Mightier Acorns

Journeys through Genealogy and Family History

A parody of a family coat of arms designed with acorns as elements, with the motto "ex gladnis potentioribus" Latin for "from Mighty Acorns"
From Mighty Acorns

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Tad Callin has been working on family history and genealogy since the late 1990s. He does most of his research on Ancestry and posts what he learns to WikiTree.

Category: California

  • Unboxing Wiley: part 2

    Where did Wiley Cowan come from? After the Revolutionary War, we lost track of James Callin. We don’t know for certain where he lived or how many children he had, but we are reasonably sure that he had two sons, James and John, who settled on a farm together between 1810 and 1816 in what…

  • Unboxing Wiley

    Part 1: A note from San Francisco On 10 June 2022, I found a note in my Ancestry messages. It began: I had just published my Callin Family History that March, documenting as many descendants of James Callin as I could, and I remembered the Cowan family. I did the bulk of my work on…

  • The Ballad of Mrs. Steele

    Pacific Junction, Iowa, was a railroad town. Three railroads converged in Mills County, about 25 miles south of Omaha, Nebraska. The western terminus of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad and the eastern terminus of the Nebraska Burlington & Missouri Railroad met at a station on the Kansas City, Council Bluffs, & Saint Joseph Railroad…