Mightier Acorns

Let’s see what this WordPress jalopy can do!

As promised, I’m back from a brief summer hiatus. Kate and I took a road trip to Baltimore to visit the kids, and grab some pie at Perkins, and now we’re ready to settle back into our regularly scheduled programming.

I haven’t exactly been idle on the family history front. There are a several things going on behind the scenes at Mightier Acorns that I plan to share with you all. And I’ve been tidying up the archives to make the old posts easier to navigate.

Tags and Categories

One of the features that attracted me to WordPress as a platform is the ability to add Tags and customized Categories to my posts. Substack has “tags” (which did not port over when I imported my archive) but they have their own ideas about SEO, so using them in a way that is useful to me and my audience was difficult.

I’ve been going through my imported Substack posts and adding Tags for each surname important to that post, and adding a number of categories to capture the places, occupations, and historical events prominent in each post. When I’m done, readers should be able to use a Tag link to find (for example) all of the “McCullough” posts. And if they want to know about ancestors from “Lewis County, NY” or ancestors who served in the “American Civil War,” there will be Categories for those.

Even if you, the reader, have no use for those features, they’ll help me quickly scan through my archives and ask myself, “Which families have I neglected?” Or maybe I’ll notice I have a lot of posts about a topic or occupation, and that will inspire me to give you an overview of trends related to the family.

Pingbacks!

As I go through and find places where I linked from one post to an older post, I have been replacing the Substack link that came over in the import with a WordPress link. In the process of doing that, I re-discovered another feature: the Pingback!

Basically, anytime someone links to an old post, their link should show up in a comment on that post. In Substack, when I linked back to an old post, that was all that happened. But in WordPress, that link in the comments means that if somebody finds the older post first, there will automagically be a link to the future post and no need for them to search through the archives manually to see if I finished my “series.”

(I anticipate that one day, the Substack will be deleted, but I want to be settled in on WordPress, first.)

Processing Artifacts

My family recently shared two interesting artifacts with me that I plan to share with you, eventually.

My maternal grandparents, Bert (Alberta) and Russ Clark had a video made for their 44th wedding anniversary in 1990. My plan is to make an edited version of the video that I can share here (taking out a lot of private information about living people and keeping bits that show their personalities), as well as transcribing it for use as a source that I can cite on their WikiTree profiles. The bulk of the video is Grandma Bert reading off all of the places she and Grandpa lived after they were married. (There were a LOT of places!)

The other recording was made by my paternal grandmother, Nancy (Witter) Callin, interviewing her mother, Merle (Huff) Witter. This audio cassette came to me from cousin Pat Witter, and once I’ve made a digital copy [update: I made the digital copy on Juneteenth!], I plan to transcribe that, too. Pat tells me it has a lot of great-grandma’s memories about her family’s move from Kansas to Arizona in the years just before its 1912 statehood.

Ongoing Works in Progress

In case you’re new to Mightier Acorns, I am working behind the scenes on a couple of long-term projects:

Callan Name Study

This is my attempt to run a one-name study for the variations of the Callan/Callen/Callin surname. I’m not the only one doing this (see the links on that page) but I launched the page on WikiTree and I’m in the process of doing the research before adding profiles for individuals and their families to WikiTree. There is also a DNA study organized by Stan Courtney on FTDNA (again, linked from the Callan Name Study page) that you can get involved with if you’re interested.

The Tartan Trail

The Scotland Project on WikiTree is a volunteer-run program to introduce people to the basics of conducting research in Scotland and building profile for Scottish ancestors.

I signed up to learn what I can, and I’ve been on a waiting list since April. [Update: I got my Level 1 project on Juneteenth!] But once I’m done, I hope to be more helpful to the community in general, but (selfishly) I want to find my Murray ancestors and find out where they were in the 1700s.