Mightier Acorns

Her Great Eight: An Appraisal

July 3, 2026

Last week, we talked about the last of my wife’s “Great Eight” great-grandparents. They were Ahnentafel posts #24-#31. When we got to the end of the first Great Eight – my children’s great-grandparents, #8-#15 – I posted an Appraisal of what that generation looked like, using several points of comparison, and of course, My Great Eight got their analysis in turn.

So this week, let’s look at a breakdown of Her Great Eight!

The Lost Generation (but Younger)

When we talked about My Great Eight, the range of their birth dates spanned from about 1873 to 1895. “The Lost Generation” is generally defined as those born between 1883 and 1900. Her Great Eight were born between 1880 and 1909.

Only one of the men in this generation (Howard Martin) served in the Army during World War I. Earl McCullough was a little too old, and Don Shuffler was far too young to serve. William Holmquist was also probably too old and had only recently immigrated, partly to escape the constant threat of war in Europe. Earl and William might have also been exempted from the draft, as they were the breadwinners for young families when the war began.

Each of these families weathered the Dustbowl years of the 1920s and the Great Depression in relative security. They were not rich, of course, but the McCullough and Shuffler households were supported by jobs in the railyards, which were steady and, by that time, unionized. William Holmquist’s position with local public schools was also steady work throughout those years, and Howard Martin’s talent for salesmanship was boosted by the constant, steady growth of the oil industry during those years.

Location, Location, Location

My wife’s family is decidedly Midwestern – five of her Great Eight were born in Iowa, plus one (Aletha Putnam) who was born in Indiana but moved to Council Bluffs at an early age. The two exceptions were William and Hildur Holmquist, whose families were from Sweden and Norway, and who settled in Minnesota – arguably the most Midwestern origin possible.

Technically, William Holmquist was the only immigrant, being born in Sweden, but Hildur, Esther Thompson, and Mary Blom were first-generation Americans born to immigrants from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany. We’ll get to talk about those countries in more detail when we get to the next generation!

The Matter of Faith

While their churches were certainly central to the social life of their respective communities, it’s not clear that these families put a lot of emphasis on theology. More recent immigrants might join congregations where they could find friends and neighbors who spoke the same language and knew the places they had come from. The effect Industrialization had on families in this Lost Generation was that fathers tended to work longer hours away from home, and wives tended to support each other through those church communities.

We know that Mary Blom’s family belonged to the United Evangelical church, because her father’s funeral was held there in 1917. United Evangelical churches later merged with United Brethren and the American Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church. It’s not clear whether Mary and Earl McCullough belonged to that church later on.

Don and Esther Shuffler were members of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, and Don taught Sunday School and served on the Evangelism Committee. Since I don’t have obituaries for William or Hildur, I can only guess that they probably belonged to a Lutheran church in Mahtomedi.

And just last week, we talked about the fact that Howard Martin remained a member of the Methodist church after he married Aletha Putnam, who insisted on raising their children in the Christian Science church.

The Family Matters

While my side of the family tended towards having large numbers of siblings but a dramatic drop off in the number of children, my wife’s side of the family tended to have smaller numbers on both sides of the equation. Five of the families they came from had between 4 and 6 siblings, and when we look at the next generation, only Earl and Mary had what we would call a “large” family with 9. William and Hildur’s 4 was a slight decrease from the number of siblings in their respective families.

Here is the 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 Esther Thompson and her two siblings give us three total.)

The Great Eight	Siblings (span of birthdates)	Children (span of birthdates)
Earl Randolph McCullough	6 (1878-1892)	9 (1908-1927)
Mary Elora Blom	5 (1886-1900)
Donald Francis Shuffler	4 (1909-1915)	2 (1926-1928)
Esther Anna Thompson	3 (1901-1908)
Arvid William Holmquist	5 (1874-1887)	4 (1915-1923)
Hildur Agda Leander	6 (1885-1897)
Howard William Martin	1 (1897)	3 (1920-1928)
Atletha Frederick Putnam	2 1/2 (1896-1904)
Totals:	32 (1874-1915)	18 (1908-1928)

In this group, Howard was the only “only” child, and Aletha was the only one with a half-sibling from her father’s previous marriage. Earl and William were the only “middle” children, and everyone else was either the eldest or second eldest of their siblings.

Infant mortality is still not as bad as it will be when we move back another generation. Of the 32 siblings, 5 died in childhood, that we know of.

When We Come Back: My Sixteen!

Since we are at a natural stopping point, I’m going to give myself a summer break from the regular schedule. I expect I will still be working on things behind the scenes, and I plan to start posting again around the end of August.

When that happens, The Ahnentafel will move up a generation and we’ll spend sixteen weeks on my great-great-grandparents.

Have a great summer, cousins!

Callan Name Study: Update for July 2026

July 1, 2026

The Callan Name Study keeps growing, and as it does, I intend to tell you about it. If you know of anyone with a Callan surname (no matter what spelling they used), take a look at the master list (a spreadsheet you can find here or on WikiTree) and see if I have them in the database. If not, you can add them with this form!

I Have Lists of Names…What’s Next?

Over the past couple of months, I’ve experimented with Google’s Gemini with variations of this prompt:

Generate a .CSV file listing every individual in the 1850 US Census whose
surname is a variation of “Callan” (using Soundex to generate the
spelling variations) and provide columns for the following information:
Surname, First name(s), age, year of birth (calculate this by subtracting the age value from the date of enumeration for the census page), sex, place of birth, head of the household, and columns for the State, County, and town or city of the census place for that person.

After tinkering with the wording and figuring out what Gemini could and couldn’t do, I ended up with several spreadsheets – one for each available census year in each of the English-speaking countries (U.S., Ireland, Australia, and Canada, plus individual census records for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). I was able to combine them into two tabs on this Proton spreadsheet. (The first tab is a backup of my One Name Study, which is on Google Docs.)

What I don’t know is “how complete is this?” The results seem complete, but I don’t have an easy way to perform any quality control. At some point, probably during my summer break, I intend to run this experiment again and try a few tricks to determine if the results are different. If I take the outputs from the first and second sets of results and use the “remove duplicates” utility, I should be able to see whether they match perfectly or not. And if not, I may need to run the experiment several times until I can determine I’ve gotten “everybody” or as close to that as I’m likely to get.

I’ve also tried a few different methods to get Gemini to compare the results across multiple decades to see if it can identify the same individual in different census years, but for now, that task seems better suited to a human being.

Apples and Oranges

I also ran the prompt to get CSV files for the 1790-1840 U.S. Census records. For those who may not be aware, 1850 was the first U.S. Census to record the names of each person in a household. Before that, only the Head of Household was named, and everyone else was counted by gender and age ranges (which differed from decade to decade).

I haven’t included those results in the US tab of the spreadsheet because their format is so different, but I need to figure out a way to compare all of these results. But, since there is even less identifying information to work with (ie, we don’t know the age of the head of the household in these records), it’s going to come down to human judgment making the call.

And I suspect we will have to use a very manual, very labor-intensive process to get all of these individuals and families mapped into Ancestry/WikiTree/FamilySearch/etc.

What’s In A Name II: Electric Soundex Boogaloo

I don’t know yet how much of a problem this might be, but here’s what I get when I ask for the Soundex variations of Callan:

Phonetic Soundex Key: C450 (Groups primary late-18th-century spelling variations including Callan, Callen, Callin, Callon, Calan, Calen, and Callam).

I know that there are several other variations (like “Callaghan” and the occasional “O’Callan” or “McCallen”) that this leaves out. I may need to go look again and see if there is a robust One Name Study for variations of Callahan, or of the similar-but-distinct “Collins,” and ask if they’ve seen any consistent data that shows our surnames either come from the same source, or for different families.

Summer Break

By the time you read this post, I should be back from traveling, but before I get back to regular posting, I’m going to give myself a bit of a summer break. I expect I’ll still obsessively pore through all of this data and write stories about what I find interesting, but look for those stories to start appearing again after August starts to wind down.
Ahnentafel #31: Aletha Frederick Putnam (1899-1981)

June 26, 2026

“What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

Aletha Putnam was born a month and a half before the 20th century in New Albany Township, Indiana.

Her family moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, about 1905, and Aletha spent the rest of her life there and in nearby Omaha, Nebraska. She married Howard Martin, and like many of the women we will write about as this Ahnentafel series continues, it will be hard to separate her story from that of her husband and children.

But we do have one important source that other, earlier families will lack, and I think you’ll agree that it provides a great deal of light and color that would otherwise be missing from Aletha’s story.

Douglas’s Memories

Howard and Aletha had three children: Douglas (1920-1997), Merilyn (1923-1997), and Charles (1928-2016). Douglas left an unpublished memoir in which he recorded memories of his childhood. Any quotes in this post come from him, and while I have no reason to question the general facts of his account, I will point out that it’s difficult to cite an unpublished source like this on any of the usual family history platforms.

“Howard William Martin was my father and Frederick Aletha Putnam was my mother. Dad called her ‘Putty’ before they were married and then referred to her always as ‘Aletha’ or just ‘Leath’ for short. To everyone, she was known as ‘Aletha’ or ‘Leath’. …My maternal grand-mother was a very headstrong person. I could not say her real name, Daisy, so I called her ‘Deedaw’ and everyone else called her ‘Deedaw’ too. This is how her name became ‘Deedaw or Deed’ for short and everyone thought this was her real name. Nothing has ever been found, and nothing was ever written on this important subject.”

Douglas’s joke that “nothing was ever written” about his family is technically incorrect (since he wrote about it), but it also makes the larger point about what does and doesn’t make it into the historical record. There are always things that we “just know” about our families that never seem to get written down, like the origins of nicknames or what people’s personalities were like.

The thing to keep in mind about a memoir like Douglas’s is that it captures one person’s limited perspective. It’s less of a photograph and more of a pencil sketch, and we might be able to find enough records to support some facts, but we’ll never really know what the full color reality might have been.

“Most of her married years, my mother spent enjoying being a housewife though, after a highschool major in domestic science. Dad was working regularly days as a city salesman for Mona-Motor Oil Co. and was actually a salesman all of his life. But he still volunteered evenings as the first KOIL radio announcer and he and a friend, Ed Hess Jr, played in the radio station’s orchestra. Mother and I were also ‘volunteered’. She answered the phones and I delivered all of the requests in the other room to Dad to be announced over the air ways.”

Building a picture of who Aletha was may never be a completed project, but we can at least begin to sketch it with these few lines.

One Family’s Faith

For Aletha’s story, Douglas tells us this pertinent fact about her father:

“I knew my grandfather Charles Walter Putnam for only the last 2 years perhaps of his life. … This person was a Christian Scientist through and through.”

Christian Science originated when the Church of Christ, Scientist was founded in 1879 in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy, author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Charles Putnam was 20 years old in 1879 and had spent part of his childhood in Rochester, New York, and part in Brownstown, Michigan. He moved to Indiana from Rochester in 1880 to live with his maternal grandparents.

We may not know much about how or when Charles became a Christian Scientist, or what specifically that meant to him, but we can find some clues in the stories that were handed down.

“My father was raised in the Methodist Church 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 was later married in and joined the Lutheran Church in the Maplewood section of Omaha and Charles joined the Episcopal Church, I guess.”

The story that I heard from my wife’s family (shared over the course of several holiday gatherings, so I couldn’t attribute it to anyone in particular) was that Aletha’s family was unhappy that she married someone who was not a believer in Christian Science, but that she insisted on raising her children in her faith.

I was told that when he was young, Charles broke his leg in an accident. The family (probably referring mainly to Aletha and Deedaw, by that point) believed, as a tenet of the Christian Science faith, that the physical realm is an illusion, and medical treatment is not necessary. So Charles’s broken leg was not treated, and during his youth, his legs were different lengths. But by the time he enlisted in the service (during the Korean War), the bones had evened out enough for him to pass his physical. This was treated at the time as evidence of a miracle.

When I heard this story from Merilyn’s family in the late 1990s, the consensus was that there was a more conventional, physical explanation for Charles’s recovery. Given Douglas’s few comments about religion, he might have agreed with that assessment, and if Charles joined the Episcopal church later on, that would suggest he felt the same way.

By then, of course, Aletha was no longer around to present or defend her point of view.

Homemaking

Douglas’s memoir is a gold mine of casual references to his family, but some of these references are difficult to parse into a description. The memoir itself is 29 pages (including one page that reads, in its entirety, “Since retirement there has been nothing consequential that I have done that I am proud of.”) and the narrative tends to ramble and contradict itself.

Still, there are insights about Aletha and the home she made throughout his recollections.

“Deedaw being widowed at a very young age [Charles died in 1922] spent most of her years as a baby sitter for us Martin kids. She was also a great companion and occupied most of her time in needle-work except when she could con Mother into creating the latest craze of needle-work, crotcheting, decaling, knitting, or ornamental furniture painting. They both loved doing things of that sort during their spare time. … When I was about 13 or 14, as a craze, Mother began knitting and took to it feverishly. Her entire wardrobe was all of knitted things, dresses, shawls, light coats, Anything that was knitted, she made and wore them. She also was very good at it and very, very fast. She was encouraged to start a knitting shop in the Chieftain Hotel selling yarns and supplies and teaching her clientele knitting. She was very well known in Council Bluffs and had accumulated a large group of girls. This she did and made a very livable wage from it. But she soon tired of it and complained. We then moved to Omaha.

“Every Saturday morning after I had helped with the breakfast dishes and put them away, my mother instructed me to help her with the upstairs cleaning. … I began these chores by shaking and then sweeping all of the small throw rugs followed by my helping Mom change the top sheets to the bottom and put fresh top sheets on all of the beds and then dusting everywhere. I couldn’t go out to play until all of this was done. Generally these chores took all of each Saturday morning. After many of these Saturdays my interest in general housework became natural and even likable. My mother soon found out that I was very interested in girls, so one Saturday during our usual cleaning chores she took it upon herself to tell me about “the birds and the bees” and where kids really came from and all of that ‘neat’ stuff. This was very timely and a very natural surrounding to talk about this subject. I felt very close to Mother for this revelation. Dad would have never have done anything like this and left it entirely to Mother. He also personally would have given me HELL if I got into any kind of trouble with a girl. What a coward he was about things like that!!”

Meal times in the 1920s and 1930s provide some color:

“I do remember that Mother was famous for all of the foods that she prepared. Though her selection of foods was, by my imagination now, very limited. She won that water heater and its installation by submitting her “Burnt Sugar Cake’ with ‘Burnt Sugar’ frosting. I can still remember that her cakes were never taken from the pan they were baked in, but kept covered neatly with a folded but clean ‘TEA towel’. How was that for quick access? She graduated from highschool majoring in domestic science. What else? We always ate the dinner meal in our dining room. Dad insisted on Bean Soup once in while. He insisted on any fish on occasion but never got that. We had chili with kidney beans and baked potatoes, round steak, Welch Rarebit over crackers just to name a few of my favorites. Many vegetables with those meals and always a salad. Dad never got his way about the fish for dinner though.”

And the family’s traditions, like many families, did not change just because the law did:

“Remember these were PROHIBITION days! We positioned the “beer” crock close to the floor drain on a special box that was just the right height and covered the crock with a clean “TEA” towel. We could peek now and then to watch it “work” daily until it was time to bottle it. With my help, Dad and I would wash the old quart bottles and rebottle his “home-brew” that he was so very famous for and then age it in Mother’s “cool cabinet” that he built. After the beer had sufficiently aged, we would share it with guests or neighbors all standing around the porcelain topped kitchen table with a special aluminum cook pot that we had, with one piece of ice in the center of it and the beer, of course, from quart bottles poured over the ice. The pot was then passed around and all of us drank from that same pot. I got to taste some of it. That was good stuff!”

While it may be hard to read between the lines and tease facts out of this kind of narrative, it does give us some rich impressions of the way these ancestors lived. The key to reading between the lines, though, is to have as many lines to read between as you can get.

For most ancestors, that’s the only way you have left to get to know them.
Family Faiths and New Religious Movements

June 24, 2026
Songwriter Amy Ray of Indigo Girls included a snippet of a conversation she recorded with her grandmother, Frances Ozilline Walker¹, at the beginning of this 1999 song that bears Ozilline’s name:
- Ozilline: He observed Saturday as the Sabbath.
- Ray: What kind of faith does that make him?
- Ozilline: He didn’t have one.
- Ray: Oh, okay.
- Ozilline: He didn’t believe in any one thing. He would go out in the street, and all of the kids would play the… with a drum-like thing. Some kind of an instrument. And, Momma played the organ. … She played that, and got a real big kick out of it.
Ozilline’s family was from Georgia, and she describes a faith tradition that had less to do with scholarly theology and orthodoxy than it did with community and expressions of joy. It sounds like the kind of faith tradition that would have given my own grandfather, Russ Clark, fits.

On one hand, her family’s obvious rejection of orthodox thinking would have been in line with his Southern Baptist emphasis on having a personal, individual relationship with God (instead of going through a priest or other human intercessor). On the other hand, he routinely mocked people who deviated from what he believed to be Biblical truth, especially if they seemed to lack any formal education or basic literacy in the Bible. He took a special delight in explaining to anyone who would listen just what people of other faiths “got wrong,” and explaining why they weren’t really Christian, even if they thought they were.

By the time I was 12, I had picked up this bad habit, and I would quarrel with classmates of different faiths in ways that I find embarrassing, now. As a non-believing adult, when I hear people describe the religious traditions they or their ancestors practiced, I make an effort to appreciate what their beliefs can teach me about them. I like to analyze how those beliefs might affect their behavior. But I’m also keenly aware of how easy it is to judge people unfairly for believing things that I don’t think are true, or to unintentionally make them feel judged.

I try to strike a balance where I avoid telling someone like Ozilline that their faith is somehow wrong, but I also have to be careful not to mislead them into thinking that my acceptance constitutes agreement.

As is always the case in genealogy and family history, we’re not talking about establishing any absolute truths. We’re talking about finding whatever facts we can find and understanding what we can understand.

Avoiding Controversy

In your private genealogical research efforts, you have no doubt found ways to compartmentalize the different faiths practiced by different families in different places and different times, but writing about those faiths is a trickier task, especially if living cousins still feel strongly about those faith traditions, or if you learn things that contradict what you have always believed.

Discussing religious faith or political convictions will always be a delicate business, no matter how neutrally or academically you try to broach the subject. The tangled nest of deeply buried, irrational biases that every human carries around with them is bound to lead to hurt feelings. Most of the time, saying nothing about a potentially divisive subject is the most prudent choice.

If you’re writing a relative’s biography, for example, you may simply record the fact of their membership in a local church. If their church was a bigger part of their identity, you might use words like “strong” or “devout” in that one-line mention, and leave it at that. But unless you have records or writings from them discussing their faith, you may be inclined to avoid digging deeper.

Sometimes, though, digging deeper and exploring unfamiliar beliefs is necessary to understand your ancestors. In the earlier essay “When Faith Divides,” I talked about the historical backdrop of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and how that history shaped the way modern Christian Americans think about their faith traditions.

I ended that piece after discussing some broad historical changes in what would be considered “mainstream” faith traditions, and posed a question:

This is where your personal beliefs may create a bias that makes it harder for you to understand the beliefs of your ancestors. Perhaps your grandparents converted from an older faith, and passed down acrimonious notions about that older faith to you. Will you be able to look past “that group is wrong and bad because they teach X” and understand your great-grandparents were really like?

Facts vs. Faith: Always a Losing Battle

Any genealogist can understand how easily a family legend can come to be accepted as fact, and how difficult it can be to find the evidence needed to support or refute the facts behind any given legend. Treasured beliefs about our origins are rarely based on facts and evidence, which makes it harder to prove or refute beliefs using facts. As the old saying goes:

“You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.”³

With American ancestors, it may be easy to identify which church they belonged to, but difficult to understand what that says about their personal beliefs. This is especially true if the church they identify with grew out of one of the revivalist movements of the mid-1800s.

The U.S. Constitution wisely prohibited the establishment of a state religion and provided for everyone to exercise their conscience. One result of this is that America’s history is full of stories of new religious movements (NRMs) that either grew out of mainstream faiths or arose in reaction to or opposition to them. Many of these new movements defined themselves as being part of a Christian tradition, sometimes even claiming to be the “real” church, returning after centuries of suppression in Europe.

Demonstrating that multiple groups who all claim to be “the real church” can’t all be correct shouldn’t be difficult or controversial, but it is both difficult and controversial to demonstrate that a particular group’s origin story isn’t supported by the historical record.

To use my own heritage as an example, the Southern Baptist church I was raised in was a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC was established in 1845 by white Baptists who supported the continuation of slavery and did not support the ordination of Black pastors. Even though this is a well-established fact documented by both SBC and the “northern Baptists” at the time, most practicing Southern Baptists do not know this, and of those who do know, few are willing to accept it. In my teens, when I began to question my faith, and I learned about our history, my own father told me that it wasn’t true.

Dad, who was born 100 years after the documented historical events took place, urged me to ignore the historical documents that tied our origins to slavery and racial animus and accept a version of history in which we represented an oppressed, enlightened minority who had existed in the margins of that history, keeping the truth of the original early church alive.

As I have learned since my teens, every faith tradition⁴, no matter how recently they were established, maintains a similar, unofficial belief about its own origins. In every case, the historical record tells us that there were worldly, contemporary factors that led to their establishment or division from their parent body. And yet, depending on the faith group in question, they either ignore and minimize their history or they make accepting the unsupported story an article of faith. In some extreme cases, spreading the ahistorical myth of their origin is part of their practice of witnessing or evangelizing, and they use the reaction of nonbelievers (like me) as evidence that they are still being oppressed.

For a family historian, recording a person’s beliefs when those beliefs contradict the historical record can put you in a difficult position.

Restating My Thesis

Last week, I asserted this in my post about Michael Callen:

Anyone who does genealogy research has dozens of examples of children and adults in their family who were lost to yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, influenza, whooping cough, and various kinds of pox. And if you look for it, you will probably find a connection between the religion your ancestors practiced and their fear of those diseases.

In case that wasn’t clear, I was trying to make a point about the broad historical context of life in the American Midwest, where communities were often isolated from each other and where neighbors of different backgrounds (whether ethnic, linguistic, or religious) had to figure out what the rules were for dealing with each other. Without the benefit of knowing how or why diseases were spread, outbreaks in these isolated communities were terrifying, and people were desperate for the kind of answers and comfort that religion offers.

I’m not here to tell anyone that their religion is right or wrong because of the circumstances that might have led to its founding. I’m just making the point that humans are rarely as rational as they like to think they are, and there is a powerful inherited trait in all of us that compels us to find explanations for how and why we experience what we experience.

And if that irrational story brings joy or peace in a difficult time, it may be hard to accept that there are more rational explanations for what we experienced than the ones we hold onto.

No Absolutes

Recording your family’s history should reflect who they were. That may come into conflict with other facts and evidence.

Sometimes, simply stating what they believed is enough. You don’t need a deep analysis of Ozilline’s faith to capture its essence. Other times, as with Grandpa Russ and his complicated relationship with his own faith and that of others, will require a more detailed and sensitive approach.

There is no real guidebook to navigating this subject. You need to use your judgment about what to say, arm yourself with the facts, and prepare to be wrong no matter how you handle the topic.

Now, let’s see if I can put that into practice as I prepare my next post, which will talk about a family that belonged to one of those new religious movements of the mid-19th century.

Wish me luck!
1. https://www.lifeblood.net/songs/backgrounds/ozilline.html ↩︎
2. Quote Origin: You Cannot Reason People Out of Something They Were Not Reasoned Into ↩︎
3. I’m only using examples of Christian-based groups today, but this pattern can be found in every faith tradition. ↩︎
Ahnentafel #30: Howard William Martin (1897-1970)

June 19, 2026
“What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

Howard Martin was a World War I army veteran and businessman in 1920s Iowa. He ran his own Texaco filling station and held positions at several successful companies. He even had his own radio program on the local Omaha radio station, KOIL, where he was known as “Here-We-Go Howie”. You can see from this 1925 opinion piece that he thought very highly of the radio:

The Stockman’s Journal Omaha, Nebraska • Thu, Nov 5, 1925

Howard was the only child of William Findley Martin (1874–1943) and Harriet Jenevereth “Hattie” Shepard (1874–1923). His father worked in the railyards, and Howard grew up and attended school in Kane Township, Iowa, near Council Bluffs.

Balloon Man

Howard enlisted in the U.S. Army on 25 Oct 1917 and served as a corporal in the Balloon Corps organized under the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps. He was assigned to the 6th Balloon Company, 3rd Balloon Squadron, and shipped out from New York aboard ship No. 501 on 31 Jan 1918.

The 6th Balloon Company arrived in France on February 20, 1918, under the command of Major Arthur Boettcheer. After training at artillery firing centers in the Services of Supply, they went to the front in July 1918. The Company was assigned to the V Corps at Ravine Jouy-en-Argonne at the opening of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. They brought down two enemy planes within 24 hours. They directed artillery fire, sometimes using carrier pigeons to transmit messages, as regular telephone and radio communications were difficult to maintain with the daily redeployment of balloon units. By 11 Nov 1918, they had advanced to Montfaucon. One of their missions involved dropping propaganda leaflets over enemy lines.

In a 1961 dissertation, Sam Hager Frank¹ described balloon operations like this:

On September 17, 1918, at Dommartin-la-Montagne in the St. Mihiel salient, the first eight balloons were successfully floated over the German lines by the 6th Balloon Company. These balloons and the ones subsequently used were supplied by the French. About nine feet long, they were made of chemically treated paper and could carry four pounds of leaflets (about 600 sheets). The ballons utilized a simple release consisting of a fuse and hangers to which bunches of leaflets were attached. As the fuse burned, the wire-bound bunches of paper fell free and scattered.”

Family Man

Sgt. Howard Martin was discharged from the service on 19 May 1919, and he married Aletha Putnam (1899–1981) on 3 Jul 1919 in Pottawattamie County, Iowa. They resided with Aletha’s family in 1920.

Howard and Aletha raised three children in Council Bluffs and Omaha. (Omaha, NE, and Council Bluffs, IA are located on either side of the Missouri River.) Douglas was born in 1920, followed by Merilyn in 1923, and Charles in 1928.

Howard started out as a salesman, then became successful running a filling station for the Mona Motor Oil Company. As mentioned above, he was the first announcer and program director for their radio station, KOIL, during the 1920s. After 1930, he worked in sales for several companies, including Firestone and Texaco. In the 1940s, after the Second World War, he gave his son-in-law, Bud Holmquist, a start in one of his businesses.

Howard was 73 when he died at an Omaha hospital on August 10, 1970. He was remembered as a former member of the Broadway United Methodist Church and as an organist for the Elks Club.
1. Frank, Sam Hager; American Air Service Observation in World War I, PH.D Dissertation, University of Florida, Aug 1961; pgs. 141, 341, 378, 380. ↩︎
Notable Callan: Musician and Activist

June 17, 2026
The Callan Name Study keeps growing, and as it does, I keep finding interesting people to tell you about.

If you know of an interesting Callan (no matter what spelling they used), take a look at the master list (a spreadsheet you can find here or on WikiTree) and see if I have them in the database. If not, you can add them with this form!

An Acoustic Personality

Meet Michael Callen, a singer, songwriter, and activist known for raising awareness about AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Here he is with The Flirtations, an a cappella group that was featured on the soundtrack of the 1993 Tom Hanks/Denzel Washington film, Philadelphia.

In this TV appearance, Mike is the tenor in the white shirt:

Born in Rising Sun, Indiana, Mike died at age 38 at Midway Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, from AIDS-related complications of pulmonary Kaposi’s sarcoma.

Despite his short time on Earth with us, he was an author, activist, and singer-songwriter who released a solo album, Purple Heart, in 1988. He wrote most of the songs for the album, and to my ear, there are some sonic similarities to folks like Joe Jackson as well as the obvious nods to Elton John. (Track one is a cover of “Where the Boys Are.”) A 2-CD collection was released after Mike’s death, and you can find all of his music on his website if you’re interested.

Your author with a copy of Purple Heart.

The Family Connection

I don’t yet know whether Michael and I share a common ancestor, but his ancestors are already included in the Callan Name Study on WikiTree. Beginning with his WikiTree Profile, I can see that his 2nd-great-grandfather was James A. Callen (1833-1862), whose family lived in Kenton County, Kentucky. As best I can tell, the paternal grandfather of James A. Callen was John Callen, who was probably born around the time of the Revolutionary War and settled in Kentucky before the birth of his son in 1806.

Since my most distant known ancestors were the brothers, James and John, who settled in Ohio between 1810 and 1816, it is almost certain that John Callen of Kentucky was not another son of their father, James Callin, whom The Callin Family History refers to as “James 1st.” I can’t rule out the possibility that John was a nephew of James 1st, because we don’t know if James had any brothers, but without more information about both men, there is no reason to think that they were related that closely.

But regardless of how distant our common ancestry may be, we share a surname, and our ancestors shared similar experiences settling the interior of the North American continent during the late 18th century.

Or, to put it more broadly… we’re all cousins if we go back far enough!

Morality Plays

I was a junior in high school when Purple Heart was released, and I probably would not have related to the subject matter or the style of the music Michael was making at the time. I later owned a copy of the Philadelphia soundtrack, but never noticed that a Callen was in the vocal group singing “Mr. Sandman,” despite being passionate about the a cappella groups performing at the time and compulsively reading the liner notes in every album I bought.

When Michael was alive and active as an artist, I was just beginning my journey away from being the conservative evangelical kid I used to be toward whatever it is I am now. As a Gen-X kid heading into adulthood, I harbored a cynical aloofness that came from having moral arguments pushed at me through media – after-school specials, public service announcement campaigns, and ham-handed story lines embedded in the types of TV programs aimed at teenagers during the 1980s. It felt like the adults in our lives thought that the best way to deal with things they were scared of – teen pregnancy, teen suicide, teen drug use – was to simply tell us “Don’t do that,” and call it a day.

The cringe-inducing earnestness and moralizing of those campaigns made it hard to take any public figure pitching a pet issue seriously. It didn’t help that most of these stories were framed as morality plays: these people made THIS choice, and THAT was the consequence. Even those rare stories that tried to capture the nuances of what human beings actually deal with struggled to escape that framing.

And the implication of that framing is that if you are suffering from the consequence, you did something wrong to deserve it.

Germ Theory vs. God

Our 18th and 19th-century ancestors in America occupy an interesting and unique place in history. Before the 1850s, when Louis Pasteur’s work became known, poor sanitation and hygiene allowed the frequent spread of diseases that we now think of as entirely preventable. Anyone who does genealogy research has dozens of examples of children and adults in their family who were lost to yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, influenza, whooping cough, and various kinds of pox. And if you look for it, you will probably find a connection between the religion your ancestors practiced and their fear of those diseases.

We tend to downplay the tension between the old ways of thinking about disease as something mysterious that only God could control and the Enlightenment-era progress that led to the germ theory of disease. The idea that God alone inflicted disease and that man was defying God whenever we found ways to prevent or treat diseases has plagued us throughout our history (pun intended), and we like to tell ourselves that science has allowed us to outgrow those old, superstitious ways of thinking.

But if I learned anything from watching people respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, it is that people still don’t understand how diseases spread, and when they are afraid, they still fall back on superstition and religion to deal with that fear.

After he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1982, Michael began to advocate for more research into, and better awareness of, the disease that would lead to his death in 1993. I see now that he was not only fighting against people who believed that he deserved to suffer from his disease, but he was also working uphill against people like me, who had become tired of the emotional manipulation of public awareness campaigns.

The Element of Truth

There is no shame in being wrong. It happens to all of us, all the time. It happened to Michael, too.

Michael lived with AIDS for 11 years, and during that time, he worked as an advocate for better public policies, not only in the prevention and treatment of the disease, but also in the treatment of gay, lesbian, and queer people. He co-authored an essay in 1982 arguing that the promiscuity that gay men had associated with their identity and with their liberation ideology was dangerous. The 1983 manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which Michael also co-authored, outlined practices for safe sex that were controversial both to religious conservatives (who believed people like Michael were trying to teach their children to have sex) and to the gay community (who believed that “safe sex” was part of an agenda to take away their hard-won freedoms).

In his 1990 book, Surviving AIDS, Michael called out public health officials and what he called the “propaganda of hopelessness,” drawing attention to the stories of 13 long-term AIDS survivors of different sexes, ethnic backgrounds, and sexual backgrounds. By that point, he had come under suspicion and resentment from people who thought he might have fabricated his diagnosis to get attention. In response, he released his medical records.

What Michael got wrong doesn’t really change anything he did or undermine any of his work. He questioned the HIV theory of AIDS, and commented in a 1992 interview, “The HIV paradigm has produced nothing of value for my life and I actually believe that treatments based on the arrogant belief that HIV has proven to be the sole and sufficient cause of AIDS has hastened the deaths of many of my friends.”¹

Despite being an activist and advocate for more than a decade, Michael was still not a scientist. His expertise was in music and writing. And even within the worldwide community of HIV/AIDS research, there were questions about how the virus worked. Conspiracy theories about the origin of AIDS, as an intentionally crafted biological weapon, were fueled by lingering questions, such as why HIV took up to a decade to cause symptoms. There were also legal issues over which research team deserved credit (and patent royalties) for the development of treatments, which fed into those conspiracy theories.

How to Embrace a Lost Cousin

In the end, it was Kaposi’s Sarcoma in his lungs that took our courageous musical cousin away from us. Even if you remain uncomfortable with who he was and what he fought for, you can’t avoid the cruel irony of lung disease in a singer.

But I hope that if you are uncomfortable thinking about who Michael Callen was, you won’t ignore the discomfort. Think about how many people didn’t dare to be themselves and take the risks that he took. How many people were stuck in a time and place where they were forced to hide? How many people do we not know of simply because they were erased for being different?

Discomfort is there to teach us a lesson. You might even say it is a consequence of our choices.

But you don’t have to say that.
1. “Immunity Resource Foundation – Meditel Film and Video Archive”. Immunity.org.uk. Archived from the original on August 7, 2013. Retrieved March 31, 2013. ↩︎
Ahnentafel #29: Hildur Agda Leander (1886-1945)

June 12, 2026

“What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

Hildur Leander was the second of six children born to Gustaf Hugo Waldemar Leander and Ingeborg Olesdatter (or Swedahl) in Brooklyn, New York.

Her father, Gust, had immigrated from Sweden in 1882, when he was 18. Ingeborg’s family was from Norway, and they began migrating to Minnesota after 1880, when Ingeborg’s older brother, Erik, brought his wife to Todd County. Ingeborg seems to have arrived in the U.S. about 1884 and quickly married Gust. They had their first daughter, Augusta, in Connecticut in 1885, and their second, Hildur, in Brooklyn in 1886. Then they moved to Stillwater, Minnesota.

From Elsewhere

Gust Leander moved his family around quite a bit, probably following work opportunities. The Leander family resided in Minnesota for a few years. Hildur’s brother, Martin, was born in Stillwater, and her sister, Mamie, was born in Saint Paul. The family moved to Illinois around 1894. Her brother Arthur was born in Chicago, and her youngest sister, Anna Cecelia, was born in Crystal Lake, in McHenry County.

By 1903, they were back in Saint Paul, where they would remain until Gust left the family about 1912 and moved to Tacoma, Washington.

It’s hard to imagine what Hildur and her siblings thought about their childhood, since to them, the frequent moves would have seemed normal. I don’t know whether they would have had a hard time adjusting to new places, or whether being the children of immigrants prepared them for that. I imagine they grew up only knowing English, but I wonder whether they were exposed to their father’s Swedish and their mother’s Norwegian, or if they spent time on the farms of their aunts and uncles.

Perhaps always being from somewhere else was a challenge, or perhaps that made it easier to adapt.

Stability in Stillwater

Hildur married William Holmquist on 26 June 1912 in Saint Paul. They made their home in Mahtomedi, where William worked for the public schools, and they raised their son and three daughters there. After a childhood spent moving every few years, life with William may have been a welcome contrast.

And then there is Gust’s departure for the West Coast. It is to find reliable records around divorce, and it’s even harder to know what happened when there are no records. I can only imagine that Hildur’s parents must not have been very happy, and I can speculate about how that may have affected their children. But at least Hildur and William were able to make a different life for themselves and their children.

And Then the Mysteries Pile Up

Life is not static, though, even when you settle down in Mahtomedi.

If you don’t count the mystery of what happened to her father after he left Minnesota, unanswered questions about Hildur’s life begin to accumulate after 1940.

The photo above shows Hildur and William with three of their four children in their cottage at Christmas time near Bear Lake, probably around 1938. They all appear in that household on the 1940 Census – William, Hildur, Ruth, Lillian, Wesley, and Dorothy. But that is the last record I have found that tells me where Ruth was. After 1940, I don’t see her in any records – and the clues I see in other people’s trees lead me to other women named Ruth Holmquist who are clearly not the same person.

Lillian married Marvin Robertson in 1940, and they raised their family in Mahtomedi. In 1950, they were listed in the Census with their four children, but nobody else was in the household. Wesley (aka Bud Holmquist) married in 1943, and he and Merilyn Martin lived in Omaha. Their 1950 household also included only their immediate family. Dorothy married Sidney Woodcock in 1944, and their family lived in Bremerton, Washington. In 1950, they appeared in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, with their two children.

As I told you last week, when Dorothy married, William and Hildur also moved to Bremerton, Washington. In May of 1947, they lived in Seattle, where William asked Hildur for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty.

And that’s where I lose track of Hildur.

After 1947, Hildur does not appear in any more records. She isn’t listed in the census on her own, that I can find, and she is not in the home of any of her children (unless she was residing with Ruth, whom I also can’t find). She also did not live with her three surviving siblings in 1950: Martin, who resided in Dayton, Ohio; Arthur, in Saint Paul; or with Anna Zimmerman in Moline, Illinois.

Perhaps one day, I’ll catch a break or find a clue that tells me what happened to Hildur, her father, or her daughter. But for now, I’m stuck.

And sometimes, we have to live with that.
Family Pride

June 10, 2026
Family history research thrives on dates of significance. Birth, marriage, and death, of course, but also immigration dates, decadal census, and annual taxes all give us milestones to mark the stories of our ancestors and cousins. Some of these dates feel more important to us, whether it is the birthdate of someone you particularly admire, or the date you lost someone.

Whether the observance is celebratory or solemn, humans like to commemorate things. That’s why this is only a partial list of monthly holidays and observances that fall in June:
- Adopt a Shelter Cat Month
- African-American Music Appreciation Month
- Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month
- Audiobook Appreciation Month
- Celibacy Awareness Month
- Cucumber Month
- Dairy Alternatives Month (but, also, Dairy Month)
- Fireworks Eye Safety Month
- International Childhood Cancer Awareness Month
- International Men’s Month
- International Surf Music Month
- Lemon Month
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month
- National Accordion Awareness Month
- National Camping Month
- National Candy Month
- National Caribbean-American Heritage Month
- National DJ Month
- National Microchipping Month
- National Safety Month
- National Seafood Month
- National Soul Food Month
- Potty Training Awareness Month
- PTSD Awareness Month (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
- Women’s Golf Month
- World Infertility Month
- Zoo and Aquarium Month
I have several favorites on this list (I am more than aware of accordions, for example), but one in particular stands out as important to my family.

The Response to Shame

People express many different feelings about the existence of LGBTQ+ people, and about Pride Month. Some of them are very strong feelings, and are not kind.

As a result of the long history of strong, unkind feelings being expressed towards anyone who did not fit the straight, cisgendered mold, people have historically tended to hide who and what they were, and the feeling associated with hiding themselves was Shame.

Shame is unpleasant. Shame does harm. And shame meant that people who did not fit into a specific expectation of their sex or gender were either brutalized, driven away, or forced to pretend to fit. Finding evidence of an ancestor who would have been what we call LGBTQ+ is highly unlikely, precisely because those individuals and their families are unlikely to have left a record behind.

There have been societies and places where Shame did not rule the day. They are also rare, and they tend not to be obsessed with record-keeping, which makes it difficult to tease out the evidence that a genealogist needs. Our society has only recently begun to behave in a way that does not automatically suppress the existence of LGBTQ+ people.

Pride Month was established to counteract that history of Shame. It is celebrated in June because that is when the Stonewall riots took place in 1969, a tragic event in which people demanding basic rights were met with violence. But because they insisted and demanded those rights, my family has benefited.

Thanks to the activism and persistence of those who came before them, my children are part of the first generation in American history where those on the queer spectrum can live openly, marry, or have their own families.

The Difference Between Us

My wife and I are both Gen-X cisgender heterosexual people who chose to marry young (compared to others in our generation) and to have double the average number of children for our age group. We were teenagers during a time when pop stars or celebrities “coming out” was often the subject of national news, and was often treated as a scandal. From our perspective, it quickly became clear that who a person chose to love should not matter to the rest of us. Artists like Prince and Michael Stipe of the band R.E.M. each demonstrated in extremely different ways that whether a person’s differences were overt and over-the-top (like Prince) or understated and private (like Stipe), it wasn’t anyone else’s business.

I may not have been gay or queer, but because I disliked sports and preferred chorus and theater, I was a frequent target for bullying that almost always included questioning my sexuality. I can’t pretend that I didn’t pay some of that forward. When I reflect on how I treated others during high school, I, too, could bully others, and did. But I eventually learned that bullying is the problem, and that treating others with respect is simply the better way to behave.

Accepting that others are different from us should not be a radical idea. That is the foundation that any healthy society is built on. Those differences are what make our stories interesting. At least, that’s what I’ve learned from reading other people’s family histories.

This Family’s History

Despite not being LGBT ourselves, my wife and I are still unconventional. She is more interested than I am in things like power tools and grilling, and I am… well, you see how I spend my time. Two of our kids are openly queer with queer partners, whom we love spending time with. From the outside, our growing clan probably seems odd to those with an expectation of what a family should look like, but that’s who we are. To us, this is normal.

Pride Month is a time when we celebrate the things about us that are different. It is also, for me, a reminder of how normal the rainbow of human diversity is.

There are still those who have strong feelings about people like us, who are different. They may choose to focus on the spectacle, and they may react in ways that are not well thought out or kind. But most people are kind to us, and most people get that “live and let live” is a better way to behave.

And eventually, when our descendants and cousins look back at us, they should at least have a record that we were here. Because we have nothing to be ashamed of.

So, whether you celebrate Dairy Month or Dairy Alternatives Month, I hope you are well. Use sunscreen and hydrate. Don’t be afraid to be who you are. And don’t be the kind of person who treats others poorly because of who they are.
Ahnentafel #28: Arvid William Holmquist (1880-1962)

June 5, 2026
“What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

Our First Immigrant

William Holmquist is the first person in this Ahnentafel series who was not born in the United States.

He was born on 6 October 1880 in Norra Vram, which, since 1997, has been located in the county (or “Län“) of Skåne. He was 29 years old when he arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the Arabic on 3 May 1910. An uncle, John Spence, was listed as the “Person in the US” to meet him in Stillwater, Washington County, Minnesota.

In 1910, immigrants faced no passport or visa requirements. Anyone could purchase passage to the United States. Upon arrival, they were processed at centers like Ellis Island or Angel Island. The process relied on a pre-existing ship manifest, medical check-ups, and legal cross-examination to filter out inadmissible individuals, and typically took three to five hours. On average, two percent of arriving immigrants were excluded from entry. The most common reasons for exclusion were a doctor diagnosing an immigrant with a contagious disease that could endanger public health, or a legal inspector being concerned that an immigrant would likely become a public charge or an illegal contract laborer.¹

William was naturalized in 1921, a process that took 11 years. In the 1920s, U.S. immigration laws began to shift from a system of “qualitative exclusion” (banning specific categories of people) to a system of quantitative restriction (strict numerical caps, visas, and digital security screenings). It’s worth keeping in mind that when you read about “Open Borders” in America, that was more or less what we had for the first 150 years of our national existence, and for the 400 years before that. So when people talk about their immigrant families coming in “the right way,” they probably don’t realize that “the right way” was to simply show up and start living here.

Boyhood In Sweden

Born “Arvid William Holmquist,” William was the only son of Anders Holmquist and Elna Mårtensson. Anders listed his occupation as “husägare” in the Swedish clerical surveys available online, which tells us a bit about the family’s lifestyle.

That title was most commonly used in towns and cities. Husägare generally owned the physical tenement or building, which often contained multiple apartments rented out to tenants, making them akin to small-scale landlords or property developers. In 1895, holding the title of Husägare usually indicated middle-class respectability. It implied a level of financial stability and social standing, as these individuals paid municipal taxes and often had voting rights in local town elections.

The Holmquist family consisted of Anders and Elna, William, and four daughters, two of whom did not survive to adulthood. The eldest child, Gerda Elna, was born in 1874 and married Karl Kristian Rasmussen in 1910. A second daughter, Estrid Svedenborg (or Svenborg), was born in 1876 and died in 1890 at age 13. After William’s birth in 1880, Anders and Elna had Julia, who died in infancy in 1885, and Lydia Ruth, who was born in 1887. She married Hans Johan Björkeroth in 1915.

Sweden in 1910 was going through some difficult transitions, which eventually led to the downfall of their monarchy. In the southern county of Malmöhus, where the Holmquists lived, deep class tensions were forming over a brewing political struggle for universal suffrage. The Malmöhus plains were incredibly fertile and dominated by large-scale farming, which required a large rural workforce. Still, the land was largely controlled by a wealthy, politically conservative landowning elite. The labor movement was making progress, but the violence and disruption from nationwide strikes threatened everyone.

A small-scale, middle-class landlord like Anders Holmquist would have been caught between those opposing forces, with no real opportunity to move up and no desire to give up what he had. And his son, facing the same bleak outlook if he stayed in Sweden, decided to head where so many others were finding better opportunities.

Living the American Dream

Only two years after settling in Stillwater, Minnesota, William married Hildur Agda Leander, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, on 26 June 1912.

After arriving in Minnesota, William worked as a carpenter until finding a job as a janitor in the Mahtomedi Public Schools during the 1920s. In 1932, he was elected as vice president of the Minneapolis public schools. As the children grew older and more independent, Hildur also found work as a custodian in the public high school.

They raised three daughters, Ruth (b. 1915), Lillian (b. 1917), and Dorothy (b. 1923), and of course, their son, Bud Holmquist. But then the years of World War II came, and their children began to marry and leave home.

In 1944, their youngest daughter, Dot, married Sidney Herbert Woodcock (1924–2011) and moved with him to Bremerton, Washington. William and Hildur decided to move there, too, and that’s where they lived in 1946. But in May of 1947, they lived in Seattle, where William asked Hildur for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty.

A Full Circle

The year after his divorce, William took a trip back to Sweden. When he returned to Seattle, he found work as a dishwasher in the restaurant of the Amherst Hotel. He probably lived off a pension from the Mathomedi schools, but worked part-time, too. In 1954, he married Ruth (Hart) Stevenson, the widow of Frederick George Stevenson (1884–1953), and in 1957, they lived in the Lorrington apartment building, where William was the manager.

Being the manager of an apartment building where he lived seems like the exact sort of life William could have had if he had stayed in Sweden. He and Ruth were still living there in 1962, when he lost a battle with cancer and died on 26 September at age 81.
1. Ellis Island, Overview and History; https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/overview-history/ ↩︎
Callan Name Study: Update for June 2026

June 3, 2026
The Callan Name Study keeps growing, and as it does, I intend to tell you about it. If you know of anyone with a Callan surname (no matter what spelling they used), take a look at the master list (a spreadsheet you can find here or on WikiTree) and see if I have them in the database. If not, you can add them with this form!

What’s In a Name?

“Why would I care about a Callan Name Study if I’m not a Callan?”

I can’t really answer that for you. Maybe you can trace one of your ancestral lines to a woman born with a Callan surname; maybe you’ve discovered an adoptee in your line who was born a Callan. Your motivations and interests are your own.

But one reason I’m posting these updates is that I think a lot of people out there are hesitating to dive in and run a study on their own surname. I figure if you are thinking about it, seeing the steps I take and the lessons I learn could help you get yours going.

And if you want to practice on my Callan study before signing up to do your own, I won’t be sad!

Visit Callan Name Study to get started.

By Any Other Name

Deciding what name variations count as “Callan” has been an interesting puzzle.

The obvious variations are Callan, Callen, Callin, and Callon, and in most cases, it’s easy to see that the newer spellings were often chosen by a generation of educated siblings who were born to a generation or more of (usually) farmers who (usually) emigrated from Ireland and whose records were written down by clerks who weren’t familiar with their accents or the spellings used in the homeland. In other words, most roads lead back to people from Ireland using the spelling “Callan,” which itself is supposedly a simplified spelling of one of the older forms of the name in Gaelic.

Deciding which spelling is “correct” often comes down to the question of how the family spelled the name on their headstones. If there are no headstones or if the family left no Bible or didn’t have a consistent spelling to use on their official documents, you may be stuck guessing which spelling they might have used.

I did say “most roads,” and even though it’s too early for me to say much, I can see a few alternate origins emerging for a few groups of “Callan” folks.

See more on the veracity of surnames from Elizabeth Petty Bentley over at Mission Genealogy: “What Was My Ancestor’s Surname?”

For example, sometimes the spelling “Calen” is just a variation of “Callen” that dropped an “L” – but there is at least one family group that originated in Sweden or Norway, and took the surname from the land or township where they were living when the law regulating the use of surnames was passed.

There are also some French and German lines that bear some resemblance to one of the Irish variations, and I don’t know yet whether that is because Irish immigrants to those lands were “localized,” or if those variations trace from another name, like Kälin. Several American “Callen” families came from Russia, and were either originally rendered as “Calinoff” or “Kalinov” or simply adopted an “American” spelling like “Calin” or “Callen” on arrival.

I’m excited to learn more, but it will require some digging once the initial collection is done.

Organize, Organize, Organize

According to the advice I was able to find online before I started this endeavor, the first step in compiling a Name Study is to collect as many individual names as possible from available records.

This means pulling together variations of the name that show up in local vital records, census records, cemetery databases, etc. The Callan One Name Study spreadsheet is where I’m trying to compile all of that information, which is why I keep sharing that link and inviting people to look through it.

I’ve also taken some of the work I did based on the 1901 and 1911 Ireland Census for County Louth and folded it into the Ancestry tree, which can be found here:
- Callan Name Study (on Ancestry)
That took some effort, because I exported the GEDCOM from my Calln Family History tree, and then “pruned” it down from more than 19,000 names to just under 6,000, which took half of the month of May. Before and after:

May 15

May 31

Barbara Tien, of Projectkin, asked whether I had considered joining the Guild of One Name Studies (GOONS), and while I’m not opposed to doing so, I haven’t seen a benefit to doing so right now. The services they offer seem like things that I will benefit from later, after I get things together and have something to publish. They seem to offer web-hosting and networking/advertising, which I will need at some point, but I’m not ready to take those steps yet.

I did take some of the advice I’ve read about leveraging AI tools, and asked Gemini for help compiling lists from available census records, so I have a collection of spreadsheets that it was able to generate for each publicly available census in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Europe. What I don’t know is whether these are “complete” or accurate.

Another reason I am hoping to attract more eyes to the spreadsheet – the more people I have going through it and looking for matches (to their family trees, to WikiTree, to FamilySearch, etc.), the better and more complete picture we will have of how many Callans there were in each of those censuses.

This month promises to be busy enough to keep me away from the keyboard, so I don’t expect to make much progress until the end of the summer – but I’ll keep you posted, anyway!