison, Iowa, with her first husband, and lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and later, Saint Paul, Minnesota, with her second.

James’s youngest daughter, Helen (Callin) Ladd, adopted two children, and his older surviving daughter, Ada Cecilia (Callin) Forgey, did not have any children. Jennie’s granddaughters were Jean Marjorie Clausin (1909-1964), who appears not to have had any children, and Louise Harriet (Clausin) Pattee (1905-1998), whose sons were Carl Bert (1930-1993) and Lloyd Garrison Pattee Jr. (1932-1998).

George and Polly’s eldest daughter was Minerva (Callin) Smith Robinson Daggett (1834-1895). Minerva had five known children with her first husband, a blacksmith named John N Smith (1830-1867) who died in Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois. It is possible that Minerva knew her Aunt Sarah’s family, but George W. appears to have lost touch with her after the Smiths moved away from Ohio. Minerva had two more children (that I know of) with her second husband, Dana A Robinson (1818-1891), and they lived in Burlington, Coffee County, Kansas. I have been unable to find more information about her descendants.

The second son of George and Polly was named after George’s brother (my 3rd-great-grandfather): William H Callin (1834-1919). He married an English girl⁴ named Ellen C. Channing (1838-1916) and they had four daughters, who they raised on their farm in Huron County:
- Lillian Florence (Callin) Richards (1861-1936)
- Anna L (Callin) Williams (1865-1908)
- Lydia Minerva (Callin) Clark (1869-1943)
- Grace M (Callin) Ritz (1880-1978)
And lastly, George and Polly’s daughter, Lovina (Callin) Rickey (1839-1877), married Ed Rickey (1831-1896) and had two sons, so there may be a smattering of cousins out there with the Rickey surname. Ed and Lovina moved to Williams County, Ohio.

The Thread of History

Most people focus on their paternal surname when they get into family history; that makes sense, of course, since that’s “your name” and most novice researchers can be easily overwhelmed by the exponential increase in the number of surnames found in each generation.

That bias towards the familiar is also compounded by geography. I’ve noticed that the people listed here that stayed in Ohio were close enough for George W. Callin to know and include in his book. Some of those who moved away were close enough to attend the Callin Family Reunions that were documented in local papers during the 1900-1910s, and their names, at least, appear in the CWF.

But those who did not remain in Ohio offer the challenge of obscurity – a challenge that only focused research can overcome.
1. See “Religion: Tool and Problem” ↩︎
2. See “Silk or Satin” ↩︎
3. See “Two Girls Called Sabra Ann” ↩︎
4. See “The Girl From England” on the old Blogger site ↩︎
Ahnentafel #12: Bob McCullough (1927-1983)

January 30, 2026

I never met my wife’s paternal grandfather, so I don’t have the same kinds of deep memories of him that made writing my own grandparents’ profiles both easy to write and hard to support with sources.

And while I have asked if anyone would like to share their memories with me on this public platform, I haven’t heard back from anyone. I’m not surprised that those who remember him best wouldn’t necessarily want to open up to me. After all, I’m just a guy who married their niece and shows up in the Midwest once every decade or so. (They are also, mostly, in Minnesota, so they are occupied with more serious concerns.)

For me, at least, this makes the challenge into a more familiar one. I’ve written hundreds of biographies for people I never knew. And I hope what I always hope:

I hope I do him justice.

Too Young to Fight in the Big One

All four of my kids’ great-grandfathers served in the U.S. military, but Bob McCullough was still in school when the Second World War broke out. He matriculated as a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the fall of 1942, and graduated in the spring of 1946. He turned 18 in October of 1945, so he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, serving from January 1946 to 3 May 1947.

His brother John was three years older than Bob, and also graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School. When John married his high school sweetheart, Elaine Shuffler, on 23 April 1945, Bob was his best man and Elaine’s sister, June, who was also a TJHS student, was the maid of honor.

After he finished his year in the Air Corps, Bob married his high school sweetheart, the aforementioned June Shuffler, on 30 August 1948. This time, John was his best man, and Elaine was matron of honor. Bob and June established their family in Council Bluffs, where they had the first of their six children. Bob worked at the grain elevator.

Then the Korean War broke out, and Bob served another tour in the military from 10 March 1951 through 11 July 1952. As it happens, he served with another young man from Council Bluffs named Charles Martin – we’ll meet Charles’s sister, Merilyn, in a few weeks!

Bob McCullough’s senior yearbook photo

From Iowa to Minnesota

Bob and June moved to Minnesota around 1959. This is typically where standard research techniques start to fail us, and storytelling becomes more desirable, because the records I have can’t answer questions like, “Why did they move?” or, “What was different for them about life in Minnesota?”

The newspapers of the time carried pretty descriptions of both McCullough-Shuffler weddings, and listed a lot of names that are useful for the FAN approach. Some of the names are familiar; family names like Roundtree and Jensen who I know are related to the two families I’m studying. The friends and families in Council Bluffs seemed to be a close-knit group before 1959, but as life goes on, friends marry and move away, older family members may die, and sometimes the sorts of tragedies and traumas that people don’t like to discuss (divorce, or the loss of a child, perhaps) may push a circle of friends and family apart.

What I do know is that Bob and June settled into life in Shakopee, and I think Bob worked (at least for some time) as a baker. I know that their older children ended up back in Iowa, and the younger children tended to stay in Minnesota.

A Step Back to Reflect

The trick to writing a genealogy blog like this one lies in finding the “so what” twice a week. Most of the time, my expected audience (including my close relatives!) know as little about the people I’m studying as I do, so if I think something that I learn about a family from 100 years ago is interesting, chances are good that my audience will think so, too.

But writing about more recent generations has an added risk, not just that the people who don’t know me or my family won’t be interested in what I have to say, or bored by stories I think are charming. I also feel I need to tread carefully so that people who did know the family I write about won’t be hurt by something I say.

Every family has some drama; some more than others. Some families have dark secrets or traumas that they don’t want discussed. It’s possible that a researcher like me could stumble into something hurtful or harmful, or might share a “cute and innocent” story that triggers the darker memories, or whitewashes someone who did something wrong.

Sometimes, people just don’t want to dwell on the sadness of having lost someone. Bob McCullough died at age 56, an age I’m close to myself. He didn’t leave behind any “small” children, but they were robbed of many years they should have had with him.

And for many people, that is reason enough not to dwell in the past.
Amos Clark: Weighing Evidence

January 28, 2026
I found a secondary source that may help answer the questions I had when I wrote Wavetops: Amos Clark – but untangling what it says from what it means and interrogating the source on the question of how do you know that? may end up leaving me with a paradox: more information and more questions.

The question I’m trying to answer has to do with the origins of my 3rd-great-grandfather, Amos Clark (unknown DOB-1848). Here are the facts I have:
- He married “Sally Stumbough” on 8 April 1824 in Lawrence County, Ohio.
- Their family appeared in Perry Township, Lawrence County, Ohio, in 1830 and 1840.
- Amos died in 1848, and his will named his children¹.
- In 1853, the local newspaper in Ironton (Lawrence County), Ohio, The Spirit of the Times carried a Notice for the estate of Amos Clark² on 12 April… and then a few weeks later, on 31 May³, printed that “The late advertisement of Amos Clark’s estate in our paper, was not that of Amos B. Clark, who is well and favorably known to many of the citizens of this county, as some have supposed. He is still alive and kicking.”
At first, I assumed that the 1853 estate notice was for a different Amos Clark, because the husband of Sally Stumbough died in 1848, but I have seen that probate cases can take years to resolve themselves, especially when minor children are involved. So that estate notice could be for my ancestor. But we also know that we can’t assume any record for the name Amos Clark is my ancestor, because another Amos B. Clark was still alive and kicking in 1853.

The puzzle I have to solve now is “which pieces of information pertain to my Amos Clark?”

From New Jersey to Ohio

One piece of information kept popping up on various unsourced family trees, so I decided to start investigating where that information came from. Supposedly, Amos Clark was born on 3 November 1802 in Westfield, Union County, New Jersey. After coming up empty on records searches, I finally found this book: Clark of Elizabeth Town in New Jersey by Elmer Sayre Clark.

This book, published in 1942 by Professor E.S. Clark, a Fellow of the Institute of American Genealogy, is not organized like a family history document. It begins with a few pages labeled “Summary of Lineages” that lists families under 16 surnames. I assume these might be the author’s Sixteen great-great-grandparents, but he doesn’t tell us that.

After the Summary, there are three pages that provide the heraldic definitions of the coats of arms for nine of the families, and then Professor Clark turns on the fire hose. What follows is more than 200 pages of will transcripts, correspondence with descendants, lists of names with what look like inline references, and essays with the byline “By the Editor” – an undifferentiated, un-indexed mass of genealogical information. Fortunately, since the book was digitized, we can search through the text for names.

Despite these challenges, Professor Clark’s book appears to support the origin of Amos Clark that I kept seeing.
- From the “Summary of Lineages“:
  - CLARK(E):
    
    Samuel (1768-1856), of Scoth [sic] Plains, N. J. m 1791 Mary dau. of Elias Darby of Scotch Plains, N. J.; removed to Hanging Rock, Ohio, thence to Gashland, Mo.
  - SAYRE/SAYER:
    
    Phoebe (1797-1845), m 1814 Samuel Clark of Hanging Rock, Lawrence Co., O.”
  - DARBY/D’ARBY:
    
    Mary (1768-1806), of [Elias] m at Westfield, N. J. 1791 Samuel Clark.
- From the “Letter from Daniel Carpenter, Oct. 20, 1913” on page 202:
  - “Samuel Clark was born in Elizabeth, N.J., March 11, 1768; died in Clinton County, Missouri, Oct. 7, 185-2, or 6… married to Mary Darby probably around 1790, who was born July 17, 1768…” [8 children were listed; I selected these five to make my case:]
  - [1.] Samuel was born March 20, 1792 [married Phoebe Sayre, above]
  - 2. Cornelius, born Nov. 22, 1793
  - 3. Joel born Oct. 10, 1795
  - 4. Hannah, born Feb. 14, 1798, m. Wm. Carpenter, 1812, d. Sept. 18, 1881
  - 6. Amos, born Nov. 20, 1802
  - “Cornelius, Joel and Amos lived and died in Lawrence County, Ohio, leaving a number of descendants still living there.”
This still isn’t conclusive or primary evidence, but there seems to be agreement from multiple accounts provided by people who remembered their grandparents’ stories. You can piece together from the information above that Samuel Clark (1768-1856) and Mary Darby (1768-1806) married and had their eight children, and Dan Carpenter’s letter states that they moved, along with Dan’s grandfather, Benjamin Carpenter, to Lawrence County, Ohio, about 1803-5, settling on the river about one mile above Hanging Rock.

There are more details to tease out of this book; as I said, it is densely packed with references, side comments, and details that need to be teased out and confirmed with primary source records. But the one thread that makes me think I’m on the right track comes from that 12 April 1853 Estate notice in the Spirit of the Times.

Assuming that estate is for the Amos Clark who died in 1848, the administrator’s name is Cornelius.

Tantalizing.

But Who Was Amos B. Clark?

That other item from Spirit of the Times telling us that “Amos B. Clark” was still alive in 1853 may lead to more of the information we need to solve this puzzle. There are some clues in Professor Clark’s book.

As it happens, Professor Clark includes a biographical sketch of Ephraim S. Clark, sourced from another book, “Portrait and biographical album of Livingston County, Illinois,” published in Chicago by the Chapman Brothers in 1888 (pp 198-202). On page 207 of Prof. Clark’s book, he lists the fourteen children of Samuel Clark (1792-1840) and Phoebe Sayre (1797-1845), including a son named Amos:

“Amos, born March 27, 1825, married Lucy Reither, and they have one child; Amos is a shoemaker by trade, but he is now [presumably in 1888] a travelling salesman”

That sketch states that this Clark family relocated to Indiana around 1830, so further research into Amos Clark and Lucy Reither will be needed before I can say whether he is our “Amos B. Clark” or not.

What Goes Into WikiTree

If you haven’t already done so, you should follow the link to Amos Clark’s WikiTree bio, where you can see how the page has been edited to reflect these developments. Take note that the Biography section is meant to be a narrative constructed out of facts that can be sourced to primary records, while “unknowns” and theories can be discussed in the Research Notes.

Wherever possible, I like to include as much information as possible for future researchers. You will probably notice that when I don’t know whether something is correct, I explain why I don’t think it’s correct and try to link to the sources so other researchers can examine them for themselves. I also try to provide a link to and a transcript of the relevant document, though a source citation doesn’t have to include either.

When editing your own WikiTree profiles, make sure you proofread it a few times while asking that key critical thinking question: “How do you know that?” If the text answers that question, then you’re doing something right!
1. The exception is that my 2nd-great-grandfather, Joel Clark, is either not named or is mis-named as “Jacob”; see Amos’s WikiTree entry for more. ↩︎
2. Newspapers.com, Spirit of the Times, Ironton, Ohio; Tue, Apr 12, 1853, Page 3, https://www.newspapers.com/article/spirit-of-the-times-amos-clarks-estate/125497327/ ↩︎
3. Newspapers.com, Spirit of the Times, Ironton, Ohio; Tue, May 31, 1853, Page 2, https://www.newspapers.com/article/spirit-of-the-times-amos-clark-still-a/21733341/ ↩︎