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.

  • Uncle Norman's Missing Family

    A lifetime in Baltimore without finding my cousins

    My grandfather, Bob Callin, had two older siblings. Bob was the baby, born in 1920; Yvonne, the oldest of the three, was born in 1907, and Norman was born in 1912.

    John Norman Callin graduated from Fostoria High School in Ohio in 1930 and then moved to Orlando, Florida. His parents moved there about that time, probably because great-grandpa John had followed his older brother, Byron Herbert Callin, looking for business opportunities.

    Norman married Ruth Frees Harpster in 1933, and at some point after 1940, they moved their family to Baltimore County, Maryland. I know from his 1964 obituary that he worked as a machinist for the American Can Company for 18 years, so I would guess they moved about 1946.

    Norman and Ruth had three children – Michael, the youngest, was born in 1946. He is the young man in the white sweater at the left of the group photo above. He was the same age as my dad, but they only met once or twice; Michael died in 1976. Norman’s daughter, Marilyn, is still living, and I have been in touch with her children.

    But their older son, John Richard “Dick” Callin (1933-1993), also died in Baltimore County and left behind a number of second cousins I have never met.

    The Cousins in Baltimore County

    I arrived with my young family in Maryland in 1997 when the Air Force stationed me there for a year. We had an infant to care for and I was only dabbling in genealogy, so I didn’t know any solid information about Norman’s family – I was just vaguely aware that Grandpa’s brother had lived in Maryland. I think I learned that Dad’s cousin Dick had died a few years before, but I didn’t yet understand whose son he was.

    We bought our house in Baltimore County in 2005. By then I knew a bit more, but I struggled to find contact information for any of the Callin family. I didn’t know the names of Dick’s children for certain – though I knew his wife’s name was Edna. I found an address in Middle River and wrote letters periodically without hearing back.

    Edna died in 2013, so at some point during the project to compile the Callin Family History I found her obituary. This gave me some confirmation of who her children were, and I tried again to reach out. I found Edna’s granddaughter on Facebook, a girl about five years older than my eldest, but she (probably wisely) ignored the Facebook message from a complete stranger.

    The closest I came to making contact happened a few weeks before my wife and I moved to Texas. We were making a Costco run, and we went to the Costco in Middle River, where we usually shop. The cashier saw my name on my membership card and asked, “Oh, are you one of the Callins of Bowley’s Quarters?”

    “Technically, yes,” I said. She didn’t know what to make of that.

    “So, have I ever seen you at one of the cookouts?” I said no, and it only occurred to me later that I should have given her my number and asked her to pass it on next time she was at a cookout.

    A map showing Parkville in relation to Middle River and Bowley's Quarters
    I lived in Parkville for 15 years and never found my cousins in Bowleys Quarters

    Maybe Someday

    There are a number of reasons why distant cousins would not be interested in talking to me. I’m basically a stranger on the internet, and if they do any research on my name they are likely to find my writing and opinions splashed all over social media. They may be put off by my political opinions, by my open atheism, or (worst of all) they might not think I’m funny. For all I know, there was a falling out of some kind between Grandpa Bob and Norman that has carried down to Norman’s grandkids.

    Who knows?

    For now, they remain a mystery.

  • Wavetops: Amos Clark

    No, not that one – the older one

    I feel like we all say this a lot, but: Don’t accept unverified research until you’ve checked out the sources.

    I don’t know who did the research on my Clark family before I started looking into genealogy, but I was given a tree that showed Amos Clark and Sarah Stumbo (or Stambaugh) as the parents of my 2nd-great grandfather, Joel Clark.

    There wasn’t a lot of information for me to work with in the beginning. I remember finding a marriage record for Amos Clark and Sally Stumbough, dated 8 April 1824 in Lawrence County, Ohio. Joel Clark’s death certificate listed his parents as Amos Clark (place of birth “not known”) and Sarah Stumbo (born in Virginia) – and since “Sally” was a common nickname for “Sarah” I can accept that with Joel’s 1828 birthdate, I have the right people.

    That’s about where I sat for many years before digging into that branch of the family more deeply and learning about the area where they lived.

    The geography of that particular stretch of the Ohio River is interesting because, in the present day, it forms the Huntington–Ashland metropolitan area – which “spans seven counties in the three states of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.”

    Map of the so-called "Kyova" tri-state area
    Map showing the Tri-state area – note how close Ironton, Ashland, and Huntington are to each other

    Four of those counties – Boyd and Greenup, KY; Lawrence, OH; and Cabell, WV – kept turning up in the records for other descendants and relatives of the Clark family. Joel’s second wife, Sarah Jane Bellamy, was born in Cabell County, Virginia, (in 1836, decades before the state of West Virginia split from Virginia in 1863). Their son, David Ulysses Clark, was born in Greenup County and raised most of his family in Boyd County. And, of course, Amos and Sarah were married in Lawrence County – so I started digging there.

    I found a lot of information about Amos Clark – multiple dates of death, multiple Census records…. some from the same years. Things quickly stopped adding up.

    Eventually, I sorted some of the mystery out and discovered that there were at least three men named Amos Clark living in or around Ironton, OH, during the years I was researching. Later, thanks to another researcher on Ancestry, I found a court document in which Sarah Clark had filed a Petition for Dower, naming several of her minor children and establishing the date of death for her late husband.

    “To the Court of Common Pleas within and for the County of Lawrence and State of Ohio in chancery sitting Sarah Clark of said County represents that Amos Clark late of said County departed this life on or about the first day of January A.D. 1848 leaving your petitioner his widow and Jacob Clark[,] Hannah Clark[,] Jackson Clark[,] George W Clark[,] and Elizabeth Clark Gannon his heirs at law and legal representation who are all persons under the age of twenty one years…”

    Joel would have turned 21 about two months after this petition was filed (on 31 October 1848), and he didn’t marry his first wife until 1853, so it seems odd that he is not named here. However, I have found no records for a “Jacob Clark” anywhere, and Sarah’s 1850 Census shows her living with Joel, Jackson, and George W. – so it’s possible that the children in the petition are listed in order of birth, and that “Jacob” is Joel.

    In the coming weeks, I’ll be digging into the descendants of these Clark children to see if I can track down cousins from other branches who might be able to compare DNA results with me or with other known Clark descendants.

    One piece of information I haven’t been able to either confirm or rule out is the birth information I found on Amos’ WikiTree page. It was an “orphaned” page and I have since taken over as the profile manager. The person who added the birth info – “Born about 3 Nov 1802 [uncertain] in Westfield, Union, New Jersey, United” – also included records from another Amos Clark who lived after our Amos’ death in 1848. While it seems unlikely that the Amos Clark I’m interested in was from New Jersey… I just don’t know.

    But the search goes on!

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  • On the Road: There…

    Travels Through the Places They Knew

    We weren’t supposed to be here, but Hurricane Helene washed out parts of the Interstate, so we took a more Northern route.

    Our original itinerary took us from San Antonio to Nashville on day one—a 15-hour sprint followed by a leisurely 12-hour leg to the house in Baltimore via I-81 (mostly), going through Knoxville before entering Virginia. After seeing the devastation centered in Asheville, North Carolina, we decided to go north through Kentucky and West Virginia instead.

    Our route along I-64

    And so, we found ourselves on I-64 passing through Mount Sterling, in Montgomery county, Kentucky. This was the town where my wife’s Wavetop ancestors started their family before moving to Indiana.

    Keeping to our pace, we soon entered Boyd and Greenup counties, where my maternal grandfather’s family had lived for three or four generations (depending on which branch you count).

    We didn’t have time to stop and look around on this trip, but we have been through the Ashland, Kentucky/ Ironton, Ohio area on a previous trip, and I need to plan a visit to do some research and visit with cousins.

    Someday.

    After driving past Ashland, we entered into Cabell County, West Virginia, where my Bellamy ancestors (also on my maternal grandfather’s side) settled.

    Before I go…

    …on any long trips, I feel like I need to learn more about these areas. I need to figure out where the physical records are kept and how I will need to preserve them. Are they in a courthouse, or are they (as they were in Ashland) in a separate room at the public library? Will there be a copy machine, or will I need to rely on my phone to capture images of any documents I find?

    I think the first step will be to catch up on the “All About the Place” series and check out what others have been posting while I’ve been traveling.

    I also want to visit the big family history centers in Fort Wayne and Saint Louis – where I know they have (at least) the Berlin family history.

    But all of this depends on my ability to plan things – so I guess we’ll see what happens!

  • October Surprise

    A recap of favorites from my first year on Substack

    I might miss posting next week due to traveling last week – if so, don’t panic! I will come back once I recover. But I think I’m allowed some time off. After all…

    I launched Mightier Acorns on Substack on 4 Oct 2023, with A New Leaf for an Old Genealogy Nut. And if I did my math right, this post is the 114th on this platform – but there is no guarantee that I took time zones into account, so I could be off one way or another.

    My original plan included a “Weekly Log” feature which I managed to maintain for all of 5 weeks before dropping that format in favor of a two-posts-per-week, Wed/Fri, rotation. I also did some simple math and realized that my “Family Reunion” posts were relatively easy to assemble, would give me at least half a year’s worth of content, and would inspire deeper, more interesting stories and essays. I have enjoyed watching my friends on Substack take that idea and run with it!

    Some of my favorite stories from the original Mightier Acorns blog found a new audience here. I was particularly proud of the four snapshots of my four grandparents:

    I am extremely pleased with the body of work I’ve put up on this platform. I’ve done several multi-part explorations, including a deep dive into Rhode Island founder John Green (who turned out to probably not be my ancestor). I’ve sketched out the path for researching my wife’s ancestry and learned a ton about Sweden and Norway. And I have had fun along the way – hopefully, if you’re reading this, you are having fun, too!

    …and if you haven’t already, subscribe for free!

    They say the friends you make along the way are the point of the journey, and I’ve been thrilled to become part of the community of genealogists here. Barbara Tien at Projectkin Community Forum and Robin Stewart of CuZens Genealogy Matters, both separately and under their joint effort at Mission: Genealogy, have been encouraging and supportive at every step.

    And to each of you who clicks the “like” button, shares a note, or links to something I wrote – you are seen and appreciated!

    In the coming year, I hope to keep doing what I’ve been doing. I’ve found that just writing about what interests me, keeping each post under 1,000 words, and making sure there are at least 6 scheduled posts in the queue at all times is a successful formula.

    I don’t plan on turning on the paywall, because I want future cousins to be able to find old posts, but as of this writing, one person has pledged at the annual rate, and I am flattered by the gesture. If you feel strongly about supporting Mightier Acorns financially, I recommend that you pick up a few copies of great-grandpa John’s War Poems as gifts for the Civil War buffs in your life, or to donate to your local library.

    And lastly, if you happen to be my sister – Happy Birthday! (She’s who I was waiting for outside the hospital in this photo – which you might recognize as the cover of my book, Tad’s Happy Funtime.1)

    Tad, age 4 1/2
    Tad, age 4, waiting for Sara’s arrival outside the hospital
    1

    Oh, yeah, if you like books, that is also… a book, which is for sale. Tad’s Happy Funtime

  • Maintaining a Pattern

    A celebration of a wedding trend

    I’m at a special wedding this week – so I’m re-purposing an old post about weddings in my family.

    Here are three couples with a few things in common:

    • They all married young

    • The grooms (and one bride) were all in the service

    • Not only did all six of these people share a surname (after their respective weddings), but the grooms shared their given names, as well!

    How young were they? Well, that’s the basis for our trivia question – “Which of these brides was the youngest at her wedding?”

    You’ll need some dates to make an educated guess, but with this being the open internet, you’ll excuse me for being coy about just posting them here without making you work for them!

    First up, you can see a happy young pair of airmen getting their engagement picture taken. Tad was a mature (ahem) 22 years, and Kate was a Bicentennial Baby. They took a lot of ribbing over their age difference, but when they married after a brief, six-week romance, she was 18 – and only a few months shy of 19.

    Tad and Kate, February 1995, Monterey, California

    Our next couple could hardly wait for high school graduation to set their wedding date, but wait they did. Teddy was a mature (I am certain) 22 years old, and Barbie was a true child of the 1950s. They married in 1968, just one month after her 18th birthday.

    Ted went on to join the National Guard and trained to be a medical technician, then tried his hand at teaching before settling on his career as a firefighter.

    Ted Callin and Barbara Clark, wedding photo
    Ted and Barb, April 1968

    And finally, we have the dashing couple straight out of Casablanca, the heroine and hero of When Things Got Serious. Bobby was a 21-year-old Army airplane mechanic, and Nancy was in high school when they met – and the outbreak of the Second World War lent some urgency to their decision. And so they married in 1942 – about 8 months before her 18th birthday.

    Bob and Nancy, c.1942, Phoenix, Arizona

    So there you have it – I come from a long, well-established line of young men who married young brides and survived to tell the tale. I think I can safely claim that none of us has regretted it for a moment.
    And this week, continuing a three-generation tradition of having older and older brides… my youngest, Mileidy (22) is marrying Elliot at a fairy castle in Maryland!

    Elliot (left) and Mileidy, Baltimore, Maryland, 2023

    However old or young your sweetheart is, here’s hoping you’re as happy as we were – and are.

  • Wavetops: Eleanor Waters Bollman (1810–1891)

    A woman who saw the changing rights of women in Ohio

    A story can seem straightforward once the facts are lined up and neatly documented. The life story of one of my 4th great-grandmothers, for example, could be summed up like this:

    Eleanor Waters was born on 3 August 1810 in Pennsylvania. Her family moved west to Ohio, where she married Solomon Bollman (1807-1842) in Wayne County on 13 November 1836. They lived in Hancock County, Ohio, where they had three children. When Solomon died in 1842, Eleanor was left with two small daughters and was pregnant with their son. The three children were:

    • Sarah Catharine Bollman Greenlee (1838–1875)

    • Elisabeth Ann Bollman McComb (1840–1933)

    • Solomon W Bollman (1843–1864)

    Eleanor raised these children on her own in Cass Township, Hancock County. After her eldest daughter, Sarah, separated from her husband, Robert Greenlee, Sarah and her son, Allen, went to live with Eleanor, who continued to raise Allen after Sarah died in 1875.

    Eleanor died on 17 November 1891, survived by her daughter Elisabeth McComb, her grandson, Lewis Henry McComb, and her great-granddaughter, Bertha Greenlee. In her will, she specified that some of her lands should be sold to pay off her mortgage (1st) and then to provide burial markers for Allen, Eleanor herself, her husband Solomon, and Sarah Watters – presumably her mother.

    screenshot of Bertha May (Greenlee) Callin's paternal ancestry
    paternal ancestry for Bertha (Greenlee) Callin

    Eleanor’s grandson was Allen M. Greenlee (1861-1887), one of My Sixteen. He was the first husband of Alice Hale Greenlee Cramer. You can re-visit the Greenlee family origin story here.

    The Road to Research

    Laid out like that, her story seems straightforward. But the journey to get there was rough. I started with Allen Greenlee’s name, and not much else – I didn’t have dates or places associated with him. Every record I found gave me unexpected clues that led me further from his biography and down more rabbit holes. And while I’m happy with what I’ve learned about Eleanor, her biography and that of her daughter Sarah (my 3rd great-grandmother) point to a bigger story about the growing independence of women in the late 1800s.

    When Solomon Bollman died unexpectedly in 1842, it isn’t clear whether his wife, Eleanor, would have been allowed to inherit his property. Ohio’s earliest laws were based on English common law, under which women could not “own” anything. Their personal property – clothes, bedding, etc. – belonged to their husband. If the husband died without a will, a wife would automatically receive one-third of her personal property, with the other two-thirds being distributed to the husband’s other descendants. The first Married Women’s Property Act in Ohio was not passed until 1845. But laws passed in 1809 did allow “a woman, as well as a man, the right to devise his or her estate by will.”1

    I have looked for Solomon’s will without success – I assume he did not leave one. Since Eleanor remained unmarried, but in control of her household, I suspect that she probably remained in control of her property through the inheritance of her then-unborn son, Solomon. There are newspaper notices showing transfers of real estate from Eleanor to her daughters in 1869 and 1883, and of course, Eleanor’s will from 1891 – all of which show that she took advantage of the new laws. I can only imagine that Eleanor was one of the many women who wrote to legislators to press them to change those laws.

    There is another story that I haven’t been able to tease out of the available facts. Sarah Catherine Bollman married Robert Greenlee in 1857. Their son, Allen, was born in 1861 – and by 1870, Sarah and Allen were living with Eleanor. Sarah appears in the 1870 Census under her maiden name, Sarah Bollman, but her grave marker gives her name as Sarah Greenlee.

    It seems pretty clear that Sarah and Robert divorced, but I have not found any information that could tell me why, or what happened to Robert between his enlistment as a private in the 21st Ohio Infantry Regiment in 1861 and his death in 1879. What I do know is that Eleanor raised her grandson after Sarah died in 1875 and that her will provided a burial marker for him, as well.

    Her will – a testament to the drastic changes in women’s rights that took place during her lifetime.

    1

    Little, Sarah Miller, “A Woman of Property: From Being It to Controlling It – A Bicentennial Perspective on Women and Ohio Property Law, 1803 to 2003,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2005, Article 2.

  • The Meaning of Work

    Thinking about the moral baggage we attach to the idea of “work”

    A quick Google question “How many Americans are there” gives me an estimated population of America in 2022 of 333,271,411. In 2022, it was estimated that over 158 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 3.64 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. 3.64% of 333 million is 12,131,079 “unemployed” – there were 72.5 million children in the United States in 2022, and 58 million in the 65-and-older category, which assumes they are retired. By my admittedly crude accounting methods, of the 333 million Americans who are NOT children, retirees, employed, or “unemployed”, there are still 32,640,321 who are not working.

    So I wonder – what are they up to? (Clearly, they are not all doing genealogy…)

    When you talk to people about “work” you find that we all have a lot of notions about what counts as “work” – and it is interesting to look at how those notions have changed over time.

    The Columbus Journal, Columbus, Nebraska, Wed, Apr 5, 1871, Page 2

    Once upon a time, ads like this one drew people who had known scarcity and poverty in Europe to claim land in the American West. They surely knew that this land had been stolen from previous occupants, but many of them convinced themselves that those previous occupants had not been “good stewards” of that land. They justified their possession of the prairies of the MidWest by asserting that their efforts to farm and develop industries on that land gave them a right to it that the indigenous tribes did not have – in other words, they made a moral judgment that the nomadic hunters who had lived off the land for centuries before had not worked for a living.

    There were two components of history and culture behind this idea. One was the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber in 1905. Weber’s theory traces this attitude towards work to Martin Luther, who “conceptualized worldly work as a duty which benefits both the individual and society as a whole” – in other words, Protestants tied their salvation to work1, and the idea that equated “hard work” with “good morals” still permeates our society in subtle ways.

    The other component was the struggle seen for millennia in Europe between the “civilized man” and the “barbarian.” Modern Americans have a few popular notions about who the Celts or the Gauls were, and may have a vague notion that somehow, those people were displaced by “the Romans.” But the story of European civilization is one in which newer models of living that depend on exploiting agriculture and raw materials for wealth and influence – almost always at the expense of those doing the hard labor – slowly displaced older models of living off the land, hunting, and following migratory game.

    Somehow, along the way, being a citizen, working hard, and letting your betters (aka, shareholders) profit from your labor became your moral duty as a person.

    Image of ♪ You just wanna move our money around ♪
    Daveed Diggs, as Thomas Jefferson, to Lin-Manuel Miranda, as Alexander Hamilton

    Stop me if you’ve heard this, but we live today in a post-industrial society.

    When I look at the documentation of my ancestors in census records, it is easy to see the trend away from farming and farm-related work as the most common occupation. After about 1871, more recent ancestors experienced the Industrial Revolution, which is evident in the number of people employed by the railroads or in factories. A century later, with the rise of computers, we entered the information age – and I have spent my entire adult life doing what could be classified as “knowledge work”.

    I doubt that my 3x-great grandfather, William Callin, who cleared acres and acres of Ohio forest with his five sons and turned his land into prosperous farms, would recognize anything I do as “work.” He probably would have been appalled that his grandchildren were leaving the farms he worked so hard to establish so they could earn wages in factories. Industrialization was, to men like William, something to be resisted, and they made compelling moral arguments against it. In 1869, The New York Times described the system of wage labor as “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South”.2

    If you look at things from William’s point of view, or at least from the point of view of Midwestern American Protestants like him, the only thing more morally outrageous than not working would be to have someone else steal your labor. This would explain why people like William and his brother George were willing to defy the law and help enslaved people escape from the South.

    I know I don’t want to spend any more time than I have to spend being “employed” – but I don’t plan to ever “stop working.” I have found this to be true of many people, especially those who work at creating art or those in the field of education. Most of them keep their “day job” to pay for the basics, but their drive is focused on making their art, supporting their community, and doing things that corporations have not figured out how to exploit for coin.

    On the flip side, though, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to working their ancestral farms; even with modern time- and labor-saving technology! I suspect that whether we stay employed or find a better way to support ourselves and our work, there is one ever-green meme that will never go out of date:

    r/antiwork - Nobody wants to work anymore
    1

    I am aware that I am oversimplifying the theological divide between “faith” and “works” – this post is already long enough!

    2

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery#History

  • Wavetops: William Bowen, Jr. (1783-1854)

    A connection to the world tree

    When you put your work into WikiTree, the goal is to make your contributions as solid as possible. You want your ancestors’ profiles to be as thoroughly documented with evidence as possible, with source citations pointing other researchers to your sources.

    At some point, an ancestor you’ve put a lot of time and attention into will connect to an existing profile that ties your work into what the folks at WikiTree describe as the “World Tree” – and if everyone has brought their best work to their profiles, you should be able to rely on that connection.

    But often, your ancestor was not the focus of the other person’s full attention, and you get a connection to a profile that needs work.

    screenshot of William Bowen Jr. WikiTree page
    Screenshot from William Bowen Jr. on WikiTree, as of 1 Sep 2024

    The point here is not to criticize the Profile manager or anyone else who updated the profile – I assume they did the best they could with the information they had on hand. (I include myself in that assessment.) I only point out that when I make that connection to the World Tree, my work is not done.

    I still need to examine each profile and look for evidence to support the facts before I can say with any certainty that what is there on the page is correct. So, if you follow the link to William Bowen’s Wikitree profile, and click that green “Ancestors” button, you can see that William is far from the “top” of my tree. Yet, because the evidence I have to support his connection to these other ancestors is so insubstantial, I consider him to be the “Wavetop” of this branch.

    William Bowen, Jr. was probably the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother, Amanda Lydia (Walker) Callin. Amanda was one of My Sixteen, of course, and you can read more about her family here: Family Reunion: Walker.

    Despite digging into this branch of the family many times over the years, I still have precious little information about who Amanda’s mother, Lydia Bowen was. Sometimes she is referred to as “Lydia Anti Bowen” in other peoples’ trees and notes, but I don’t know if that’s a middle name, a misspelling of “Ann” or some other artifact of having information handed down through multiple generations.

    What I do have is an 1850 U.S. Census Record from before Lydia’s marriage to William “Yankee” Walker that lists Lydia in a Huron County household with her father, stepmother, and a couple of siblings. That seems sufficient to tie her to her father – and there is existing research on him that seems convincing. You can follow the link on his WikiTree page to his Find-A-Grave profile where someone has copied information about William from the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (which is databases here: NEHGR, Jan. 2011, Vol. 165, p. 58-59).

    There are some missing facts in that NEHGR summary and some estimates that probably need to be revised. For example, the article estimates the date of William’s first marriage as 1821 – however, subsequent research suggests that his oldest daughter was Delilah (Bowen) Bodine Raymond, born in 1810. Also, the Census records for the William Bowen household put that family in Sempronius, Cayuga County, New York, as early as 1810, when William and his wife already had three daughters (one over 10 years of age – I think she might actually be a sister of William or Mary).

    I started writing this post on the first of September 2024, and as I’ve been drafting, I have been updating William’s WikiTree profile so it tells more of his story and cites the sources I have. If you visit that link now, it should look a lot different from the screenshot I included above.

    Perhaps next time the tide comes in, my Bowen family wavetop will reach further into the past. If you find yourself connected to William’s family, say hello!

  • You Shoulda Seen the Other Guy!

    You Shoulda Seen the Other Guy!

    First published Friday, October 24, 2014

    This October is the first anniversary of Mightier Acorns on Substack, so I thought it would be appropriate to republish some older posts from the days on Blogger. We also talked a lot about “Granpa No-Bob” at my Aunt Vicki’s memorial service, so some of these stories feel fresh to me.

    SGT Bobby Callin, U.S. Army Air Corps

    When I first took an interest in “Family Trees”, I was young and innocent of sense, common or otherwise. I had the idea that if I looked hard enough I would find lurking in the branches of my ancestry kings, astronauts, baseball players… or maybe someone wealthy who had left behind a healthy fortune just for me.

    So far, the closest my DNA comes to fame and fortune is “7th cousin to Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s grandchildren”. But as cool as it is to be able to say that, I’ve discovered a much deeper fondness for my less “glamorous” ancestors than my younger self would have thought possible.

    One of those regular people was Bob Callin. His great-grandfather, William Callin, was a true pioneer, clearing at least two farms in Ohio. Before the Civil War, one of those farms was a “stop” on the Underground Railroad. Bob’s grandfather, John Henry Callin, fought for the Union, alongside brothers and cousins, and became a teacher after the war. His father, John Quincy Callin, was another groundbreaker, moving the family to Florida long before it became the Enchanted Kingdom. Bob himself enlisted in the Army when the rumbling approach of the Second World War could still be mistaken for a thunderstorm, and by the end of it, he had found his best friend and greatest partner, Nancy. They eventually settled in Glendale, the desert city where her father had carved out a farm back when Pancho Villa was still a real threat.

    But, as impressive and manly as these deeds may sound in the history books, the real men behind them were not John Wayne archetypes. These were Real Men, who got by with love and a strange sense of humor. They would have needed a lot of both to survive. Great-grandpa William discovered an oil well on his farm and sold it for what he thought was a great profit — just a few years before Mr. Ford’s very popular automobile took off. Grandpa John’s Civil War service was spent largely in hospitals, recovering from diseases picked up in Civil War hospitals.1 And Bob’s father, John, would write ruefully humorous letters to his son chronicling “that old Callin luck” that kept him from becoming a real estate tycoon. (It had less to do with luck, and more to do with a man who was too generous to succeed in such a cutthroat market.)

    The notorious Fang, around 1974

    The man I knew as Grandpa Bob was every bit as lucky as his forefathers; blessed with happiness and a healthy family, yet plagued by minor tragedies. Prone to accidents around open cupboard doors and his beloved Volkswagen, Fang, he met every challenge with a long-suffering grin and a ready joke.

    After the war, Bob decided to leave the service and tried a few different professions and locations before joining the first class at Grand Canyon College with the intention of becoming a pastor. He took his Bachelor of Arts in 1951 and a Master of Arts in Education from Arizona State in 1960 before embarking on a career as a math teacher with the Glendale Union School District. He and grandma enjoyed traveling around the Western U.S. and camping with friends, and they kept a series of small, but comfortable recreational vehicles for just that purpose.

    One memorable summer, they invited me and my cousin Jeff to visit Yellowstone National Park with them. They showed us Bryce Canyon and the Four Corners along the way and took us to one of their favorite places in Colorado – Ouray, and the Silverton narrow gauge railroad. It was a great trip, and even though Grandma worried almost constantly that one of the three of us boys would fall off a cliff or into a geyser, all survived intact!

    My most lasting impression of them as a couple came from that trip. Grandma would hover behind him on treacherous switch-backed roads, occasionally bursting out with a cautionary, “Slow down, Bob! You’ll get us all killed!” I felt kind of bad for him, thinking that would stress me out as a driver – but I swear when she turned her attention to other things going on inside the motorhome, he would get a perverse twinkle in his eye, his lip would twitch slightly, and he would step on the gas and swerve (not a lot, just enough) until she came back and started in again.

    The moral of the story: Callin men can be a little bit evil.

    One summer, a couple of weeks before we expected them back in town, we got a frantic call that Grandpa had been hurt pretty badly in a fall. Their RV had overheated in Colorado, and when he opened the hood to investigate, the radiator hose burst causing him to hit his head on the latch and then fall out into the road. He did recover, and they continued camping for a few more years after that, but he was hurt badly enough to lose his sense of taste! One day after he was back on his feet, I saw him go into his kitchen to make a cup of coffee (General Foods International) and sigh. I asked him what was wrong, and he explained that while he still needed the caffeine, he couldn’t taste sweetness anymore, which took some of the pleasure out of the coffee.

    “But,” he said, always looking at the bright side, “I guess I’ll save money on sugar!”

    On my last visit with him, during our 2005 Christmas trip to Arizona, he had just come out of the hospital. He had required another procedure to clean up his circulatory system, and the doctors had left him with livid bruises on both his arms. I asked him if it hurt him, if he was alright; he said he was.

    Mr. Callin, Mathematics teacher

    “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he told me, looking somewhat glum. But then his eye twinkled, and he perked up as he said, “But you shoulda seen the OTHER guy!”

    So, while I may not have found any kings or powerful magnates in our past, I have found something of much greater value to me. Our stories are the treasures that we spend at family gatherings. They collect in our memories, and the interest compounds with time. They are fortunes built on love, and Grandpa Bob always had a great storehouse of that treasure.

    He will be missed, but our sadness is overwhelmed by the joy of having known him. We will mourn, but we are grateful for his life and his love: the greatest inheritance.

    1

    Years after I wrote this I realized I was confusing John H with his brother, James M, who was severely injured twice in two different battles.

  • Wavetops: Samuel Spitler (1810-1893)

    A 4th great-grandfather who definitely existed

    I wanted to tell you a story about Samuel Spitler – but instead, today’s story is about how little we know about Samuel Spitler.

    On February 9, 1864, Thomas B. Hale married his second wife, Elmira Spitler.

    Thomas and Elmira were the parents of one of My Sixteen 2nd great-grandparents, Alice (Hales) Greenlee Cramer:

    Because they were married in 1864, Elmira appears in two Census records under her maiden name, presumably with her family. Those records from 1860 and 1850 establish that Elmira’s father was Samuel Spitler, born in Ohio in either 1809 or 1810.

    We can derive a few facts from these two records:

    • In 1850, Samuel’s wife was Jane, who was most likely the mother of the six children listed.

    • In 1860, Samuel’s wife was Margaret, who had children from a previous marriage. We know from her marriage records that her maiden name was “Kalen” and her first marriage was to Philip Pifer in 1845.

    • Samuel’s family lived in Perry Township, Wood County, Ohio.

    But from there, things get a little dicey. These are just a few factors that have made it difficult to flesh out Samuel Spitler’s biography:

    • Lack of records; I haven’t found key records (like Samuel and Jane’s marriage record) supporting some of my guesses.

    • I haven’t found a record of Samuel’s death or obituary.

    • Multiple Spitler families were in the area, complicating searches for his children.

    • Spelling variations I have seen include “Spittler” and “Spitter,” but who knows how else the name could have been rendered.

    Samuel’s household in 1850 included two people (“Sylvia” Spitler, age 23, and John Spitler, age 31) who might have been his siblings. I found an 1840 Census for “Saml. Spitter” in Vermillion Township, Richland County, Ohio, that seems to account for Samuel, Jane, their two older children (John and Catherine), and possibly a sister the same age as Sylvia.

    In 1860 and 1870 his household included people who could be relatives of either Samuel or Margaret: an 82-year-old Catherine Taylor who could be an aunt or a mother-in-law of either of them (or just a boarder, of course); and children who could be from either of their previous marriages. (Census enumerators were not careful about recording which children were “Spitler” and which were “Pifer”.) And while Margaret appears in 1880 as a servant in another household where she is listed as “married” there doesn’t appear to be a matching record for Samuel in 1880 – which only suggests that he was alive in 1880 without proving anything.

    When it comes to putting together Samuel’s biography, there are only four records you can hang your hat on: three Census records (1850, 1860, and 1870), and the marriage record between Samuel Spitler and Margaret Pifer (1857). We have a possible death date of 1893, based on a Find-A-Grave memorial for a Samuel Spitler in the Bechtel Cemetery in Van Buren Township, Hancock County, Ohio. That cemetery does hold several of Samuel’s relatives (of various surnames), so that’s plausible, but the headstone photo is unreadable, and the person who transcribed it recorded his age as “age 10/3/7” – which would rule this out as Samuel’s memorial.

    We can assume Samuel married Jane about 1835, as their oldest child in the 1850 census was born about 1836. Jane appears to have died about 1855, and with an infant daughter and five other children between the ages of 7 and 20, Samuel probably depended on those older children to run the house until he remarried.

    Normally, I would research each of those children and look for clues about their parents in their biographies – but each of Samuel’s children presented a different set of problems. His two sons, John and Levi, left no obituaries and none of their other records mention their parents. There are marriage records for more than one Catherine Spitler – any of them could be Samuel’s oldest daughter, and none of the records mention parents. Except for Elmira, I was unable to find evidence for the other daughters beyond 1860. Most of them would have been of marriageable age, but I found no marriage or death records that could explain where they went.

    Samuel’s second wife was born Margaret Kalen, probably around 1821 in Pennsylvania. According to Ohio County Marriage records, she married Philp Pifer on 23 Mar 1845 in Columbiana County, Ohio. The couple had three children before Philip’s death, probably around 1855. After Margaret Pifer married Samuel in 1857, she bore a son and at least three daughters – though, again, the records contradict each other and I have had to make several guesses about what they mean. Some guesses are easier – “George W. Spitler” is clearly supposed to be “George W. Pifer” – but others are murky without other supporting evidence.

    All of this adds up to something but not to the kind of story I usually enjoy telling. There are too many questions and too many possible threads that could either spin into a nice tale or tangle into a confused mess. Maybe if I keep chipping away at the edges and filling in the gaps, a real story will emerge.

    The good news is that Samuel is not a “brick wall” – he’s more of a chain link fence. Or, if we want to stick with a Wavetops metaphor, he’s a bit of foam floating above the more readily supported biography of his daughter.

    screenshot of Bertha (Greenlee) Callin's ancestry from her WikiTree profile
    Samuel Spitler was the father of Elmyra

    If you came this far and think you recognize this family: Contact Mightier Acorns.

    And whether you recognize them or not, I will keep posting about different branches. Stay tuned, and I might even find someone you are related to!