Mightier Acorns

After a lot of digging, I’m ready for the next part of the Milton Township Diaspora – but this part of the story didn’t go where I was hoping to go.1

Our Story, so far…

Let’s begin with a condensed timeline of what the 1911 version of The Callin Family History tells us. This is the outline of the story that can be backed up with records:

• James “1st” Callin – supposedly came to Pennsylvania from Ireland and fought in the Revolutionary War. James married in late 1778, and had at least two sons: James “2nd” and John, who settled on a farm in Milton Township, Richland County, Ohio.
  • James “2nd” settled in Milton Township around 1810, and died in 1820, when he “was killed in an altercation with a man named Fowler who struck him over the head with a rifle”.
  • John brought his family, allegedly from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, about 1816; John died of tuberculosis in 1835.

James “2nd” and his wife, who we’ll call “Aunt Mary,” had six children (that we know of):

• Two daughters, Elizabeth (1798-1834) and Sarah (1807-1830) married sons of Benjamin Montgomery – we discussed their descendants in a couple of previous posts.
• One son, Thomas (1802-1841) married Nancy Burget and their surviving children remained in Richland County after Thomas’s death. (We’ll talk about them another day.)

The other three sons married and had families by the time they decided to move to Iowa around 1840:

• Hugh (1803-1846) – married Lucinda Montgomery, probably the daughter of Benjamin Montgomery.
• Alexander (b. 1808) – referred to in The Callin Family History as “Alec.”
• James (“3rd,” I guess?) (1810-1844) – married his cousin, Margaret Callin, the youngest daughter of John Callin.

What George W. knew, and when he knew it.

George W. Callin, who published the 1911 Callin Family History, was born in 1846, so he didn’t know any of these relatives. But his father, William, the older brother of Margaret, was the son of John Callin, and William grew up on the farm in Milton Township alongside all of these older cousins.

What we know from George’s account is that after his cousin/brother-in-law James died, William left his wife and small children at home in Ohio and made the 600 mile trip to Iowa to bring Margaret and their two small sons back to Ohio. Here is what George said about that:

“James Callin with his wife and baby moved to Iowa where he died in 1844. William Callin, brother of Margret, went to Iowa and brought her and the two above named children home to Ashland Co. after her husband’s death.”

George tells us about those “two above named children” – William Callin and Warren Callin – but he does not tell us anything about Hugh, or about the two sisters who married Montgomery men¹. However, here is what George tells us about Alec (emphasis mine):

“Married and moved with his family and mother to Iowa about the year of 1840.
“The mother referred to was “Aunt Mary”, wife of James 2nd who was killed with a gun. She sold the farm and went with Alec to Iowa where she died some years later. Nothing has been heard from that branch of the family since 1845.”

So, beginning from the assumption that the three sons took their mother and their wives and moved to Iowa around 1840, I was able to find records to support these general facts². I know Hugh’s family lived in Louisa County, and that Aunt Mary is buried in Muscatine. I gather that there was a significant outbreak of one or more disease (cholera, typhus, typhoid, who knows?) which took James 3rd in 1844, and may have taken Hugh and Aunt Mary in 1846.

But what about Alec “with his family”?

The Search for Alec

For a long time, I didn’t find any records that I could tie to our elusive Alec. I eventually found a handful of land purchases using the U.S. Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records database, but no census records. So periodically, I would go back and search again to see if there were newly digitized records, new databases, or variations of the search that I hadn’t tried before.

These records show Alexander Callin/Callen buying land in Iowa:

If you read that 1843 transaction, it describes him as “Alexander Callen, of Washington County, Illinois.” And looking again, there is a record for an Alexander Callan in “Illinois, Public Land Purchase Records, 1813-1909” dated 12 October 1838. Plugging the location info from that record into the BLM-GLO database gives us two 1840 records for 40 acres each in Washington County, Illinois:

Armed with some certainty about his possible locations, I was able to find an Alexander Callan in Wapello, Louisa County, Iowa, in the 1850 Census, and in Des Moines County in 1854. This 1854 record provides his name and the number of people in his household (5 males, 4 females). The 1850 Census only lists him as a farmer age 30 (born in 1820), born in Pennsylvania, and living in the household of the Gilliam family. This suggests the rest of his family lived somewhere else.

Casting a slightly wider search than I had tried before netted another land transaction for Alexander Callan dated 30 October 1857 in Schuyler County, Missouri. That lead me to an 1870 Census record in Fabius, Schuyler, Missouri, where 56-year-old Alexander (abt 1814) lived with his wife, Elizabeth and 8 children, four of whom were born after that 1854 record!

Two Steps Back – One Inch Forward

Long Story/Short: the man I have been chasing through land records all these years is not the Alec Callin from The Callin Family History. The man in Schuyler County, Missouri, was Alexander CELLAN. All of the evidence I’ve been gathering fits the story told on his Find-A-Grave memorial. The land purchases he made (mapped out in the image at the top of this post) match up with the places mentioned in that biography, and if you look at where each of his children (listed in 1870 and 1860 Census records under the names “Callen” and “Kellan”) the place of birth for each child lines up with the land purchases – showing his eldest born in Philadelphia, and subsequent children born in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.

But…

There is one small sliver of silver lining. Remember that 1850 Census in Wapello? The Cellan family (spelled “Alexander Kellon”) also appears in the 1850 Census, living in Yellow Springs, Des Moines County, Iowa. The 1854 state census record in Yellow Springs also fits with the Cellan family, but that 1850 record in Wapello that doesn’t fit into their story.

So I think record for Alexander Callan in Wapello in 1850 might be the man I’ve been looking for, after all! The date and place of birth fit, and the land record I mentioned above in Louisa County dated 1854 describes a land purchase by “Alexander Callen of Muscatine County” – none of which matches the records associated with the Cellan family.

These are two big discoveries for me. 1) I finally found a record for Alec Callin where I have been expecting to find him, and 2) I have another name variation (CELLAN) to include in the Callan One Name Study.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and revise the family tree in several places.

1. The records and my reasoning showing that Elizabeth, and Sarah are likely the children of James “2nd” were laid out in two posts on my old blog: Elizabeth’s discovery was in Echoes & Rhymes (2018) and Sarah’s were in Here We Go Again (2020) and The Other Montgomery Connection (2020). ↩︎
2. The case for Hugh being the brother of Alec and the others was made in: The Iowa Branch of the Callin Family (2021) ↩︎