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

Category: Historical Events

Ancestors who were part of major historical events.

  • Grandma Merle’s Travelogue: Farming and Motherhood

    The last of four installments where we read the transcript of Grandma Merle’s Travelogue!

  • Grandma Merle’s Travelogue: Back to Arizona (1913)

    Grandma Merle finally gets around to meeting Grandpa Dick in the recording of her memories.

  • Dangerous Times in Kentucky

    A Tale of Harassments and Murder Note: this piece was originally published on Projectkin in Feb 2024 in their Member’s Corner. It is being re-published here with permission. Kentucky was not the safest place to live in 1862. Several Southern states seceded from the Union after Fort Sumter, but Governor Beriah Magoffin declared Kentucky to…

  • Facing sex & religion in history and genealogy As I’ve been writing about the branches of my children’s ancestry this year, I’ve had to consider many points of view that are very different from my own. Most of those differences are due to the religions practiced by those ancestors. The history of America was driven…

  • The Milton Township Diaspora (part 3) When we last talked about Sarah (Montgomery) Davidson and her family, they set out from Fulton County, Indiana, and took to the Oregon Trail in 1852: Sarah and Henry Davidson took their four children and their adopted niece, Sarah Farrell, on the trip; we have only talked about Sarah…

  • Most of her story remains underground The Opp family is my mother’s maternal grandmother’s maternal side—and if that doesn’t emphasize “maternal” enough, I think of them as being on the Opp-osite side of the tree from my Callin family. (Opening with a Dad joke of that magnitude should rebalance things, don’t you think?) I’ve tried…

  • Finding family in the military Charles Walter Putnam (1859–1922) was one of my wife’s sixteen great-great-grandparents. We talked about his family last year: Some families pass down maternal surnames as first or middle names in their children. In the Putnam family, Charles named his youngest son George Force Putnam (1904–1978), not only giving young George…

  • The Milton Township Diaspora (part 2) Sarah Montgomery was born in Milton Township, Richland County, Ohio, on 27 December 1824 and married Henry Davidson (1818–1894) in Fulton County, Indiana, on 22 Apr 1841. They took their family—including their adopted niece, Sarah Ferrell—on the Oregon Trail in 1853. In my last post about this family, I…

  • A tale from when the West was still young Once upon a time, several families founded a town in Ohio. Benjamin Montgomery (1766-1841) brought his wife, Nancy, and their six children from Virginia to settle in Weller Township, Richland County, Ohio, where they laid out a town in 1816. Benjamin called the town “Olivesburg” after…

  • On the precipice of a nine generation breakthrough If you’ve been following along the past few weeks, you know that I’ve been climbing the Hart branch of my family tree. Last week, I showed the documentary evidence connecting Alexander C Hart (1817-1871) to his father, Martin: Now we will look at Martin Hart (1792 –…