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.
This is the line of my paternal grandmother, Nancy G (Witter) Callin. I’ve been able to follow her paternal line back to Abraham Witter (1786-1882) with reasonable confidence. As it happens, renowned scholar and genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills posted her research on Abraham and his (possible) family in her Historic Pathways publication.
Abraham’s wife was Catherine Piper (1805-1888), and I will have a lot of work to do to untangle her family’s story from the information already on the web. If you look at the WikiTree profiles for her parents and grandparents, you will see that there is very little evidence to support their relationships, and there are a lot of records for people with similar names in Pennsylvania for that time period that need to be examined.
Taylor Township, Fulton County, Pennsylvania
The children of Abraham and Catherine Witter grew up in this township, and some of them stayed and raised their own families here. Their son, Adam Witter (my 3x-great grandfather) married Hannah Jane Tice (1832–1919) around 1852, and they had several children in Fulton County before moving to Kansas around the time of the Civil War.
The Tice/Theiss family, like the Pipers, appear to have been a family that came to Pennsylvania from Germany; and like the Pipers, many other researchers have put information on the web that needs to be examined more carefully.
Kansas
My 2x-great grandfather, Abraham Howard Witter (1859-1918), was born in Pennsylvania, but his family settled in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, when he was a boy. Abe married Nancy Ellen “Ella” Shriver on 11 Feb 1885 and they lived in Belvue Township, raising seven children in Wamego and in St Marys.
Abe and Ella (Shriver) Witter, abt 1885
The children of Abe and Ella, and the children of Abe’s siblings, did not stay in Kansas and have a lot of children of their own. About half of them had no children of their own, and many of them re-settled in other places: Idaho, Texas, California, Colorado, and Arizona.
Arizona
Growing up, I heard about how my great-grandmother’s family came to Arizona from Kansas in a covered wagon. Her name was Hannah Merle Huff (1889–1984), and she married another former Kansas resident, Howard Ray “Dick” Witter (1890–1963), the middle child of Abe and Ella Witter.
If you click the links in these posts, you will find yourself on WikiTree, looking at the profiles of those individuals. I’ve done my best to develop those profiles, add sources, and connect them to existing profiles made by other researchers. In each generation, I’ve attempted to find or build a full profile for each ancestor’s parents and siblings – but as you can imagine, there is a lot of work left to do.
Be sure to comment here, or on the WikiTree profiles, if you see something interesting. Questions, suggestions, and corrections are always welcome (especially if you have evidence I’m missing).
And if you’re not already subscribed, that’s the best way to keep up to date.
This is my wife’s paternal line – which reminds me:
SIDE NOTE: If you’re a genealogist/family historian, I hope you’re not using “mother’s maiden name” in your security questions for any of your sensitive online accounts. Because it is distressingly easy to learn that information, even if nobody posts it on their family history blog! Besides, in most situations, the account asking for your mother’s maiden name as a security measure isn’t going to verify your ancestry, anyway. So you could tell them your mother’s maiden name is Vanessa Doofenschmirtz, and they won’t know.
Anyway – back to the Reunion.
James McCullough (1804–1864) is as far back as I have been able to go, so far. He was born in Kentucky and married Nancy Ford (1807–1850) about 1829. They had two children in Montgomery County, Kentucky, before relocating to Rush County, Indiana, and then to Clay County, Indiana, where they raised seven children on a farm.
John Riley McCullough was their youngest son, born on 5 Mar 1848 in Clay County, Indiana. John enlisted in Company I of the 1st Regiment, Indiana Heavy Artillery Battery, and served garrison duty in Louisiana until his unit mustered out at Baton Rouge on 10 Jan 1866. He married Alice Frances Jones (1857–1921) on 4 Nov 1877 in Saint Johns Township, Harrison County, Iowa.
Added to John’s FindAGrave memorial by Debbie Cromwell on 23 Jan 2001
The McCullough family was the first family I researched outside of my own, and I was particularly interested in finding their Scottish origins. So far, 25 years later, I haven’t been able to find reliable documentary evidence of where James McCullough’s family originated, but I have read a great deal about the patterns of Scots-Irish migration to and through the New World, and we can guess, in general terms that they were part of that migration in the 1700s.
Clan MacCulloch tartan from clan.com
One thing I did learn is that the fun and exciting world of Scottish heraldry has little to do with family history research. A quick Google search can find a tartan belonging to the old McCullough clans, and you can find any number of sites repeating the same handfuls of facts about their allegiances and rivalries. If you go down that rabbit hole, there is a lot of interesting history to discover, but unless you can find a documentary chain of evidence tracing your ancestors through two centuries of disruption and migration, you are just speculating about your personal connection to that history.
And that’s fine.
A lot of Very Serious Historians will say very discouraging things about how misleading it is to claim a connection to the Clans – and they aren’t wrong about the academic value of doing that. There is much more to Scottish history than colorful cloth and fancy dress. But if you find that your curiosity and passion to learn are stirred by the color, pageantry, and folklore that has built up around these old families, there is nothing wrong with channeling that curiosity into your research.
Just don’t get carried away and confuse the legends, tales, and guesses with provable facts.
For the seven years leading up to the publication of The Callin Family History, I mostly focused on my paternal ancestry. I had a head start on my Callin line, thanks to the 1911 version of the Callin Family History, and my goal was to find as many of the descendants of James Callin as I could.
This week, I’m looking in the “other direction” and taking a look at the mothers. On Wednesday, we traced my wife’s maternal ancestry, and today, we will trace the mothers of my mother. This is referred to as the “matrilineal line” and this is the line of descent tested using Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). You can learn more about that from the National Human Genome Research Institute or from this very detailed Wikipedia article.
For the sake of respecting the privacy of living people, we’ll start with my late maternal grandmother:
Emily Amelia (Opp) Frey (1871 – 1913) was the youngest child of three born to Jacob Edward Opp and Mary Elizabeth Palmer. She was most likely born in December 1872 in the state of New York, and her family resided in Paterson, Passaic County, and in Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey. Amelia married Emil Carl Frey on 16 May 1893 in Newark, Essex, New Jersey.
Are YOU descended from any of these families? If so, I’d love to hear from you.
Asking me questions about my research is a good way to guarantee that I will continue working on the families that you’d like to learn about, so comment early, comment often, and subscribe to keep up with future posts!
In 1999, I was serving in the U.S. Air Force and stationed at a tiny base in Lincolnshire, England. My parents came to visit in April, and we rented a people mover for a road trip to Scotland.
Callin family in 1999: (left to right) Tad, Cam, Kate, Barb, and Ted
You can’t see him, but wee baby Seamus is in that photo, as well – Kate was still in her first trimester. Between her morning sickness, and Dad’s motion sickness, some parts of the drive were more memorable than others. Specifically, when we drove along the shores of some of the gorgeous – but very, very twisty – lochs.
Our 1999 journey – “I would drive 500 miles, and I would drive 500 more…”
We chose Dunstaffnage Castle near Oban as our destination because I had learned that the McCullough clans were allied to the MacDougalls who built this castle. We didn’t have the robust and in-depth Internet resources that we have now (like that link to the Historic Environment Scotland website), so I was doing my best to learn what I could at the local library in Lincolnshire.
The Campbell House was built much more recently than the castle.
Since my research was limited to a couple of paragraphs in a book about Clan history, I knew that the MacDougall Clan had fought against Robert the Bruce and that the castle was passed to the Campbell earls later. The castle was built around 1220 by Duncan MacDougall and then managed by the Campbells from the 1460s.
A postcard’s view out from the Castle Wall
One would think that 500 years might be enough time for the heat of these conflicts to subside. One would be misled.
After our tour of the grounds and the reading of several placards, we stepped into the small gift shop. (“I love a little shop. So people can…. shop.” ~the Doctor)
My view in from the Castle Wall
The shop was run by a sweet, middle-aged lady whose name tag indicated that her surname was Campbell. She fawned over our wee bairn, and we chatted amiably about our visit and the research I had done. Until she asked how we were related to the castle.
“Oh, my wife’s family was apparently allied with the MacDougall clan.”
Things got quite frosty after that. It was as if we had just revealed a cunning plan to retake the castle for the Crown through the means of snapping photos and trudging up and down wet, wooden steps.
The postcard we bought from the very testy Campbell descendant.
If you have a family history-related trip you’d like to share, but don’t have your own blog, drop me a note and we can discuss working up a guest post.
I’d love to hear your comments – if I know what you’re most interested in, I’ll know what to write about next!
And if you don’t want to miss future posts, be sure to subscribe:
Normally, we see people refer to their “line” in terms of a particular surname. Even when we take a mother’s line into account, we tend to follow her father’s surname back through subsequent generations before we look at her mother – and her mothers.
This week, I’m going to take a look at my children’s maternal ancestry. This is referred to as the “matrilineal line” and this is the line of descent tested using Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). You can learn more about that from the National Human Genome Research Institute or from this very detailed Wikipedia article.
For the sake of respecting the privacy of living people, we’ll start with my wife’s maternal grandmother:
Martin
Merilyn (Martin) Rossiter (1923 – 1997) was the daughter of Howard William Martin (1897–1970) and Aletha Frederick Putnam (1899–1981), born on 17 Aug 1923 in Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie, Iowa. She married Arvid Wesley “Bud” Holmquist (1920–1996) in 1943 in Douglas County, Nebraska.
Putnam
Aletha Frederick (Putnam) Martin (1899 – 1981) was the daughter of Charles Walter Putnam (1859–1922) and Daisy Deane Frederick (1871–1964), born on 16 Nov 1899 in New Albany, Floyd County, Indiana. Her family moved to Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie County, Iowa, between 1904 (when her younger brother was born in New Albany) and 1910. Aletha married Howard William Martin (1897–1970) on 3 Jul 1919 in Pottawattamie County, Iowa. They resided with Aletha’s family in 1920.
Frederick
Daisy Deane (Frederick) Putnam (1871 – 1964) was the daughter of Lafayette Frederick (1837–1918) and Jane Eliza “Jennie” Smith (1840–1916), born in Dec 1871 in New Albany, Floyd County, Indiana.Daisy married Charles Walter Putnam (1859-1922) on 5 Jan 1899 in New Albany, Floyd, Indiana.
Note: as of this writing, this is as far back as I have gone in WikiTree. The rest of this post is based on records I have found and added to my Ancestry tree, “The Merilyn Martin Project”. To see if I have made any progress adding profiles for the following people, click on the link to Daisy Deane’s profile, and look for an “Ancestors” button!
Smith
Jane Eliza “Jennie” Smith (1840-1916) was the daughter of Adam Smith (1792–1847) and Experience Garretson (1800–1897), born on 26 Jun 1840 in Galena, Floyd County, Indiana. Jennie married Lafayette Frederick (1837–1918) on 26 Nov 1863 in New Albany, Floyd County, Indiana.
Garretson
Experience Garretson (1800–1897) was the daughter of Jacob Garretson (1755–1836) and Millicent Tomlin (1768–1854), born in New Jersey on 27 Sep 1800. She married Adam Smith (1792–1847) on 20 Oct 1825 in Floyd County, Indiana.
Are YOU descended from any of these families? If so, I’d love to hear from you.
Asking me questions about my research is a good way to guarantee that I will continue working on the families that you’d like to learn about, so comment early, comment often, and subscribe to keep up with future posts!
Note: This story is reposted from the old Mightier Acorns blog. If you find any of the links are broken, please let me know so I can fix them.
When Grandma Played the Organ
In his 1995 book, The Five Love Languages, pastor Gary Chapman outlined five ways to express and experience love that he called “love languages”: gift giving, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion), and physical touch. Everyone expresses themselves in each of those five languages to some extent, but almost everyone favors one above the others. On the morning of August 21st, at age 91, my family lost someone who expressed herself through acts of service more than almost anyone else I have ever known.
When Alberta Jane Tuttle was born on August 29, 1925, in Summit, New Jersey, her father, Alfred, was 32, and her mother, Edna, was 30. Alberta and her big sister, Lyle, were raised in New Jersey. Their father, who had served as a bugler in the infantry for three years before World War I, worked as a manager for a chemical plant during the Depression. Their mother was a tough but sweet homemaker who had supported her five sisters before marrying Alfred.
Alberta “Bert” Tuttle – Columbia H.S. 1943
Alberta graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, Class of 1943. The Second World War was well underway, and a number of her classmates and faculty enlisted; the school yearbook was full of advertisements for war bonds and calls for victory.
At the end of World War II, Alberta married a tall, handsome sailor named Russell Hudson Clark on March 2, 1946, in Irvington, New Jersey, in a service held at the Reformed Church in America by Rev. Harry A. Olsen. The young couple honeymooned in Washington, DC, before moving out to Middletown, Ohio, but they soon moved back to New Jersey.
In fact, “movement” would turn out to be a defining characteristic of the household of Bert and Russ Clark.
When I showed an interest in family history, Grandma sent me a partial list of all of the places they had lived. She could only remember 33 moves between 1946 and 1984, but she assured me that there were more. They moved from New Jersey to Texas, to Arkansas, back to Texas; to California, Arizona, back to California; to Colorado, followed by a trip to visit New Jersey before moving back to Little Rock, Arkansas – and that only brings us up to 1962!
Alberta & Russ – 2 March 1946
Somewhere between the end of the war and becoming a father, Russ became a preacher, and many of these moves were to follow his calling. I have written before about him, describing him as A Fire in the Desert. Bert went with him everywhere he traveled. Along the way, they had three children together, and I am sure that they have stories to share about growing up in so many places.
Russ would find work in a place, and settle for a while. He might find a church that was looking for a pastor, and they might go live in that community. Alberta could play the organ, and so she would accompany the choir or the congregation, and he would preach. But there was always another call from elsewhere that he needed to follow, and she would go with him. Eventually, the kids grew up and it was just the two of them, always traveling.
It didn’t matter where they were, whether you were in their home or they were in yours; Grandma would be busy. She loved to take care of her family. She was forever bustling around the kitchen, cleaning up, playing with the children, singing – always showing us all how much she loved us through those acts of service.
I discovered a few years ago that one of Grandma’s ancestors, a surgeon named John Green, was a founding member of the First Baptist Church of Providence, along with the famous Roger Williams, who also established the colony that would become Rhode Island. Baptists place the conscience of the individual at the center of their faith, and Williams’s conscience drove him to avoid organized religion – even if he was the one who organized it. In many ways, I could see Grandpa as a spiritual successor to Williams, always seeking, always following his calling. Grandma, as a committed Christian wife, followed her own conscience just as fiercely as he followed his.
I know how important it is to my surviving family to mention the fact that Grandma was a strong Christian. She certainly was that, without question. A few years ago, I was going through some intensely difficult troubles, and she called me to make sure I was okay. I could tell that it broke her heart that we were 3,000 miles apart and that she couldn’t come over and help with the children or do something to show her love. All she could do was ask, “Have you considered just giving the problem to Jesus?” Being a humanist who has no belief in the supernatural, I couldn’t honestly tell her that I had. But being a humanist also means that I treasured the fact that she would dive in and exhaust herself trying to make things better for everyone around her before finally accepting that there were some things she could not fix.
That ferocious, patient love was what made her a great lady.
That philosophical stuff would have all been beyond my understanding when I was young. All I knew when I was a kid was that seeing Grandma and Grandpa Clark was an adventure. They always had a new house in a new place, or if they were between houses, they would have a different motorhome or trailer to live in. As we got older, we learned what they meant by “disability” and “fixed income” when they talked with the other adults at dinner.
She wouldn’t complain, but sometimes we could tell that all of the moving around was hard on her. She would talk about finding a church home, putting down roots, and having a house she could call her own. Sometimes they even stayed on a piece of property long enough to build a house, and she could get her organ out of storage and set it up in her living room. I particularly loved the visits when she had room for her organ because she would play and sing those old revival hymns that made such a grand first impression on the churches they visited.
After Grandpa died in 2002, Grandma’s life was not the same. How could it be after 54 years of life together? There was a brief time when we wondered what she would do next, and how she would adjust. We worried, but we should have known that she would find a way to feel useful.
Alberta and Sherwin, 2004
In September 2004, she then married Sherwin Nichols. In many ways, Sherwin reminded me of Grandpa; he had mobility issues, and some severe health problems, but he loved my Grandma, and most importantly, he gave her someone to take care of again with her ferocious intensity. She finally had a home where she could install her organ in a front room. By this time, it was old and the circuitry inside was fragile, so it didn’t get played much, but at least it had a stable place to rest.
When Sherwin died in 2008, he and his family were generous enough to leave her his house and enough to live on. Grandma married a third time, once again choosing a preacher, but this time, she joked, she was marrying a much younger man – he was only 85! They were planning to buy a house and move to the north of Phoenix to get away from the heat and the city.
In 2011 her sister, Lyle, died after battling dementia for several years. Having watched Grandpa battle with Alzheimer’s Disease before his death, Grandma told us that her biggest fear was that she would lose her mind and not know who any of us were before she died. She worried that any time she forgot a name or misplaced something it was a sign, but as far as I know, she was still fully herself when she began suffering from an elevated heart rate last week and went to the hospital.
She died at four o’clock in the morning on August 21, 2017, in a hospice in Surprise, Arizona, at the age of 91 years, 11 months, and 21 days. I will always remember her for her music, her laughter, and her constant, steady service to everyone she loved.
Grandpa & Grandma Clark, bound for their D.C. honeymoon (and 60 years of movement!)
This is my maternal grandmother’s family, Alberta Jane (Tuttle) Clark (1925-2017). I’ve traced them back to Samuel Tuttle – though not to the same Samuel Tuttle many of the public trees on Ancestry and FamilySearch would have you believe. There is a Rev. Samuel Tuttle who lived in Morris County, New Jersey, too, but my ancestor was not a minister. He worked in a blast furnace and had three children with his wife, Mary Elizabeth Zindle.
Rockaway, Morris County, New Jersey
Almost all of the families mentioned in this post lived in or near Rockaway at some point in their lives. They connect to my Tuttle family, so I hope to get to all of them someday.
Alberta Tuttle’s 1943 Columbia High School yearbook photo
Zindle
Mary’s grandfather was (as far as I have been able to prove) Leopold Zindle. I told his story in one of my favorite Mightier Acorns posts, “Me No Go; Me Die First” in 2014.
I love that story because it gives us some insight into the other side of the Revolution. My Callin ancestor, James, may have fought battles against Leopold’s unit, and yet, here I am two and a half centuries later – and I couldn’t exist without both of them. (Not to mention Mary and everyone in between.)
Plumsted
Samuel and Mary had one son, my 3x-great grandfather, Edmund H. Tuttle. He married Josephine Plumsted in 1870, but for the longest time, I didn’t know anything at all about her family. In 2019, I made some progress – which you can read about on her WikiTree profile.
Hart
Ed and Josie Tuttle’s middle son was John Jackson Tuttle, by 2x-great grandfather. His wife was the former Florence Hart, the only daughter of Seymour Hart and Harriet Wells. They had a dozen children, leaving me with dozens of cousins to find – but Florence’s ancestors have left me with a number of interesting mysteries and puzzles to solve before I can tell their story.
I’d love to hear from you if you have traced your ancestry to any of these families. And if you’d like to keep up with any updates, be sure to subscribe!
This post is meant to provide you, dear reader, with some insight into how I work: tools I use, techniques I employ, and what I’m trying to discover. If you have been doing family history for any length of time, you might have gained different experiences which means some of your choices will be different from my choices.
So, when I tell you what software and which sites I use, I don’t mean to imply that those products are best for you – but I thought it might be helpful for you to understand how I work.
Currently, the three main tools/platforms I use are:
FTDNA – where we might show up in each other’s matches.
You may note that I don’t actively use a standalone family tree program – I do have RootsMagic, and try to sync my files there with my Ancestry tree, but I would say I haven’t actively used any family tree program on a regular basis since Legacy 7.
Since publishing The Callin Family History in March 2022, I have been trying to organize my work around my grandparents and my wife’s grandparents – the 8 great-grandparents of my children. I created an Ancestry tree for each of those 8 individuals and began working back from each of them.
I generally work through the available information on Ancestry, where I have a full subscription, and document each individual, their parents, spouse(s), siblings, etc. with as much information as Ancestry has in their databases. If there are glaring gaps, I will go to FamilySearch.org or other free websites to look for documents – but most of the time, I can get the vital information I need from Ancestry.
Once I have a family thoroughly documented in my Ancestry tree, I will move over to WikiTree and add or update profiles for as many of those individuals as I can. So far, I have avoided creating profiles for living people. Privacy is a great concern of mine, and it is one of the primary reasons I like WikiTree – and I plan on writing more extensively about that later. (You can read up on their Privacy policy here:)
For now, I am testing the limits of what I can do with this approach. I was able to assemble The Callin Family History this way, and while each family presents its own set of unique challenges, I am enjoying the work of expanding to the other lines of my ancestors.
At some point, I will need to take the work I’ve put into WikiTree and build trees in FTDNA so that it’s easier for people who see me in their list of matches to find me – and I will probably need to be a bit more assertive about looking them up, too.
But for now, I’m enjoying my process, and I am very satisfied to see how my WikiTree contributions have begun to build up. Take a look at the page for James Callin (c. 1750-c. 1816) and click the “Descendants” button to see the top several generations from The Callin Family History outlined on WikiTree.
Not familiar with WikiTree? Here’s a quick intro:
As always, I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment here, or email MightierAcorns at Gmail if you have questions.
You may notice that I refer quite often to putting my family history research on WikiTree. And I gently hint that if you’re not on WikiTree, you probably should be. Here’s why:
There are dozens of options out there for building and maintaining your family tree online. If you have purchased a DNA test through one of the major companies, you have seen their family tree builder on their websites – and if you are like the vast majority of the people who show up as matches on my list, you did not want to use it.
Maybe you felt like building that tree was a lot of work, or you didn’t trust the privacy settings. Maybe you’ve already spent a lot of time building your family tree on one platform, and you don’t want to re-do that work every time you try a new platform. Maybe you didn’t buy the test so you could connect with distant cousins you don’t know, and that’s all fine.
But, if you are willing to invest some time this weekend, you might find that WikiTree can address a lot of those issues. Here are my top five reasons to check it out:
It’s free.
You control your privacy settings.
You can connect with cousins across all of the major DNA sites.
It’s a “world tree” – everybody works together on the same tree.
If you and I share a connection, I’ve done a lot of the “homework” already!
My biggest complaint with the other major sites is that every user has their own tree/trees in their walled garden. That means that when I add a relative to my tree, I am probably duplicating someone else’s work – and even if I can find all of the other trees that have that relative in them, I can’t correct errors or add new information so that everyone who has that person in their tree can see it. (And this is assuming their privacy setting lets me find it.)
WikiTree is built on the idea that there is one “world tree” that everybody works on. Each person in the tree has a “profile” – that functions as the Family Group Sheet for that person – and each profile should have a “Profile manager” who is responsible for making sure the information added to that profile is accurate. There is a “Comments” section on each profile for discussing big changes.
If you visit my WikiTree profile, you should be able to see several cousins who are WikiTree members and have connected their profiles to their DNA accounts. As I make more connections with cousins on WikiTree, more will show up there – which should help me answer some of my tougher ancestor puzzles.
(And if you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter, you could get updates on those puzzles as I post them:)
Privacy is often a roadblock to collaborating on the other major websites. In Ancestry, for example, you can only set the privacy on your whole tree. That means that if you include information about a lot of living relatives in your tree, you might have to set your privacy level in a way that prevents distant cousins (like me!) from seeing your common ancestors. WikiTree requires a privacy setting on each profile, with a default for living people of the highest privacy setting.
And… WikiTree is free.
So, what I’m asking from each of you is that you take some time to set up a free account at wikitree.com and spend some time (maybe over this long weekend?) searching for your grandparents, great-grands, and great-great-grandparents.
If we have a common ancestor, I’d love to hear from you – and even if we don’t, I’m happy to help you learn how to get the most out of your new, free account. (And if we learn something new together, maybe it will end up as a post here on Mightier Acorns?)
Try it out, and let me know what you think in the comments!
For those who don’t know me, my name is Tad Callin, and I’ve been researching my family history since my first child was born in the mid-1990s. I was interested in genealogy as a kid, but after I had a kid of my own, I started taking it more seriously. That was slightly more than a quarter century (and four grownup children) ago.
Over the years, I’ve tried several times to build a community around the work I was doing, but genealogy/family history presents a difficult needle to thread: focusing on your personal research can limit your audience to scattered cousins who don’t know each other and focusing on general research topics tends to get really dry and really academic in a hurry.
I maintained a blog called Mightier Acorns for several years, while I was compiling my book – a large undertaking that documented seven generations of descendants of Revolutionary War veteran James Callin. When I finished that project, I was tired and needed some time to regroup.
It has been a year since my last post on Blogger, but I haven’t stopped working on family histories. Most of my time has been spent adding my research to WikiTree so that it is a little bit easier to share. I am an Ancestry member and do the vast majority of my records research there. I have a much smaller presence on FamilySearch. I have had my DNA done by Ancestry and by FamilyTreeDNA, but I have barely scratched the surface of what can be done with DNA research.
As I prepared to bring Mightier Acorns back from inactivity, I decided to try using Substack instead of Blogger because it looks like it might be easier to build something that appeals to both kinds of people that make up my target audience: curious cousins who might not have a lot of research experience and seasoned researchers I can learn from. I’ll be experimenting with newsletters, subscriptions, tags, and other features, but before I can do that, I need to get back into the habit of writing.
That’s where you can help me.
I’m looking for feedback and input on what you, as a reader, might like to see in a blog about my genealogical research. I would like to continue writing about the discoveries I make, how I made them, where I have found useful information, and where I’ve run into mysteries. All of that is easier when it’s part of a conversation – so drop me a note and let me know what you’d like to see me post about.
Mightier Acorns 