Mightier Acorns

Let’s begin our new weekly Ahnentafel series with my paternal grandfather.

Sprucing Up a Profile

One of the great things about a wiki – like WikiTree – is the way it saves the previous versions of every page. There are a lot of reasons why this is great. For one thing, if someone else makes edits that turn out not to be correct, you can easily go back to an earlier version of the page. But for my purposes today, the great thing is that I can show you some “before” and “after” views of Grandpa Bob’s page.

If you click on this link, you can see that I replaced the placeholder information that had been in the Biography since 2019 with a complete, sourced biography on 1 December 2021.

In the 5 years since I made those edits, I’ve learned a lot about making better source citations on WikiTree. You can do a lot more with a citation than you could do even in 2021, giving any interested cousins access to the documents you used to write your biography, and often allowing you to link to images of the documents, where available.

And creating those source citations is easier than ever if you install the WikiTree Sourcer App. (Here’s a handy How-To guide.) You will still need to review any citations you generate using the app carefully to make sure they have the information you expect, and to make sure they display correctly after adding them to your profile. (All magic comes with a price, dearie!)

Expanding a Biography

The version of Bob’s biography that I added in 2021 came from The Callin Family History, which I published a couple of months later. Since then, I’ve learned a few things and found a few more sources and stories I’d like to add. When you look at the profile now, the sources should all have publicly viewable links to Ancestry documents or media files (particularly for his diplomas). You can also see that I added small details, like:

• The story of how he was accidentally scalded by boiling water as a 2-year-old, which was found in a newspaper clipping from his mother’s scrapbook.
• Two 1950 Census records showing his young family living in Glendale while he pastored a church near Prescott.
• A possibly apocryphal story about his name, added in the Research Notes section.

There is always more to add, such as the small details gleaned from transcriptions of letters written by Nancy, his parents, and others. Some of those details are already touched on in his obituary; some of them give the reader a sense of the family’s relationship dynamics, and hint at the drama in their lives.

But you also have to consider whether a future reader of this WikiTree profile will be interested enough in those details to make it worth the effort of documenting, citing, and uploading images of artifacts to websites.

What Might Not Make the Cut

It’s impossible to distill everything you knew and loved about a person into a sourced and documented history, so WikiTree also has a section for adding “Memories” – special personal recollections about a loved one that might not have a source outside of you. (I added a Memory about Grandpa Bob’s love of western novels and trains.)

There are other things that probably bear mentioning, but are hard to include on a WikiTree profile. We know that Bob was an aircraft mechanic during the war, and I remember him showing me this postcard of the AT-6, a training variant of the T-6 Texan, and telling me that was the aircraft he maintained at Luke and Yuma airfields, where U.S. pilots trained. I also know that he got his personal pilot’s license in 1968 – we have this photo of him with his airplane, and a pilot’s log that was in with Great-grandma Bertha’s scrapbook and all of the Callin/Witter/Huff photos.

But there are a lot of unknowns involved in telling that part of his story. I don’t know why he stopped flying in 1971, for example. It may have proved too expensive to keep up; he may have decided to prioritize family camping adventures. I do remember that he was very proud to see me in my U.S. Air Force uniform when I came home for my first visit after enlisting in 1994. (See the featured image.)

And then there are the hints of family strife.

When Brothers Part

Bob’s brother, Norman, died in Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1964. I never met Norman’s family, even though I lived in Baltimore County for 15 years. But I may have found a small clue to understanding Uncle Norman’s Missing Family.

When Bob and Nancy were living in Glendale, his folks, John and Bertha, lived in Orlando, FL, and wrote to them often. In November 1948, John mentioned something vague when discussing the family’s plans for Thanksgiving:

I don’t know for sure what we will do. Norman + Ruth + family are trying to come down here [to Florida, from Baltimore] but he has been so sick so much I don’t know whether they will be able to make it or not. Norman is back at work. Sorry they have to act as they do t’word you, but just forget it. They will see the error someday.

I know that Bob and Norman visited Florida at the same time in the 1950s, because I inherited some photos of them at the beach. In one, you can see their dad, John, just off camera, so that visit must have occurred before 1956. I would guess that both photos were taken on the same day, since Norman appears to be wearing the same shirt in both. (I’ll refrain from comment on Bob’s attire!)

But while I can see the contours of a story there, it’s not enough to assert that I know anything about the nature of their relationships. And since everyone involved has died, we may never know what happened.

Ancillary Editing

For now, I’m happy to have Grandpa Bob’s profile as complete and up-to-date as I can make it. While reviewing his page, I can also take a look at his siblings’ pages, and see if there are any improvements I can add to them or their childrens’ pages. (I owe Aunt Vicki’s page an overdue update, too. We certainly have enough material for a proper biography!)

Next week, look for “Ahnentafel #9: Nancy Witter” – and if you’re reading this in the future, look for a link to it in the comments section below.