Mightier Acorns

Picking up from last time: John Callin (1870-1835) and Elizabeth Simon (1780-1864) were born and married in Pennsylvania, according to The Callin Family History, published in 1911 by their grandson, George W. Callin (1846-1921). Anything George knew about his grandparents probably came from his father, William, or aunts and uncles who remained close enough to Ohio for him to meet them.

Rainbows in a Mental Prism

I’ve been poring over that 1911 Callin Family History (the “CFH”) for three decades, now. I’ve lamented for 30 years that George did not include any of his sources, and I spent the years 2015 and 2016 using my full Ancestry membership, FamilySearch.org, and old digitized local histories found on sites like the Internet Archive to find sources that could support or refute George’s information.

Ann Callin‘s story in the CFH is pretty straightforward, and George seems to have been confident about the information he recorded:

Record of Ann Callin Campbell, who was the 2nd daughter of John Callin, who was the 2nd son of James 1st.

• Born Sept. 16,1806, died Mar. 18, 1889.
• Married Henry Campbell Aug. 20, 1833.
• To this union four children were born:
• Cyrus, born Mar. 23 1834, died July 21, 1873, at Ashland, Ohio.
• Harrison, born Dec. 8, 1837, lives at Tipton, Mo.
• Elizabeth, born June 30, 1840, died at Ashland, O., Feb. 8, 1897, unmarried.
• Francis, born Mar. 30, 1842, died Mar. 27, 1905.
• Cornelia, born Oct. 13, 1843, died Mar. 13, 1849.

Of course, confidence does not correlate to correctness. Stating “four children were born” and then listing five children undermines your credibility a little bit. Still, records seem to bear out most of that information – census records show those children in the household of Henry Campbell, a shoemaker in Milton Township, and various vital records support those dates and name the parents.

So George Callin’s account mostly holds up, but there are small details that don’t add up. It reminds me of trying to drive into the morning sun with a cracked windshield – you can mostly see to drive, but there can sometimes be unexpected refractions, casting distracting rainbows across your vision.

Speaking of vision, we do have some photographic evidence for Ann:

We don’t have any birth records (for Ann or any of her siblings), and we don’t have Ann and Henry’s marriage record (even though we do have records for her siblings and cousins who married before she did). We do have Census records from 1840-1870 that definitely fit the family George described, and we have Ann and Elizabeth living in Ashland in 1880.

Within these records, there is an interesting trend in which Ann’s name transitions from plain “Ann” to “Mary Ann” and, in 1880, to “Mary A. Campbell.” What we do not see is a similar trend with Henry’s name – he is Henry on all the records I have found (sometimes misspelled as “Hery” or “Henrey”) – but that raises the question of which facts are facts, and which are phantom rainbows coming from the cracks in between.

Just Who Was Henry Campbell?

I don’t think this will be a shocking announcement, but “Henry Campbell” is an extremely common name. I’m not even sure that I can say whether or not this mention of a Henry Campbell in Milton Township in 1825 in the History of Ashland County, Ohio¹ is the man who married Ann Callin:

Chapter XXXIII. “The Pioneers of the Year 1825.”

“…since we will not have space for a personal notice of each pioneer, at a later period, we have concluded to give the name of each voter and male citizen, so far as possible, at that date.”

Milton township (range 17): includes [a long list, I selected these three to make my point] –

• William Callin
• Hugh Callin
• Henry Campbell

The records we have (census records and his headstone in Ashland Cemetery) tell us Henry was born in 1812. 1825 minus 1812 equals 13, and a voter in 1825 would have had to be at least 21, but the only William and Hugh Callin I know of who lived in Milton Township would have been Ann’s brother, William (b. 1813) and Hugh (b. 1817)…so I’m not sure what to make of this list of “1825 Pioneers”.

The point I’m making here is that we have to be careful about making sure that the records we find match what we already know. We have to be more careful about making assumptions in this case, because there could be more than one Henry Campbell of unspecified age or parentage in play.

The three Census records that name everyone in the household (1850, 1860, 1870) name the children who survived childhood, and the 1840 census counts the number of children we expect to see (two boys, one girl, of the right ages). The latter three records all give Henry’s occupation as a shoemaker. The first two (1840 and 1850) put their home in Milton Township (Richland County before 1846, Ashland County, after), and the latter two put their home in Ashland, which incorporated as a city in 1844.

As a shoemaker in Ashland County, Henry may have mentored Thomas Jefferson Callin, the son of his wife’s cousin, Thomas. You might recall that Jeff Callin also lived in Milton Township and Ashland, and his father, Thomas, died when he was young. I find it likely that Henry may have stepped in as a father figure for the young man, maybe taking him on as an apprentice.

But there are no clues in there to tell us who Henry’s own parents might be, or where in Pennsylvania he was born. I’ve done what I know how to do, and I added Henry to the Campbell Name Study. Perhaps someone will find him coming from another direction one day.

Where the Children Remained

Of the four children who survived to adulthood, Elizabeth remained unmarried her whole life and died in 1897 in Ashland. Frances (Campbell) Hoot married John B. Hoot in 1862, and they had nine children in Ashland, eventually moving to Mount Vernon in Knox County. Frances died in Columbus. The two boys, Cyrus and Harrison, grew up in Ashland, but many of their children ended up moving away from Ohio.

Cyrus Campbell (1834-1872) fought for the Union in Missouri, and his younger son, Howard, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in July 1864, probably during the Battle of Nashville. Cyrus left his wife, Ursulla, to raise his two sons when he died in 1872 or 1873, and she remarried and lived with her second husband, Robert Sutton, in Ohio. Elder son, Alden, became a farmer in Illinois, raising a son and two daughters. Howard moved out of Ohio and became a farm hand in Texas, eventually marrying his boss’s daughter and raising eight children.

Harrison Campbell (1837-1924) enlisted on 15 Sep 1861 and mustered in as a private with Company I, New York 59th Infantry Regiment on 19 Oct 1861. After returning from the Civil War, he married Catherine Hoot, a half-sister of John Bently Hoot, who married Harrison’s sister, Frances. They lived in Missouri, where most of their children were born, and farmed until about 1914. By 1920, Harrison and Catherine had moved to Forest Grove, a small farm town about 25 miles west of Portland, Oregon.

A CFH Post-Script

When I embarked on my mission to update George’s CFH in 2015, the Campbell descendants were the first major research challenge I faced. I suspect now that George got the information for his book from Elizabeth Campbell before she died in 1897, or from Francis Hoot, who died in 1905.

So when it came to chasing down records for the Campbell children and grandchildren who left Ohio, I found myself constantly losing track of people and then having to double back and double-check what I thought I knew, and what the records actually said.

And I learned many lessons that would serve me well when I moved on to Ann’s sister, Eliza, and her many, many Ferguson descendants!

1. Hill, George William; History of Ashland County, Ohio, published by Williams Bros, page 84 (Internet Archive). ↩︎