Mightier Acorns

Journeys through Genealogy and Family History

A parody of a family coat of arms designed with acorns as elements, with the motto "ex gladnis potentioribus" Latin for "from Mighty Acorns"
From Mighty Acorns

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Tad Callin has been working on family history and genealogy since the late 1990s. He does most of his research on Ancestry and posts what he learns to WikiTree.
  • When They Had A Choice

    When They Had A Choice

    I haven’t had a lot of time to read all of the great things being posted in the genealogy and genealogy-adjacent history community, but I ran across a Substack post by Renee Stonebraker that gave me a new way to think about an old story.

    The 1911 Callin Family History and the 1990 Callen Chronicles each relate stories about a girl (or a pair of girls) from a family of colonial settlers in Pennsylvania, and how they were taken from their homes during a raid by Native Americans. Stonebraker wrote a June 16, 2026 essay comparing the Native American and Puritan/Colonial societies that lived side by side in the 1600s and 1700s, and challenging assumptions that people like me have made about those who were taken. Stonebraker shares several examples of these types of abduction stories in which the women who were taken did not wish to return to the Puritan societies they came from, preferring to remain with their “captors,” and explains why. (The saucy title is only part of the history!)

    When I have written about this particular pair of stories in the past, I focused on how little factual, confirmable detail we have, and how that plays into our habit of family history myth-making:

    As we learn more about our collective family history, we inevitably learn more about the mythology America’s European colonizers built around their experiences. And it is important to keep in mind what mythology means, because “myths” are not simply “true or false.” When they are the stories we tell about ourselves, they can incorporate facts, capture elements of our self-image and of our aspirations, and they can shape the way we interpret which parts of the stories are factual.

    Here’s a quick refresher:

    A Callin Family Myth

    The Callin Family History and The Callen Chronicles include what appear to be different versions of the same story.

    Here’s George Callin’s version, which he probably learned from his father, William, a grandson of James “1st” Callin. It is worth noting that George never met William’s father, John, and William never met John’s father, James:

    Record of Polly, Daughter of James 1st.
    Born about 1782. Grew to womanhood in her Pennsylvania home. Was captured by the Indians, and started for the Indian country. Her father James 1st gathered some neighbors and militia and followed the trail, they were guided by bits of clothing Polly had from time to time stuck on bushes. After several days pursuit, the Indians with their captive were overtaken. In the skirmish that followed Polly attempted to escape by running. An Indian fired at her just as she fell over a log and he supposing her killed did not further molest her, there her father found her after the fight, and the men made a litter and carried her home.
    She was shot through the knee, and for the want of proper surgical attendance, became a cripple for life. She never married, lived to be middleaged, and noted for the exemplary life she lived. The date of her death is unknown but somewhere about 1825.

    A Callen Family Legend

    The Callen Chronicles contains what might be another version of the same story (pages 17 & 19):

    It may be about this same time [the spring and summer of 1778, when Patrick Callen was enlisted with Capt. John McCleland’s company escorting provisions to Fort Hand in Westmoreland county] that the story has been told about Patrick’s and Sarah’s identical twin daughters, their names uncertain. (35D) “During the Revolutionary War when there was much Indian activity in Westmoreland Co., the two little girls were kidnapped in an Indian raid when Patrick was away from home. The little girls were about five or six at the time, and both were taken. About 10 or 12 years later (after the Revolutionary War was over) a fur trader went into a remote Indian village, in far western Pennsylvania or Ohio, to trade with the Indians. While he was in the village he saw two young white women, about 18 years old, living with the tribe. One was the wife of a young indian brave and had a tiny baby; the other was unattached, but under the “protection” of a family in the tribe. During his visit he had no opportunity to talk with either of the women; however, after he had traded with the indians and left the village, he found one of the young women under the supplies in his canoe. She told him that she wanted to return to her white family; she said that she had talked with her sister before leaving and that her sister had wanted to remain behind with her indian family.”  She was returned to Patrick and Sarah Callen – apparently just a short time before they moved to Armstrong Co. The story continued, “the returned daughter had not been injured or mistreated, the family that had taken her in in the tribe had treated her as a daughter. Though she never regretted returning to her natural family, she was often restless.  She was a private person, enjoying her time alone and in the woods, and she was described by her nephew, Watson, as ‘special and different’.  She had a way with wild animals that no one, not even her family understood.  She was slender, tall, and very blonde but she spent every day in the sun and the wind and she was as brown as an indian.  Watson said that his grandparents just let her be herself, and did not attempt to change her, but cherished her for who she was.”

    Determining which parts of these twin stories are “true” is challenging. The account in The Callen Chronicles contains more details, including a mention of the relationship between Margaret (the twin who was recovered) and Patrick Callen’s grandson, Watson. It is also a less dramatic story, told in a way that sounds more factual, although neither story has any facts that are likely to be verifiable by research. My hunch is that the Callen Chronicles’ version of the story is probably closer to “true” and that the Callin Family History version told about “Polly Callin” was altered and adapted as George’s grandfather and great-uncle retold the story to their children in Ohio.

    The nephew, Watson, mentioned at the end was a son of Hugh Callen, who founded Callensburg, PA, in 1825. It’s hard to know which of the known sisters of Hugh might have been carried off, or if the Chronicles simply didn’t include them. Hugh had a sister named Mary who was known as “Polly” (a common nickname for Mary). This Polly married a James Galbraith in 1815 and died in Kentucky in 1839, though, so she is not a serious contender for lead in this story, but it could be that the Ohio Callins remembered her name when they told their version.

    Making Her Point For Her

    Stonebraker tells us her thesis early on:

    Colonial America in the 1600s and 1700s had two systems running side by side. Puritan society, where sex was a procreative duty and a woman’s satisfaction did not register as a category worth discussing. And a number of Native American societies, where female sexual autonomy was an accepted, parent-sanctioned norm, alongside legal autonomy, property rights, and the ability to leave a bad marriage without asking anyone’s permission.

    Colonial women got to make that comparison, and a significant number of them chose Native life over their own. Not once. Repeatedly, across decades, across colonies, with women being recaptured and escaping again. They were telling Puritan society something, as clearly as a person can tell you something without ever publishing a word. Give us autonomy. Give us a say in our own pleasure, our own property, our own marriages, and we will stay.

    The reaction of the Puritan men is a shining example of how religious white males handle everything: poorly.

    Some obvious elements of the Callen Chronicles’ story resonate here (my emphasis, added):

    While [the trader] was in the village he saw two young white women, about 18 years old, living with the tribe. One was the wife of a young indian brave and had a tiny baby; the other was unattached, but under the “protection” of a family in the tribe. …after he had traded with the indians and left the village, he found one of the young women under the supplies in his canoe. She told him that she wanted to return to her white family; she said that she had talked with her sister before leaving and that her sister had wanted to remain behind with her indian family.” …”the returned daughter had not been injured or mistreated, the family that had taken her in in the tribe had treated her as a daughter. Though she never regretted returning to her natural family, she was often restless.

    If my theory about the two stories is correct, you can see how they evolved over years of retelling. Not only does the Chronicles version provide an example of a woman choosing life with the tribe over life with her family to add to Stonebraker’s, but the way the story changed demonstrates how the Callin men chose to rewrite the narrative.

    Their version omits the nuance of one sister choosing her Native American family and the other remaining single and “restless” for the rest of her life. Instead, Polly is rescued – the “damsel in distress” trope – and shot in the leg, which is used to explain why she remained single in a way that did not suggest any sexual immorality took place.

    The Truth Myths Can Tell

    As I said, I don’t expect to ever learn “the truth” about what happened to “Polly” or “Margaret,” or ever get confirmation that the two stories are about the same event. But it is endlessly fascinating to learn about the times that my ancestors experienced and get a glimpse into how they thought about things.

    I only hope that some of my writing answers the questions my descendants might have some day. More likely, they will be just as confused about what is true as I am!

    Good hunting, cousins! (And go give Renee Stonebraker a read!)

  • Ahnentafel #50: Bernard Blom (1861-1917)

    Ahnentafel #50: Bernard Blom (1861-1917)

    Bernard Blom was born on 30 June 1861 in Angerlo, in the Netherlands. His parents, Bernard Blom (1829-1912) and Maria Heijting (1832-1916), emigrated to America with their family in the 1870s and settled in Hardin County, Iowa.

    If you’d like to see the map of Angerlo, I included it when I wrote a brief overview of the family in Family Reunion: Blom. (And I’ll offer the Wikipedia article on the Netherlands, aka Holland, in case anyone is unfamiliar with the connection between those names and the people from there, who are referred to as Dutch.)

    Going Dutch

    All immigrants to America had to deal with stereotypes and some degree of mistreatment when they arrived in the States, but the Dutch immigrants endured less nativist hostility than other 19th-century immigrant groups. They enjoyed reputations for agricultural expertise and an intense work ethic, but also received gentle ridicule for their financial conservatism and religious insularity. You’ve probably used the phrase “going Dutch,” or “Dutch treat,” in reference to going on a date where each party pays their own way, even if you’ve never met anyone of Dutch origin.

    This is the power of American stereotypes. Even “good” ones.

    Still, Bernard and Maria brought their family to America in about 1872. Once they settled in Ackley, Hardin County, Iowa, Bernard supported them by working as a cabinetmaker. Together they raised eight children who survived to adulthood. They had twelve altogether.

    A Better Life

    Barney Blom arrived in America at about 10 years of age, the third eldest of the Blom children. His two older brothers were Dirk (1858) and John Benjamin (1859), and Barney was followed by Gerrit (1862), George (1864), and Antonie (1864), then by three sisters: Mary (1865), Anna Gertrude (1866), and Carrie (1868). Aleida Blom was born on 21 August 1871 in Angerlo, but I don’t believe she, Anna Gertrude, Gerrit, or Antonie survived to make the trip to America.

    While the United States was embroiled in the Civil War in the 1860s, the Kingdom of the Netherlands experienced a constitutional showdown between the Crown and the Parliament, economic aftershocks from the abolition of slavery, and a slow, painful transition toward a modern industrial economy. Once the War ended between the States, and the railroads began to drive our own industrialization, the U.S. seemed like a much more stable and safer bet than the European continent. The Bloms were part of a large influx of immigrants, bringing their eagerness to build a better life to Iowa.

    After settling here, Bernard and Maria had two more sons: William Arthur (1874) and Alexander (1878). The older boys stayed at home for a while, either working in carpentry and cabinetmaking with their father or as farmers. In 1883, Dirk married and started his own family, and carried on in the business of cabinetmaking. John Benjamin married the following year and took up farming; and in 1886, Barney took a wife.

    Barney’s Brief Legacy

    Barney married Ida Slight, and they had five daughters. Four of them survived childhood, including the eldest, Mary Elora Blom.

    After he married and started his family, it becomes all too easy to try to characterize the next thirty years as some kind of Midwestern, turn-of-the-century “happy ever after.” Losing a child in 1893 was a tragedy, but there were no other tragedies severe enough to put his name in the newspapers. It appears that he made a good living, raised his four daughters, and stayed close to his brothers and sisters.

    Barney’s life went along until March 1916, when his widowed mother, Maria, died in a fire that consumed her house. His brother George was grief-stricken by the loss and took his own life in May 1916 because, according to the note he left behind, he couldn’t stand being confronted by the charred reminder of her ruined house every morning when he woke up.

    Barney died a year later, in May 1917, when the limb from a tree he was trimming struck him in the abdomen. This is how the Ackley World Journal described the event:

    While trimming a tree on Fred Trainer’s lawn, on Saturday, May 12, Mr. Blom was in the act of shifting his position, when the limb he was sawing broke down, and, coming in contact with a dead branch near, the limb turned and struck him in the abdomen. He sank into the crotch of the two remaining limbs of the tree, stunned by the force of the blow. Succeeding, a few minutes later, in climbing down the ladder, he finally reached home and Dr. Miller was called to give medical assistance. The case was deemed so serious that the patient was, kept under the influence of anaesthetics to alleviate his suffering.
    The first yearning hope of the family for his speedy restoration to health and strength soon began to vanish, especially as the patient could take no nourishment, and Wednesday morning found him visibly declining. He was removed to the Miller hospital. A partial examination and operation revealed, however, that gangrene of the intestinal organs had set in and the faint hope that had centered about this last resort died away.
    After a day of intense suffering the shadoys [sic] of evening brought quiet and relief from pain, the sufferer sank peacefully to sleep at about nine o’clock and the spirit took its flight.
    Bernard Blom was the third son of Bernard Blom and Mary Heiting Blom, and was born at Gillerland, Holland, June 30, 1861. He died May 16, 1917, at the age of 55 years, 10 months and 16 days.

    Relating

    I think about Barney often, especially when I am doing the sort of job around the house that involves power tools and nature. Like, for example, trimming trees.

    Callin men tend to be accident prone, and I’ve written before about the mishaps that me, my dad, and my Grandpa Bob have suffered over the years. Learning about Barney Blom’s fate resonated with me, and the specter of all of these well-meaning, but often hapless, men makes me take extra precautions when I’m doing anything that could be dangerous.

    So far, I’ve been fortunate. But it’s always worth remembering that fortune can hold out for a lifetime before that one branch snaps the wrong way!

    Be careful out there, cousins!

  • Callan Name Study Update: Data, Data, Data!

    Callan Name Study Update: Data, Data, Data!

    Last month, I spelled out the troubles I was having collecting an initial pile of census data for the Callan Name Study. When dimple commented with the wise suggestion to ask the app developer community at WikiTree, I said: “It will take me a few weeks to find time to look into that, so if anyone else wants to talk to them, feel free to point them at this post!”

    She took me up on that: G2G: This member needs some geek help

    And if you check out the selected answer from Arno, you will see that he offered a solution that was outside of my grasp, but gave him a couple of afternoons of fun. He ran his solution across the whole set of U.S. Census records from 1790-1950 and the two Irish Censuses (1901 and 1911). I added the whole table to my Callan Name Study spreadsheet.

    Number Talk

    If you open that spreadsheet, you should see four tabs (or sheets) along the bottom:

    • Collaboration form (we’ll come back to that)
    • Callan ONS individuals – the “final product” we’re working toward
    • FamilySearch records – the data Arno collected for us
    • Louth c. 1910 – the data I manually collected from the 1901 and 1911 Ireland Census (probably going away now)

    The FamilySearch records tab contains 44,155 lines, each representing a record (with a link to that record on FamilySearch in the “Record URL” column). If the record was attached to a FamilySearch person profile, that link is in the “FS Person URL” column – there are 23,978 lines in that column! When I de-duplicated that list, I had 13,300 individual profiles!

    It took me several months to manually pull out the records from the Ireland Censuses, and I only collected 642 individuals. Arno’s technique found 3,040 records. Even if you assumed that everyone overlapped between 1901 and 1911 (and they definitely did NOT), that would be 1,520 individuals from those two census years collected in an afternoon!

    What Next?

    Now that I have this spreadsheet to work from, the goal is to take the collection of records and organize it. If I have to go through 45 thousand lines by myself, I will do that, but I will be asking for help from the WikiTree community.

    Many hands make light work.

    That means that I need to work through a few lines of the list and design an outline with some clear instructions. I don’t know what that will look like, but:

    • Each Record URL needs a FS Person URL (even if that means creating a new FS Person profile).
    • Each FS Person profile needs to be matched to someone in the Individuals tab.
    • Each person in the Individuals tab needs to be matched to a WikiTree profile (even if that means creating a new WT profile).
    • The people in the Individuals tab need to be organized into families (identified under the OCA, or “Oldest Common Ancestor”, we can connect them to).

    There are probably some solutions that will be better than doing these steps manually, but I haven’t figured them out yet. For now, I plan to press forward and start asking for help in earnest once I know what specifics to ask for. (It’s more fun for people to help if it’s easy to understand how they’re helping.)

    If you decide to dive in and start helping, you won’t have editor access to my spreadsheet, but you can add someone to the ONS sheet using this “Add a person” form.

    Thanks again to everyone who took a moment to help move this project forward! I’ll keep y’all posted!

  • Ahnentafel #34: Allen Marion Greenlee (1861-1887)

    Ahnentafel #34: Allen Marion Greenlee (1861-1887)

    Allen Greenlee was my first real genealogy challenge. No one living seemed to know anything about him – starting with his name! – and even the records I could find were parsimonious with the information they collected.

    Peering Over Brick Walls

    Grandpa Bob was the one who first showed me the Callin Family History, so when I had questions, he’s the one I asked. But when those questions came to the origins of his mother, Bertha Greenlee-Cramer, he didn’t have many answers.

    He knew that she had been adopted by her stepfather, George Cramer, when she was very little, but beyond that, he knew nothing about her biological father. Great-grandma Bertha died the year before I was born, so I couldn’t ask her; but even my dad and his sister, my aunt Vicki, had no recollection of ever discussing her birth father with her.

    I was so new to genealogy that I didn’t yet know the term “brick wall,” but that’s not the metaphor I would have reached for. This sensation of facts being just out of reach or out of sight felt more like a weather event, like a dust storm or a heavy fog, where you can tell that there is something out there, but your light can’t reach it to tell you what it is.

    I could see the place where my great-grandfather should be, and I knew the shape of the hole that he left there, but I didn’t know how to start answering those questions. I didn’t even know what questions I should have been asking!

    A.M., Ellen, and Eleanor

    For a long time, “I think his name was Greeley or Greenlea” was the only clue I had. Then I found a marriage record for Alice A. Hale and “A.M. Greenlee” in Hancock County, Ohio, dated 16 (granted) and 17 (return) August 1884.

    Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993; Film Number 001299133

    I knew Grandma Bertha’s birthdate was 5 December 1885, so the timing wasn’t a big surprise, but when you are relying on freely available census records for all of your research, it is an inconvenient mid-decade to get lost in. Only having his initials made it that much harder to know who to look for on the 1880 census. (And, as you may know, the 1890 Census was lost, so no joy there!)

    With some guesswork, I did find Allen Greenlee living with his grandmother, Eleanor Bollman, in Cass Township, Hancock County, Ohio, on the 1880 Census. His occupation was listed as farmer, and his father’s birthplace was Ireland, while his mother’s was Ohio. In 1870, I found them again: Eleanor (with her name transcribed as “Elesur”), and “Ellen Greenlee,” a male, 9 years of age. This time, a 31-year-old woman named Sarah C. Bollman was also listed. She would prove to be Allen’s mother, but it would take many years and a paid Ancestry subscription to find enough pieces of the puzzle to be sure.

    The Will and the Newspapers

    When I decided to revise the Callin Family History in 2015 and paid for the full Ancestry subscription to help me do it, I found Sarah’s 1875 will. In it, she named her son, Allen Marion Greenlee, and left him all of her property and named Ezra Karn his legal guardian. This confirmed many guesses I had made, based on what I could see in the census.

    About that same time, Newspapers.com began digitizing The Weekly Jeffersonian, and as I found small mentions of Allen Greenlee in their pages over the years, a figure began to emerge from the fog.

    In April of 1882, Allen Greenlee reported that 11 of his sheep were killed by dogs, and, in a later item, that he and Elizabeth McComb exchanged property. Elizabeth McComb’s maiden name turns out to have been Bollman, making her a sister of Allen’s mother.

    In 1882, he turned 21 and came into his inheritance. He exchanged land with his aunt, raised sheep on what was now his land, and got a teaching certificate. In 1883, he was elected clerk of Cass Township (as a Democrat!) and served as umpire for Wineland and Marion baseball clubs in 1884.

    As we saw from his marriage certificate, he married Alice in 1884, and in December 1885, they had Bertha. But in September 1885, the papers mentioned on the 10th that Allen suffered from typhus, and reported he was “up and round again, yet very feeble” a couple of weeks later. In October he and Alice moved into her father’s house.

    For a long time, I assumed he died because of that typhus infection, but in December 1886, the paper named him as one of the men paying the “Dow Law tax,” which was a tax on businesses that sold liquor. Since that news placed him in Arcadia, it suggests he and Alice moved out of her father’s house and started a business that involved selling alcohol. That suggests that he recovered from the typhus, at least.

    And sometime during 1887, he died and was buried in Bechtel Cemetery, with no mention in the papers and no obituary. But there is one more twist in Allen’s story, and it happened before he married Alice Hale.

    Ohio Progressivism

    In June of 1882, a few months before Allen’s 21st birthday, the paper reported what sounded like a scandal to me:1

    “Allen Greenlee, a young school teacher residing north of this city, was arrested on Tuesday and brought before Justice Beardsley, on a charge of bastardy preferred by Miss Dora Nickey, a lass aged seventeen years. Greenlee was bound over to court in the sum of $500.”

    While that language sounds punitive, it was apparently a legal mechanism for a woman to claim financial support and legally name a father without having to marry him. Based on what I was able to learn online, it seems from the language of being “bound over…in the sum of $500” that the court found Allen responsible, but there was no follow-on report to say either way.

    One unanswered question raised by this: was Dora one of Allen’s students? They both grew up in Cass Township, so they may have gone to school together there as students or otherwise been childhood sweethearts, even being four years apart in age. Dora was 7 years past Ohio’s age of consent, so this would not have been considered statutory rape as it would be today.

    We don’t know if he was her teacher, but in 1882, there was no law prohibiting student-teacher relationships. That law passed on 22 April 1886, four years after Allen was sued by Dora. And judging by the fact that he was elected to local office and held positions of trust after this, it seems the community considered this matter settled after the court ruled.

    I found no evidence of a child in Dora’s family that was born in 1882, so it seems most likely that she gave the baby up for adoption. That suggests I might have a whole set of cousins descended from Allen who have no idea where they came from. For now, I don’t have any clues to go on, but I will keep an eye out for leads to help find them.

    Perhaps one day, I can help them peep over this brick wall, too.

    1. Newspapers.com, The Weekly Jeffersonian, Findlay, Ohio, 1 Jun 1882, Thu, Page 3, “Allen Greenlee, a young school teacher“. ↩︎
  • Accepting Wrongness

    Accepting Wrongness

    My inbox can sometimes go for months without any direct genealogy activity. There are always lots of impersonal notifications and updates. I do have regular readers here who like and comment on my posts. And I get some periodic interaction from the Substack Genealogy community. But it’s a rare gift when somebody finds me and sends a message through Ancestry or edits a WikiTree page.

    This past month, though, I had a veritable flood of messages!

    But in the middle of these messages and notifications, something dropped in my WikiTree notifications that didn’t look quite right.

    Kinds of Wrong

    Whether you are just starting out or have a few years of research experience under your belt, you have errors in your genealogy. So do I. We all do.

    The whole point of engaging in this hobby is to figure out what is wrong and correct the record. But there are different kinds of “wrong” that might be at play in any situation. Most mistakes in genealogy are errors in correlation; we incorrectly match a piece of evidence to what we think are known facts. Errors usually persist when other researchers don’t question your evidence, don’t compare all of the dates, don’t look for contrary evidence, or simply don’t read the original record carefully. In rare cases, a mistake comes from an intent to deceive others; this might be a lie about a birthdate on an official record (to get married or join the military, for example) or it might be a fabrication by an unscrupulous historian trying to connect unrelated families.

    All mistakes are vexing.

    If you follow Nate Douglas over at No Parents Listed, he has been confronting the mystery of his great-grandfather’s parentage, and the stubborn refusal of the records and the DNA evidence to come together and cough up an answer. In his 16 Sep post, he summarizes the most common “wrongness” that many of us struggle with in both our own work and the work that others do:

    In the last three months, I’ve found more documented genetic convergence than I found in all the years before it.

    And that work’s taught me something ugly about online trees: sometimes the brick wall is visible before the tree owner sees it. The drift. The wrong date. The wrong place. Children glued to the wrong couple. Sometimes it’s the wrong person entirely, marching through generations because somebody clicked “accept” in 2011 and nobody’s had the nerve to interrogate the corpse.

    I like the way he distills that frustration that we all feel when we realize that a piece of evidence we took for granted turns on us (or evaporates). And depending on how you read that last line, you might have missed the subtle way the blame creeps from the person in 2011 who made the original mistake to everyone in the intervening years who didn’t catch it.

    That blame gets on all of us.

    Extending Some Grace

    Fear of that blame causes us to be timid.

    Whether you are the person who made the original mistake or one of the people who notices it and wrestles with the choice of bringing it up, none of us is comfortable confronting a mistake.

    Factor in a selection bias within the genealogical community for people who are predisposed to devoting solitary hours of a significant portion of their lives to poring over documents and piecing together facts about dead ancestors, and I think you’ll find that many of those people are also highly allergic to interpersonal confrontation.

    And so we either avoid “correcting” someone else’s mistakes, or we overthink our position and offend the person we’re “correcting” with our arguments. You must prepare yourself to extend a little bit of grace and forgiveness to the other person, whether you are the one offering a correction or you are the one being corrected. Keep in mind that both people are probably uncomfortable and embarrassed about the situation.

    Don’t be timid.

    Show some grace (for yourself and the other person).

    But keep evidence at the center of the conversation.

    Confronting the Error

    Since it is a wiki, WikiTree has built-in systems for notifying you when a page you are interested in or responsible for gets edited. Most of the edits I get notifications for are small things, like categories being added or typos being corrected. Occasionally, someone will connect their family member’s profile to one of “my” profiles1 – most often, they are researching a descendant line for a shared ancestor. I delight when that happens, because that’s the baseline for WikiTree collaboration.

    This week, I saw a notification that someone had added “Thomas” as a child of “Baker,” so I clicked to see the profile. I don’t know as much about Baker’s origins as I would like, so I was hopeful that this new connection would tell me more. The first red flag was that Baker already had a son named “Thomas B.” (my direct ancestor), so while it is always possible that my direct ancestor might have had a sibling I didn’t know about, it seemed unlikely that they would have the same given name.

    Further investigation showed that the profile for this new “Thomas” had an 1805 birthdate; Baker’s birthdate was about 1803. The source information for the new “Thomas” cited a FamilySearch record for an 1850 Census, but I couldn’t find any such record for a Thomas in the Township and County cited in 1850 on either FamilySearch or Ancestry.

    It quickly became clear that a) something was wrong, and b) I would need the other person to help me clear it up. So, I did my best to craft a neutral response and commented on the new Thomas’s profile:

    It looks like your Thomas Hales may not be attached to the right family – Baker Hales already has a son named Thomas, and your Thomas was born about the same time as Baker.

    I wanted to try to find you more information to work with, but I couldn’t find the 1850 Census record you cited in either FamilySearch or Ancestry. Do you have a link to the record you found, or more information about Thomas Hales?

    The Worst Case

    If you have ever sent a message like that, you probably dreaded the response and loathed the time you spent waiting for one.

    I hoped that my tone wasn’t offensive, or that I didn’t confuse the issue. I did my best to put it out of my head after I hit send, but my back brain continued to second-guess my word choices. I braced for a hostile reaction, or who-knows-what sort of information dump the other person might have had on hand. The worst case I could imagine was some kind of permanent limbo state where we couldn’t agree on who belonged to which family, but kept arguing unconvincingly at each other.

    I had no reason to fear.

    In this case, the person responded right away, removed Baker as the father of their profile’s Thomas, and left it at that. I do wish I could have found more information to help with their research, but outside of a mutual breakthrough, this was the best case for an exchange like this.

    Living With Wrongness

    This whole experience just reminded me that what we do is a process, just like “science” is a process, and not a single, solid Thing. The records we have to work with are not a perfect representation of who and what our ancestors were, any more than a “map” of the solar system represents anything more than a fleeting glimpse of something that approximates reality.

    Reality is a cloud of rocks of various sizes whipping around each other at incomprehensible speeds while we try to keep track of the tiny crumb we happen to live on.

    And people are often very uncomfortable with how uncertain even our most certain works of history really are. Errors creep into the most factual of records, and those are subject to loss and damage as our rock spins through its orbit. The best we can do is come up with something that seems logical: “I know I’m here, and I know Mom and Dad were here before me, so it stands to reason that I can figure out who their parents were…” …with the occasional snippet of paper to “prove” we’re close to being right.

    Living with Wrongness is actually the largest part of what we do. I think it’s healthy for us to recognize that and acknowledge that the reason we do what we do is that we want to help bring some order to the chaos.

    In a way, it’s appropriate that there are no absolutes in genealogy, because no matter what you can prove, everything really is relative.

    1. I say “my” because I’m just a steward for the page, not an “owner” ↩︎

  • Ahnentafel #49: Alice Frances Jones (1857-1921)

    Ahnentafel #49: Alice Frances Jones (1857-1921)

    Alice Jones was the eldest daughter (possibly the eldest child) of David Jones and Susana Brookhouser, born in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, on 9 October 1857.

    The records that tell us about Alice’s life seem to support the facts as I’m about to lay them out for you, but they also raise the sorts of questions that never seem to find satisfying answers. For example, we can be reasonably certain that her full name was “Alice Frances,” and most records record her name with the initial, as in “Alice F.” But her first appearance in the Census and one World War I service record for her son give her name as “Frances.” Does that suggest she went by her middle name?

    I don’t know.

    Inferences and Suppositions

    One of the first suppositions I had to make about Alice’s family was whether she was the first-born child of David and Susana, or whether they had a son, Albert, in 1851. Albert and Frances appear in the household in 1860. I only have one source that says they were married in 1854 (the 1900 Census), so it’s possible they were married earlier, but Susana was 18 in 1854, and I find it doubtful that they married when she was 14. So, I suppose Albert must be a relative from David’s side of the family.

    Another mystery child appears in the 1870 Census. By 1870, the Jones family had moved to Missouri Valley in Harrison County, Iowa. Their household included Alice, Martha, William, and a 9-year-old female child named “Georgie A.” about whom I have been able to find nothing further.

    At least we can infer from the children’s birthplaces recorded in that Census that the family moved from Mercer County, Pennsylvania, to Harrison County, Iowa, between 1864 (when Martha was born) and 1870 (when William was born). At least we can see that the Jones family lived next to a Brookhouser family – which we will need to investigate further when we look at Susana’s immediate family.

    Making a Life In Iowa

    Alice was 12 years old in 1870, and her family seems to have been well-established in Missouri Valley by 1876, when she turned 18 and (I assume) finished school. We don’t have school yearbooks from that far back, and if the newspapers printed graduation announcements, I haven’t found a digitized copy. So, we will continue to infer.

    We don’t know how or when she met John R. McCullough, a farmhand from Indiana, but we do know that they were married on 4 November 1877. He was 29, and she was just a few weeks shy of her 21st birthday. A veteran of the late War, John appears to have been ready to settle down and raise a family, and I think it’s safe to conclude that he made a strong impression on this new wife’s family, or she would not have become his new wife.

    The following September, John and Alice had their first child, William Edgar. And David and Susana had another child, giving Alice a little brother, Bertie Mac Jones. I almost can’t imagine growing up with an uncle the same age as me, but William Edgar did.

    Sadly, John and Alice would suffer the loss of two children: an unnamed infant son in 1879, and a little daughter they named Edna Iola, who was born and died in October 1880. But the following year, they had another son, Earl Randolph, who was born on 30 October 1881, just 8 months after his aunt, Bessie Elnora Jones.

    They had another daughter in 1884, Elsie Ann, and that’s the youngster in the center of the photo above, flanked by her brothers and her parents. That portrait was probably taken around 1890. Alice had lost another baby in 1888, but then had their youngest son, David Earnest, in 1892.

    Even given what we know about the spread of diseases, even in the later years of the 19th century, that feels like a lot of loss to bear.

    Leaving Space

    I have no doubt that there might be a lot to say about the lives they led and the experiences they had, but those things are not yet mine to say. We haven’t inherited any writings they left behind, and few records. I know there are snippets in the local newspapers about visiting relatives, but it’s hard to build a narrative out of those.

    What we can do is sketch out a life, fill it in with what we know about farming at the turn of the century, and be grateful there were no other tragedies striking enough to reach down through the years.

    And if we find more later, we can add it to our record.

  • A Road Trip to the Berlins

    A Road Trip to the Berlins

    Normally, I like my posts to have a tidy structure that tells a story.

    If it’s a biography, I like to tell you everything I know and draw out insights that might help you trace your own family. If it’s something other than a biography, like an ongoing/developing mystery, I try to give you a 3-act structure – either “a beginning, a middle, and a (satisfying?) end,” or “a pledge, a turn, and the prestige.”

    That’s not happening today, so buckle up and prepare for some turbulence and digressions, because…

    This is one of my favorite shirts – it’s sold out, but you should still visit FilmJoy’s apparel store1

    The Destination, or A Pledge

    I want this story to arrive at a particular place, and I want a particular outcome – one that puts a copy of a particular book on my shelf. But I don’t think we’re going to get that outcome, at least not before this post goes out to all of you lovely subscribers. If at all.

    The book in question is The Berlin Family History. That link points to the WikiTree page about the book. My connection to this book is in Volume IV, Descendants of George Frederick Berlin (1720-1759). That connection is my 3rd-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Berlin.2

    The Berlin book has minimal information about Elizabeth and her family, but it has her birth date names her sister, Catherine, and provides her birth date – information I found independently, so I am pretty sure we have a match for my family. The trouble is that all of the evidence I’ve collected, trying to identify records for their parents, John Berlin and Maria Schierly, leaves several open questions, none of which are answered in the Berlin book.

    I know this, because I was provided with a copy of Volume IV by the author/compiler, Reginald Berlin.

    The Hero’s Journey

    I know firsthand what kind of monumental task it is to compile a five-volume family history. My Callin Family History probably should have been broken down into multiple volumes; at 800 pages, it’s a giant paperweight, unlikely to reach the broadest possible audience of cousins. (I didn’t even manage to fit an Index in, which I regret deeply.) That book took seven years of late nights to assemble, and at the end of all of that work, I had something that I was immensely proud of, even though I knew what its flaws were.

    Because I know how much work went into it, I have a pretty good idea how I would feel if some random stranger from the Internet started asking me questions about re-publishing my work or making updates and modifications to it. I am 85% sure I would feel reluctant to dive back in, and 95% sure I would be uneasy about trusting someone else with something I poured so much effort into.

    Reg and the late Terry Jones-Cooney worked on the Berlin Family History together. Together, they traced the family’s origins to a German-speaking area of the Alsace region in Niederbronn, France, in the late 1500s. Reg’s late father-in-law, Roy Roushka, published the book in 1995. Boxes of the five spiral-bound volumes found their way into genealogy collections across the country, though, as you can imagine, it was harder to warehouse and market a family history like that in the pre-Internet era. In contrast, we still aren’t breaking sales records, but anyone who wants a Callin Family History can order a clean, fresh, newly printed copy from Lulu, and I don’t have to store copies or lug them around when I move.

    I can save my storing and lugging for many different books instead of multiple copies of the one I lived inside for seven years.

    The Titular Road Trip

    My wife and I live in Texas, but our sons rent the house we own in Baltimore, and so we occasionally find our way back there. Visiting that house is an odd experience, because for about a decade, our “master bedroom” used to be in the finished basement. Before we moved away, we demolished and re-finished the entire basement, adding a legal bedroom, full bathroom, and open living space. So the room where I spent those seven years working on my book no longer exists, as such. The spot where I used to keep my computer desk is now the downstairs shower.

    We needed to visit in July, to do landlord-ish things and visit our sons, so as we prepared for the two-day drive from San Antonio, it occurred to me that this might be a good chance to meet Reg and pitch him my idea for re-publishing his book. I sent him an email in May or June, and got busy with preparations. We were just a couple of days from returning to Texas when I got a call.

    That is how it came to pass that I spent one of my last days in Maryland driving towards Harrisburg, PA. It struck me then (as it has many times over the years) that I have cousins and closer relatives scattered all over the place who I have never met. Waco is only a couple of hours from my house, but I have several Callin cousins in that area. I have a couple of cousins from my mother’s Tuttle side who live in New Jersey; I would love to meet them. I lived in Baltimore for nearly 20 years, and never met my 2nd or 3rd cousins there.3

    I feel kind of guilty that the one distant cousin I have been able to arrange a meeting with is the one who has something that I want.

    What Do I Want?

    We met at a diner, and had lunch together. Because I am terrible about making records or taking notes (remember: “No one knows what they’re doing”) I have no records or notes of what we said, but I enjoyed spending time with Reg.

    I brought along a copy of War Poems to show him an example of the final product one could get from Lulu.com, and did my best to answer his questions. He did say so in words, but I feel that the difficulty he faces is choosing between learning his way around a new and unfamiliar technology (using Lulu would involve creating an account, connecting it to an online bank for royalty transfers, and dealing with uploads of PDF documents and cover images) and trusting a random stranger (me) to take care of those things for him.

    After the Movie

    By now, regular readers may know that my brain is full of odd digressions, obscure references, and asides. For example, every time I research the Berlin family or think about their book, this 1990 They Might Be Giants song bubbles up in my back brain:

    The song was written about the Berlin Wall, which was a symbol of dangerous division and the threat of devastation for decades, until it suddenly wasn’t. The lyrics don’t directly have anything to do with my situation, but they are evocative of the journey to recapture the past:

    We’re in a road movie to Berlin
    Can’t drive out the way we drove in…

    This music has become a soundtrack to the journey I am on. It’s a song about visiting a place because of its past, a place that may not exist any more because history has moved on. It has unsettling imagery, dramatic shifts in tempo and tone, and conveys a sense of wistful longing for a destination that may not exist.

    I don’t know which choices other people will make regarding the Berlin Family History, and I don’t want to commit to investing my time into creating my own version – a project that I know will be a heavy lift. Even with the help of a team, or at least a partner, I don’t have the time in my budget to take this on.

    But I will keep thinking about the puzzle, and looking for a path to take that will end up at the Destination. I’ll keep digging for evidence, using any new skills I acquire to do so. And maybe I’ll find a partner to be my own Terry Jones-Cooney, and improve my chances of arriving someday.

    Time won’t find the lost
    It’ll sweep up our skeleton bones
    So take the wheel and I will take the pedals

    1. Filmjoy is a YouTube channel run by Mikey Neumann, a Texas-area film critic and video essayist. “No One Knows What They’re Doing” is something Mikey repeats in his videos “as a comforting reminder that even when life feels completely chaotic, everyone is essentially figuring it out as they go.” Even the Greats. Probably especially the Greats – who are great because they kept going even though they didn’t know what they were doing. ↩︎
    2. See Silk or Satin and A Surfeit of Berlins for previous posts about my quest to find this connection. ↩︎
    3. My grandpa’s brother Norman has more than half a dozen descendants in Baltimore county. I have yet to make contact with any of them. ↩︎

  • Ahnentafel #33: Amanda Lydia Walker (1856-1933)

    Amanda Walker was the eldest child of William Walker and Lydia Bowen.

    Sometimes referred to as “Manda,” she was born on 14 Mar 1857 in Scotch Ridge, Wood County, Ohio, a small, unincorporated community in Webster Township that was settled by several families who departed from Glasgow, Scotland, in 1834. Her father came to Ohio from Ithaca, New York, and married her mother on 13 May 1856 in Fairfield, Huron, Ohio. He was known as “Yankee” Walker, probably due to his origins in upstate New York.

    A Pioneer Childhood

    Webster Township was incorporated in 1846, and by the time the Walker family arrived, the area had been settled for more than twenty years. The last federally recognized tribe of native Americans, the Wyandot, was officially forced out of Ohio in 1843 and sent to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma. Still, there were scattered encampments of those who refused to go west, living quietly and peacefully in the area around Dowling.

    Manda would have been four years old when the Civil War began, and eight when it ended. Her father did not enlist during the war, probably because his children were so young and he was their sole means of support. It seems likely that young Manda would have been central to running her household from an early age.

    Ohio law mandated that township boards of education should maintain a network of one-room schoolhouses so that no child lived more than a few miles from a school. Manda and her eight younger siblings almost certainly got their basic education attending one of these schools. They were probably taught using McGuffey Readers, which were commissioned in the 1830s by a Cincinnati publisher.

    By 1872, fifteen-year-old Amanda would have been a competent homemaker with a basic education.

    Amanda Walker, abt. 1872

    Becoming Mrs. Callin

    After the Civil War ended, Union veteran John Henry Callin married Lucy Patterson on 27 Oct 1865. The following year, he was awarded a teaching certificate in Wood County.1 John and his brother George, and another man named John Patterson (no known relation to Lucy), all received their certificates as part of class 4 in October 1866.

    Obviously, there is a lot that we don’t know – and probably can’t know – about the events that took place between October 1865 and 1873, when John’s NARA pension file says he and Lucy Patterson were divorced. John’s file says that there were no children from his first marriage, but that doesn’t tell us much about the relationship. And Patterson is such a common surname; I haven’t been able to identify Lucy’s family with any certainty. She could be the daughter of Martin Patterson (1818–1891) and Abigail Osgood (1820–1908). If so, she appeared in her parents’ home in Wood County under her maiden name on the 1870 Census.

    Based on this shaky foundation of uncertainty, we can speculate that a teacher in Wood County might have been assigned to teach in the one-room schoolhouse in Webster Township where Amanda Walker and her siblings attended school. Webster Township is only twenty miles or so from John’s home in Plain Township. Either he or his brother, George, could have taught there and become acquainted with the William Walker family.

    For modern Americans, there are a lot of red flags waving, no matter which version of events we think might have taken place. John was sixteen years older than Amanda, and might have even been her teacher, when she was between 10 and 17 years old. Evidence suggests that his marriage failed between 1866 and 1870, and his divorce was only made official a year before his second marriage. All of the “most likely” scenarios suggest that he was a lonely young man, estranged from his wife and uncertain about his future, possibly in a position of authority over his future wife.

    The best/least cringeworthy version of this story, at least for a modern audience, is that his brother was Amanda’s teacher and learned that William Walker was seeking a match for his oldest daughter. George could have recommended his brother, recently divorced and looking to start a family. Whatever the case, this would have been a private matter between the families, and there was no mention of scandal or outcry in the local newspapers of the time.

    Whatever may have taken place, Amanda and John were married on 8 Apr 1874.

    The Post-War Generation

    When they first married, the Callins were not as well off as they would be in later years. Her 1933 obituary described their early years in the hyper-romanticized language of a 1933 newspaper writer:

    In the spring of 1885, her husband purchased 80 acres of land eight miles north of Bowling Green in what was known as the “Black Swamp,” or “Devil’s Hole.” Herself the daughter of pioneers, she shouldered her full share of the toils and hardships of making a new home with her pioneer husband. In the lean years of the struggle, her indefatigable spirit kept before her a vision – a better home and a log hut, clear fields in place of forest, dry land where lay the swamp, good roads in place of boggy trails – a vision which was only realized after 17 long years.

    Amanda and John were married for 38 years, 11 months, 9 days. In those years, they raised a family of five exuberant boys and one daughter who survived infancy. Their firstborn son, Byron Herbert, was born on November 5, 1874. If you do the math, the time between April 8, 1874, and November 5, 1874 is 211 days, or just under 7 months. Babies born 2 months premature in that era could survive, but it is more likely that he was conceived a month or two before the wedding. Make of that what you will.

    The following year, they had a little girl who died before her first birthday. They named her Leota. The couple seems to have taken Leota’s death hard. It isn’t clear whether she was a victim of the numerous childhood diseases of that time, or if Amanda’s health was a factor. If Byron Herbert was premature, perhaps Leota was, too?

    Four years later, they had my great-grandfather, John Q. Callin, in July 1879. A few months after that, in October, Amanda’s mother died. Amanda is listed twice in the 1880 Census, recorded in June 1880, both in her own home in Plain Township and in her father’s household in Webster Township.

    In 1879, Amanda was a 22-year-old mother of two small boys, and the wife of a man of some prominence in Bowling Green. These were years when the railroads were both driving a series of nationwide economic booms and creating new opportunities and disruptions for America’s laborers. The world around her was changing drastically from an idyllic, if rustic, pioneer farming life to a more crowded, faster, more socially demanding “city” life. But the evidence seems to suggest that she and John were both close to their families, and they probably had an extensive support network of friends and neighbors.

    There is a six-year gap between the birth of John Q. and his next-youngest sibling, Emma Beatrice. But after Emma was born in 1885, the three younger brothers came in regular succession: Prentice (1887), Welles (1889), and Ray (1890). Perhaps by then, John H.’s success as a local community leader and his business relationships with men like George D. Matcham had improved their lives so they could afford to grow their family.

    It is interesting to consider how their experiences shaped the lives of each of their children in different ways.

    The Kids Were (Mostly) Alright

    If you read Byron Herbert’s biography, you know that he was a precocious scholar and an ambitious young man. Receiving his teaching certificate at 16 (in 1890) was a considerable achievement, and evidence that his father likely put pressure on him to succeed. I wonder how much of that pressure came from living in a household that doubled in size between 1885 and 1890? He took on teaching posts in Dayton and other parts of Ohio, but by the early 1900s, still in his twenties, Byron left Ohio (and his first wife) and began his rather colorful life in Montana and North Dakota.

    John Q. was only 11 in 1890, but he eventually followed his older brother’s profession of teaching and followed Byron (who began calling himself “Herbert” or just “H.B.”) to New York, where John taught school during the early 1920s. He seemed to give up teaching in the 1930s and moved back to Ohio to sell insurance in Fostoria before eventually retiring to Florida.

    Emma B. was still very young when she married George Matcham, who appears to have been a friend and business associate of her father. She stayed in Ohio and gave George a large family. After he died in 1923, she remarried, but remained in Ohio raising her children.

    Welles notoriously left at an early age to work on the railroads, and married his first wife in Canada in 1908, at age 24. Then, in 1911, he eloped with his second wife, which caused a scandal in her hometown. He left behind three sons when he was killed in a train accident in 1921 at age 36.

    Prentice made a few ventures away from his Ohio home as a young man, but after he married in Michigan, he and his wife, Miss Hattie Owen, raised their two sons in Bowling Green. After he retired, he and Hattie moved to California.

    After Ray grew up and married Mary DelCamp, he seems to have made a living building and selling lakeside resort cottages in Lorain County, Ohio. He was 43 when their son, Glenn, was born. Ray, Mary, and Glenn divided their time between Ohio and Florida before eventually settling down near Orlando, where John Q. resided.

    Ending Up in Oberlin

    Amanda and John saw their children grow up and find their way, until John died in 1913. He received many honors as a Union veteran. Amanda sold their Bowling Green home and worked as a live-in housekeeper in Vermillion, Erie County, with young Ray. After Ray married, she lived with him and Mary in Florence, also in Erie County, and helped care for a number of foster children they raised.

    She probably got to meet most of her grandchildren, and most of them grew up in the vicinity of Bowling Green, so she likely got to spend time with many of them. The exceptions being Glenn, who was born the year after she died, and Herbert’s children. The five children born to Herbert’s second wife, Ruby Cole Callin, spent most of their lives in South Dakota. And the children of his third and fourth wives were born in 1931 and 1932 in Florida; it is unlikely that Amanda was able to travel by then, and I don’t see any evidence that Herbert was able to bring them to Ohio before the events that unfolded in 1933.

    Amanda, in Oberlin, about 1932

    Amanda spent her final years living with her daughter, now Emma Heimsath, in Oberlin, Lorain County. On a Wednesday night in February 1933, “she was stricken with paralysis of the throat, and her weak heart could not stand the strain of her fight for breath.” She died at 2 a.m. the following Sunday, February 12, 1933. She had already survived her husband and two of her children.

    A few months later, her eldest son, Herbert, was shot and killed in Florida during a disagreement with his wife’s family. Fortunately, Amanda did not have to deal with that loss, too.

    1. Perrysburg Journal, October 19, 1866, Page 3. via Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/article/perrysburg-journal-teachers-certificate/205817364/ : accessed September 12, 2026), clip page for Teachers’ Certificates – John H. and Geo. W. Callin; John Patterson by user callintad ↩︎
  • Notable Callan: A (Suspected) Soviet Spy

    Notable Callan: A (Suspected) Soviet Spy

    Sylvia Lorraine Callen was born in 1914 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her grandparents, Solomon and Carrie, were married in the Russian Empire and had six children between 1880 and 1888 before immigrating to the United States and settling, first in Menominee, Michigan, and then in Milwaukee.

    Sylvia is notable for her alleged work as a spy for the Soviet Union during World War II, but questions remain about what her role was, or how much she knew about what was happening around her.

    Is It A Spy Story?

    Espionage is a complicated and confusing subject. Who knew what, and when? Who did what, and why? Even if we have excellent records of the facts, they don’t necessarily answer the questions of motive, or who was spying on whom. We are but humble genealogists, and we trade in facts, but facts cannot tell us Sylvia’s whole story.

    Fortunately for us, we can learn at least a little bit about Sylvia’s side of the story. On 29 May 1947, Sylvia was interviewed by an investigative committee for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) about her background. Her responses were published in 2018.1 The interview took place after Louis Budenz, an activist who renounced Communism in 1945, claimed that she was a part of the young Communist movement in Chicago and was recruited by Budenz into the Communist Party USA’s “secret apparatus” in 1937.

    The SWP decided not to take action against Sylvia after her interview. For decades, her denial that she had been part of a plot stood, but in the early 2000s, the United States declassified the Venona project, which referenced Sylvia under the cover name SATYR and revealed that she did work for Soviet intelligence services.

    So what do the sources tell us? And what does it all add up to?

    In Her Words

    I want to give Sylvia as much control of her narrative as I can, so when you see her quoted in the first person, those quotes are from the SWP interview published in 2018:

    My father’s name is John Callen. He has been a salesman for many years. Neither he nor any other member of my family entertain or ever entertained any political views other than the average citizen.

    Sylvia’s father, John, was the youngest son of Solomon and Carrie, born on 3 December 1888. He listed his place of birth on his World War I and World War II registration cards as “Markovke, Russia” – which isn’t helpful, since there are villages of that name in almost every region. Her grandfather, Solomon (aka “Sam”), wasn’t very precise about giving his date of birth, either, and every record gives a different year for the family’s arrival in America. I estimate that it was between 1889 (after John’s birth) and 1897 (the earliest city directory placing Sam in Menominee). The family likely fled Russia after the horrible famine of 1891-1892, and the expulsion of Jewish families, like theirs, from Moscow and other major cities as the Russian Tsar blamed the Jewish population for the empire’s problems.

    Sam and Carrie raised their children in Milwaukee, and as near as I can tell, everyone was naturalized before World War I. The Russian Revolutions that brought down the monarchy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union played out while Sam sold fruit and his children were educated and built lives of their own. John grew up to be a salesman, and Sylvia, his eldest child, graduated from Washington High School in Milwaukee.

    I myself did not know that there was such a thing as a radical movement until I was about 19, at college. I lived in Milwaukee until about 1932. I went to Madison, Wisc. to attend the University of Wisconsin. I met Zalmond Franklin and we got married in February 1935. We were together on and off for about a year. I graduated June 1935 and left school. Franklin remained at school. After graduating I looked for work and finally found a job in a Milwaukee drug store and worked there for a while as sales clerk.

    There is a lot of historical context to unpack. Sylvia’s new husband, Zalmond, was in Spain during the Revolution, apparently supporting the Republican government as a Soviet operative. The Soviet Union and Mexico supported the Republican government while Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany supported the Nationalist faction that eventually won power in 1937.

    The first unanswered question we have is whether Sylvia knew about Zalmond’s Soviet connections, and if so, how much she knew. If you read Zalmond’s biography and the SWP’s assessment of him and his father, it seems he was a very active communist agent. However, the timing of events suggests that Sylvia was not privy to his assignments or activities.

    In the Fall of 1935 or Spring of 1936 I went to Chicago to live with my folks. There I entered the Chicago University to study social service. I went to school there for four quarters, working one summer for the Jewish Social Service outfit there, and then went to work for the Chicago Relief Administration where I worked until I came to New York.

    In the summer of 1937 I joined a YPSL circle in Chicago.

    Young Peoples’ Socialist League (YPSL) was the youth movement of the Socialist Party, within which the SWP conducted its activity at the time.

    The Work of the Spy

    Sylvia was apparently in Chicago during those early years of her marriage. According to Louis Budenz, he recruited her into the communist organization there in 1937. In his telling, she was assigned to go to New York, where she joined the Socialist Workers Party under the name “Sylvia Caldwell.”

    I came to New York in May 1938 to go to work for the Hebrew Association for the Deaf. I worked part time there and helped out in the National Office of the SWP in spare time. In December…I was asked to take a full-time job in the SWP National Office as the office secretary was leaving to take a job in industry.

    The SWP brought her in as the secretary to their leader, National Secretary James P. Cannon. She organized Cannon’s schedule, had access to all party records, finances, and international correspondence, and she took dictation of his letters, memoranda, and political reports. If she passed information that Cannon had about Leon Trotsky’s whereabouts in Mexico, her actions may have played a part in Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940. Whether she knew that was the result of her work or not is an open question.

    Sylvia and Zalmond were both in New York during those years. In 1939, he worked as a security guard at the Soviet Pavilion in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and in 1942 and 1943, he received classified material from the research being done on the atomic bomb at Columbia University and passed it to Soviet intelligence. Both Zalmond and Sylvia were referenced in decrypted intercepts from the VENONA project, which began in February 1943.

    The fact that she used the name Caldwell and apparently hid her marriage from the SWP lends weight to Budenz’s story that she was working for the Soviets. But even given the evidence confirming that she was a Soviet spy, there is also reason to suspect that she may not have been an enthusiastic one.

    “I Liked Them As People”

    When Sylvia told the SWP about joining the socialist organization in Chicago, she revealed an insight between the lines. Americans have always had trouble understanding the difference between communists and socialists, but Sylvia’s experience shines some light on the divide between those groups:

    I came to join the YPSL chiefly, I guess, because I was so lonely. I did not fit in with the friends of my family and I had no circle of my own. At the University in Madison, I got my first contact with radicalism and in a vague way I got to feel that socialism is a good thing. I heard Norman Thomas speak at the Socialist Club of the University of Chicago and he made a deep impression on me. I wanted to know more about socialism, so in my loneliness, I consulted the Chicago telephone directory for the address of some socialist organization, and founf [sic] the Socialist Bookstore.

    Did you catch that? Her “first contact with radicalism” seems like a reference to falling in with Zalmond and his circle of friends at the University. But in Sylvia’s words, later in the interview, she expanded on that characterization:

    My first contact with radicalism was at Wisconsin University where there was a group of the National Students’ League. My husband joined the League, 1935 semester, and I joined too just because he did. But I really didn’t know what it was all about. I don’t know whether the YCL [Young Communist League—the youth movement of the Stalinist Communist Party] had a fraction there at the time, but there was a radical group, bohemian types, of which my husband was one, and which was considered the “Communists” on the campus. I never knew whether my husband had any communist affiliations, but knew he was radical in his views and he may have been a member. I do know that his parents were either communists in ideology or just on the fringe of the Communist Party. They once gave a house party for the Friends of the Soviet Union.

    Some years ago I heard that my former husband had been in Spain during the revolutionary days there. So I imagine he must have become a YCLer after our separation. Or he may very likely have been one before. I did not know enough then to be able to detect that and he never trusted me with any information about his activities.

    It’s possible that she said those things to the SWP to maintain her cover. But if they are true, these remarks seem to confirm that she wasn’t aware of Zalmond’s activities, or of his father’s. She said something else that stood out when she described her experience with the Young People’s Socialist League (emphasis added):

    At the time I was working as a social worker in Chicago. The work I was doing, by the way, did not help me any. The patronizing attitude toward the poor was very distasteful to me. Well, so I went to the Socialist Party bookstore for some of their literature. There I met Lydia Beidel. She told me about the Young People’s Socialist League in my neighborhood and invited me to attend. I went. They met at Belle’s house. There I met a number of people. They seemed so different from the people I had known and made me feel so at home that I returned to a number of meetings and then joined the Circle. They were different from the other type of radicals I had known at college and I liked them as people. In the summer of 1937 I joined the YPSL circle on the North Side, Chicago.

    There is still a lot we don’t know, but the claim that she liked the Trotskyist Socialists “as people” tells me where her sympathies rested, and indicates some grey area between the characterizations of Sylvia being either a “committed communist spy” or a complete innocent.

    Après la Guerre

    Zalmond and Sylvia divorced in 1943, and he remarried Rose Richter, the sister of Nathan Einhorn’s wife. Einhorn was a journalist and secretary of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG), which was known for recruiting people into the Soviet espionage circle. Einhorn complained that Zalmond bragged too much about his contact with Soviet intelligence, and Zalmond Franklin was removed from active work.

    Sylvia’s activities, according to the VENONA intercepts, involved passing correspondence from the SWP to the KGB in 1943 and 1944. The correspondence was about Leon Trotsky’s widow and gave financial reports from Trotskyist groups to the KGB. Even if she was passing information about Trotsky to the Soviets as early as December 1938, it feels inaccurate to say that she was spying on America for the KGB. And while she doesn’t admit to doing that, I imagine that when she learned that her work for the Soviets led to Trotsky’s death, it soured her on that relationship. Of course, we don’t know when she would have learned that, or how long it took for her to extricate herself from her role as a spy.

    By 1950, Sylvia was working as a secretary in Chicago, where she lived with her parents. In 1951, she married James Donald Doxsee (1920–2005). James was a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War, and he and Sylvia seemed to just want to put her past behind them.

    But in 1954 and 1958, she was called before a grand jury to testify about her relationship with the KGB. After invoking her Fifth Amendment rights in 1954, she confessed in 1958 to meeting with individuals to pass on the correspondence she collected from the SWP. No charges were brought against her, and she did her best to disappear into her new life after that.

    The Past Behind Us

    Sylvia and James eventually moved to Mesa, Arizona, and then to Eugene, Oregon. James died in 2005, and Sylvia passed in 2012 at the age of 97.

    Her obituary described her as a “homemaker”.2 And for half a century, at least, that appears to have been true.

    1. London, E. (2018, August 14). An “exemplary comrade”: The Socialist Workers Party’s 40-year-long cover-up of Stalinist spy Sylvia Callen. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/14/sec1-a14.html ↩︎
    2. “Sylvia Doxsee obituary”. The Register-Guard. 2012-01-29. p. 12. Retrieved 2026-07-09. ↩︎
  • Ahnentafel #48: John Riley McCullough (1848-1918)

    Ahnentafel #48: John Riley McCullough (1848-1918)

    John R. McCullough was the youngest child of James McCullough and Nancy Fort (or Ford). John’s eldest brother was 18 years older than John, and while John was the ninth child born to the family, only five of his older siblings were still alive when he was born.

    This McCullough family struggled through the economic “boom and bust” cycles that you may have read about in middle school history, and judging by the number of unexplained deaths, they also struggled to stay alive in the time before germ theory was well understood, and there were no vaccines or antibiotics.

    When people are struggling, they aren’t often thinking about maintaining accurate records, and so much of what we have to tell us about their lives amounts to family legend.

    John Riley McCullough, FindAGrave memorial #5170344

    The Ephemera of Lore

    Much of what we think we know about this family comes from James McCullough and Descendants, A Family History1, the cover of which is our “featured image” above. This paragraph from Maxcy and McSween introduces John to the family:

    James, Jr., married Nancy Fort about 1829 and their first three children were born in Kentucky. In April 1834, his father gave James, Jr., 80 acres of land. In September of that year, he sold the land to his half-brothers, Daniel and John McCullough, and he and Nancy moved to Rush County, Indiana. In 1835 they bought 80 acres there. They did very well for awhile, but soon were having a hard time financially. They lost their little son JAMES III in 1836 and another infant in 1838. By 1848 they had five more children and had lost EMILY J. Nancy died in 1850, when her son, John Riley, was only two.

    John’s oldest brother, Benjamin Franklin McCullough, died at age 23 in 1853. Maxcy’s description of Ben says only, “He must not have been a strong person. Nothing is said about him.”

    When she says “Nothing is said,” Maxcy is probably referring to the somewhat ephemeral source material she had to work with. She sources some information to a family bible that was owned by a descendant, Ruth Points, in 1987; and she quotes heavily from a 1896 autobiography written by John’s older brother, Andrew. Andrew characterizes his family as impoverished, moving frequently to find opportunities, and struggling to get out of debt.

    After Nancy died, James McCullough remarried, but while the Maxcy book (citing that family Bible) lists his second wife as “Sarah Yocum,” there do not appear to be any records to support this. In fact, records don’t support much of what Maxcy and McSween tell us about the years of John Riley’s childhood:

    “When Nancy died in October 1850, James, Jr., was left with three small children, ages 2, 4, and 8 and Andrew J. who was 14. James, Jr., married Sarah Yocum in 1852. He and Sarah had two children; a daughter Nancy and a son Charley. Sarah was about 25 years younger than James, Jr., and he probably thought that she would be there to help with the children until they were grown and be company for him when he was older, but that was not to be. Sarah died in 1858 or 1859 and he was again left with small children. A family took the young son Charley; Hannah went to live with the Francis Yocum family; William D. and Andrew J. went out on their own; so only John Riley and Nancy (Sarah’s daughter) were at home by 1860, and their father died in 1864.”

    The 1860 Census seems to support this story, as it lists James in a household with John and Nancy, but when you consider the years in which important events happened, you begin to see how a poorer family with no fixed address could fall through the documentary cracks.

    A Young Man On His Own

    John McCullough was sixteen years old when his father died, and the country had been at war for three years. Wars have always been an employment opportunity for poor young men, and John mustered into Company I of the 1st Regiment, Indiana Heavy Artillery Battery, as a private on 29 March 1864.

    His Company performed garrison duty at New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and at various points in the Dept. of the Gulf from the summer of 1864 till Feb 1865. The regiment was part of the campaign against Mobile, Alabama, from 17 March to 12 April 1865. This included the Siege of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, March 26-April 8, followed by the occupation of Mobile from 12 April until 24 June 1865. Companies “I” and “M” did garrison duty at Fort Pickens, Florida, until Jan 1866.

    John mustered out with his unit at Baton Rouge on 10 Jan 1866.

    Veteran John found work as a farm hand. We know he was in Indiana in 1870, but farm work can keep a person moving, and I assume John moved a lot during the decade after the war. John was in Missouri Valley, Iowa, by the mid-1870s, and it was there he met his wife, Alice, and settled down to farm and raise their family.

    The McCullough family, about 1888. (Elsie May looks to be about 4, and the youngest son, David, wasn’t born until 1892.)

    A Story Worth Learning

    We’ll spend some time talking about Alice and the children in a couple of weeks, but for now, there isn’t a lot left to say about John’s biography that is grounded in facts or documents. Unlike my 2nd-great-grandfather, young John McCullough was not a poet and did not leave behind an artifact documenting his thoughts. Unless another cousin turns up with a collection of letters by or about John and his family, we have to be satisfied with a newspaper obituary’s summary of his life:

    He was ever a good soldier and citizen, a loving father and a Christian. He united with the Christian church in early manhood and transferred to the M.E. church in Mo. Valley 36 years ago, when Rev. Woodward was pastor. He was always a consistent Christian and was willing and ready to meet his God.2

    If you stop and think about it, this is all we get for most people of John’s era: spotty childhood records, a period of military service, and three or four decades summed up by the church he attended and a few general comments on his character.

    This is why it’s important to go deeper and read the history of the area where your ancestor lived during their lifetime. You can find some general history on Harrison County’s official website, and there are three volumes on the Internet Archive:

    Only one of those works mentions the surname “McCullough,” and that seems to be an unrelated family; but all three books were published in John Riley McCullough’s lifetime, and can tell you a lot about the changes going on around him and his farm over the course of his life. For now, I’ll have to leave it to other cousins to tease out those details.

    This is a life that unfolded in the period between the Civil War and World War I, when America found itself propelled to prominence as a world economic power, and all of the growing pains that came with that transformation. John McCullough may have only played the same small part that a million other Midwestern men played, but that is, in itself, a story worth learning.

    1. Maxcy, Mabel E, McSween, Jimmie D.; James McCullough and Descendants, A Family History; 1991, Penny Press, Inc., Denton-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas, U.S.A., pages 74-76. ↩︎
    2. Newspapers.com, Missouri Valley Times, Missouri Valley, Iowa, 16 May 1918, Thu, Pg 3, John R. McCullough. ↩︎