Mightier Acorns

(We’re all cousins if we go back far enough.)

My name is Tad Callin. My journey through my family history started with asking questions when I was a kid. In the late 1990s, when I started having kids of my own, I started fooling around with Legacy and some other early family tree programs. My interest and my tree grew from there.

I started a family-only genealogy blog in 2007 and called it “Mighty Acorns,” referring to the old poems:

“as an ook cometh of a litel spyr” [a spyr, or spire, is a sapling]
-Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 1374
“The greatest Oaks have been little Acorns.”
-Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia, 1732
“Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks from little acorns grow.”
-D. Everett in The Columbian Orator, 1797
  (citations courtesy of The Phrase Finder)

My research has shaped the way I think about my roots and origins. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the notion of finding “important people” in my family tree, but as I found more and more “little acorns” – farmers, teachers, and the dozens upon dozens of silent, unnamed women who are all but erased from their own histories – I came to appreciate the fact that I wouldn’t exist at all without any one of the people hiding in the background of history. To me, the fact that they existed and survived makes them mighty. Thus – “Mighty Acorns” was born.

In 2014, I decided to open up my work to the rest of the world, and re-branded the new blog as “Mightier Acorns.”

A Busy Decade

I was 42 years old when I launched Mightier Acorns, and I felt like I needed to accomplish a few things. By 2020, I had crossed several big projects off my list:

• narrated and hosted for the Pseudopod horror fiction podcast and Escape Pod, the science fiction podcast

• published a replica of the 1911 Callin Family History (available on Lulu.com in paperback or hardcover)

• published my 2016 memoir/novel, Tad’s Happy Funtime (available on Amazon in paperback and e-book)

• returned to school at Towson University and finished my Bachelor of Science in Music (vocal performance) – Class of 2020!

• published my revised Callin Family History (available on Lulu.com in an 800-page hardcover edition)

• published War Poems, a collection of poetry written by my great-great-grandfather, John H. Callin about his experiences as a Union artillery sergeant in the Civil War (available on Lulu.com in hardcover)

I took a break from blogging until 2022, when I re-launched “Mightier Acorns” on Substack. There are a lot of great people over there, but the company also promotes and profits off of some pretty awful people, and they have doubled down on promoting those who have been working to undermine democracy in the U.S. and tear down the Constitution that I swore an oath to defend. So, after two years on Substack, I decided to make the move to a platform where I would not be contributing to the corporate support of white nationlists and fascists.

I think most of the ancestors I write about would be proud of me for standing up for the principles they fought for.