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.
  • The Last of the Milton Township Diaspora

    The Last of the Milton Township Diaspora

    Since April, I have been sending out snapshots and overviews of the families that once lived in Milton Township, Ohio. Before we get into the last of the Callin families that moved away in the 1840s, let’s review the timeline.

    If my suspicions about James Callin, the veteran of the Revolutionary War, are correct, he was part of the Kentucky Mounted Cavalry that participated in the Northwest Indian War, a military campaign against a Confederacy led by the Wyandot people, who were trying to keep Americans from settling the region north of the Ohio River valley. James and John Callin were listed as privates “under the command of Captain Joshua Baker, Major Notley Conn’s Battalion, in the Service of the United States, Commanded by Major General Charles Scott, from Jul 10 to Oct 21, 1794” – and almost certainly fought in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, which took place at the site of the present-day city of Maumee, Ohio.

    • Based on the earliest record I have that might show our James Callin, he was at least 21 years old and paying taxes in Hempfield, Pennsylvania, in 1773.
    • Based on the furlough recorded in the 4th Virginia Regiment’s muster rolls, he may have gone home to be married in late 1778/early 1779; I estimate that his son, James “2nd”, was born at that time.
    • After the Revolutionary War ended in September 1783, James took his family and “settled on government land in Westmoreland Co. in Western Penn., where they remained the remainder of their lives,” but we don’t have any evidence of this outside of The Callin Family History.
    • By 1794, James (age 42), may have been living in Kentucky, or he may have heard that his former commander, Gen. Scott, was recruiting for his militia and came from Westmoreland County to join. It is also worth considering that the James and John Callin we see in the Kentucky militia were his sons, but they would be 15 and 14 years old, at best, and unlikely to be accepted in the militia.

    But by 1810, the sons were 31 and 30, and Ohio had been a state for seven years. And as of 1820, our speculation ends and the U.S. Census records the brothers, James and John, in Richland County, on a farm in Milton Township.

    The Last to Leave

    Elder brother James “2nd” and his wife, “Aunt Mary,” had six children, most of whom were born in Pennsylvania before the family moved to Ohio. Aunt Mary was a founding member of the Hopewell Presbyterian church. In 1820, James was killed by a neighbor.

    Their two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah, married sons of Benjamin Montgomery, and the Montgomery families ended up in Rochester, Indiana. Their three younger sons, Hugh, Alec, and James, left for Iowa, taking Aunt Mary and their wives and children with them. Their wives included another of Benjamin Montgomery’s daughters, who married Hugh, and a cousin, Margaret. Only the elder son, Thomas, stayed in Milton Township.

    Younger brother John married Elizabeth Simon in Pennsylvania, and they had six children before moving to join James and Mary on the farm in Ohio in 1816. They had three more children after arriving in Ohio, including Margaret, who would later marry her cousin James and leave for Iowa. Their oldest son, also called John (1802-1825), died at age 23. Ten years later, the senior John Callin died of tuberculosis and was buried in Olivesburg Cemetery.

    Six of their surviving children remained in Ohio. The oldest, Sarah, married John Scott and left for Winnebago County, Ilinois. And finally, Eliza Callin married James L. Ferguson.

    We don’t actually know when most of these families left Ohio – the scant evidence we have suggests they left within a year or two of 1840. But The Callin Family History says that Eliza and James Ferguson moved to Indiana around 1851, and their two youngest children were John D. Ferguson, born in Ohio in 1848, and Minerva, born in Indiana in 1854.

    Since they appear in the 1850 Census in Jackson, De Kalb County, Indiana, I think they must have moved in 1849. By then, Milton Township had also left Richland County. Ashland County was formed out of parts of Richland and neighboring counties, and part Milton Township became what is now Milton Township in Ashland, and part of it became what is now Weller Township in Richland County.

    Meet the Fergusons

    James Ferguson was a farmer, as you might have come to expect of the men of his generation. We don’t have records to pin down the details of his marriage to Eliza Callin, but their first child was born in 1833.

    We also don’t know where they were living between their wedding and their move to Indiana in 1850. There is a James Ferguson listed in 1840 living in Brown township, Delaware county, 133 miles to the west of Milton township; this James Ferguson had children of ages that match our James Ferguson. The important thing for us is that we have them placed in Indiana in 1850.

    By 1860, Eliza’s mother, Elizabeth (Simon) Callin, was living in the Ferguson household on James’s forty acre farm near Auburn in De Kalb county. The Callin Family History says that she died in November 1864 and was buried in Auburn. It could be that she moved to Indiana with James and Eliza, or she followed along during the 1850s. She certainly got to spend her last few years with her younger Ferguson grandchildren.

    Of the eleven Ferguson children, only George died without leaving behind a family of his own. The Callin Family History says that he was twenty-seven years old when he was “Killed in battle on the Potomac, Feb., 1865.” If our George is the George Ferguson who enlisted in the 13th Regiment of the Indiana Infantry, they would have been some 380 miles south of the Potomac in February 1865, engaged in operations around Wilmington, North Carolina. George may well have enlisted in another state, though, as many young men did if they could not find a regiment in their home state. If that was the case, he might well have been killed on the Potomac.

    Eliza died on 17 November 1870, and was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Auburn. In 1885, James seems to have grown ill, and he updated his will accordingly (transcribed by me – consider all of the spelling irregularities to be part of the original):

    “Know all by these presents that I James L. Fergeson son of Jackson township in DeKalb County State of Indiana being of sound mind and memory do make and publish this my last will and testament, revoking all former wills by me made; that is to say
    “First–I give and devise unto Six daughters Mary McNabb, Elizabeth Reed, Mildred Ettinger, Margaret J. Gallaher, Sarah Myers, and Eliza Myers, in equal portion all my household goods of every name and character to be by them divided
    “Second–To my Son John D. Furgeson I devIse the entire use and possession of the forty acres of land I own in said township for the term of two years from my death upon the express condition that he pay or cause to be paid all my debts; expenses of my last illness and funeral and the taxes on said land for the two years
    “Third–All the balance and residue of my estate real and personal I devise (except as Stated above) unto my three Sons James L Furgeson Jun- Nicholas Perrine Furgeson and John D. Furgeson in equal portions and Shares- provided that they shall and will pay or cause to be paid within three year from my death the sum of Four hundred and twenty (420) dollars – that is to Say – that they Shall pay to each of my above named daughters the Sum of Sixty (60) dollars and to said John D Furgeson who has purchased the interest of Clarissa J Copp daughter of my daughter Minerva Copp deceased in my estate the further Sum of Sixty (60) dollars, Interest is to be charged on said. Four hundred and twenty dollars if not paid within Said three years
    “Fourth- I name and advise that my Son John D Furgeson act as the Executor of this will.
    “In witness whereof I hereunto Subscribe my name and affix my seal this 12th day of December 1885”

    Patterns and Dynasties

    Not only did this Ferguson family have a lot of children, ten of those children had families ranging in size from two grandchildren to nine grandchildren – giving Eliza 47 grandchildren.

    Eliza’s two eldest daughters married men named McNabb (I haven’t established whether they were related to each other), and two of her younger daughters married brothers named Myers. One of the Myers grandchildren was the grandmother of Wiley Cowan, whom you might remember from previous posts.1

    There are so many descendants in that branch of the family, I could probably spend several years posting about one descendant per week. But we all must make choices about where to spend our focus and our resources, so for now, I will let them go and hope that I’ve been able to help some of their living descendants find their way back to Milton Township.

    1. Wiley was the subject of three 2024 posts, beginning with Unboxing Wiley. ↩︎
  • Counting Cousins: An Open Question

    Counting Cousins: An Open Question

    How many cousins do you have?

    I know, it’s a tricky question – “We’re all cousins if you go back far enough!”

    But seriously, do you know how many 1st, 2nd, or 3rd cousins you have? Because every now and then, I start to think about the answer, and … I end up sidetracked doing something else, because I don’t have an easy-button or an app to answer it for me.

    (This is where you may have an app or an easy button, and yes, please do share the link in the comments!)

    It’s a tricky question because looking “up” the tree is always so predictable and easy to grasp – 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greats, etc. In contrast, looking “down” the tree becomes a crazy-quilt of ever-branching forks, complicated by the system of “once-removed” and generational overlap.

    There are Eight of Us, But…

    I’m one of two siblings. Our parents had siblings, and their children are my First Cousins – and there are Eight of us. Simple enough, but…

    How many cousins do each of my First Cousins have?

    That’s not simple at all. For example, my cousin Tim was the only child of my Aunt Judy, my mother’s sister. However, I never knew his dad – and I only vaguely think I know that Uncle Jack had more kids. If he did, they aren’t related to me genetically at all; and I certainly have no idea whether he had siblings, so if he did, Tim has an unknown number of half-siblings and First Cousins who are not related to me.

    Tim also wouldn’t count my dad’s niece and nephews as First Cousins, so of the Eight of us who are first cousins from my point of view, Tim is only really related to four of us.

    In other words, I have no idea how many cousins Tim has!

    Add another interesting wrinkle – among the Eight people I count as my First Cousins, three are girls, but two were adopted. My sister was not. One of my adopted cousins has been getting in touch with her biological family, and may know about her set of First Cousins, but I don’t know if there are any cousins in her bio-fam, or how many there are. My aunt’s husband was an only child, so while my adopted cousin’s brothers only have four First Cousins, she could have many more than her siblings do!

    Expanding the Circle

    The problems of figuring out how many cousins there are in a given generation feels impossible, even when just trying to count how many Second Cousins I have. On my dad’s maternal side, Grandma Nancy had one brother, who had one son, and he had two sons (one biological). Grandpa Bob’s brother Norman had three kids, with eight children between them who would be my Second Cousins.

    Nine so far, so let’s look at the maternal side. Grandma Bert’s sister had four kids… who had 2, 2, 1, and… 12 children? And Grandpa Russ had 11 siblings, so I think I have πR2 Second Cousins, total.

    I can’t even begin to think about counting Third or Fourth Cousins at this point, if only because I’m not sure I’ve done my homework that far “down” the tree from all of my great- and great-great-grandparents.

    Who’s Got a Number?

    So, dear fellow Acorns, how many cousins can you count?

  • Placeholder for an Untellable Story

    Placeholder for an Untellable Story

    A sexual predator has died.

    I’m not going to tell you that story, because it’s not my story to tell. It belongs to the survivors who were damaged by that person, and by those who served as enablers and protectors to the abuser. It does not belong to those enablers and protectors, either, even though they might see themselves as victims, too.

    For a family historian, this story sits uncomfortably in a place made only of memory. There are no public records to document what happened. The private records that tell parts of the story may never come to light. Only those involved know that the story exists, and even they only know their small part of it. The whole story can never be told, and the jagged pieces that remain will never fit together. The only true thing those jagged pieces share with the whole is that both are sharp and continue to do damage to those who know their part of the story.

    The whole story died with the only person who experienced all of it, and even before they died, they almost certainly lost most memory of what they had done. The human mind is not a recording device. It only captures a fraction of the stimuli of light, sound, and other sensory input that bombards it for, in this person’s case, 652,536 hours. Whatever fraction of what got processed and interpreted into memories was rewritten each time they were recalled, and faded away completely if they were not recalled.

    Biases affect a person’s recollections – shame, fear, discomfort, etc. – a foggy sludge in which the memories get buried. With age, time and disease will rob a person of their memories altogether, or leave them clinging to fragments that only make sense in brief flashes.

    So the story, such as it was, has been untellable for some time. And now that the perpetrator is gone, it will grow increasingly untellable. And yet, the story lingers in those dangerous fragments, waiting to cut again.

    Facts and Feelings

    There is a popular lie that says, “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

    The family historian knows facts, like date of birth, date of marriage, date of death, but truly only cares about them because of the feelings they brought. The joy and pain of a child arriving, the terror and joyful anticipation of a wedding, the looming finality of deaths that may be sudden or lingering, dreaded or eagerly awaited. The feelings are what make the facts a story.

    Fact: one February afternoon, we took out children to an indoor trampoline park in Timonium. I have videos, with timestamps, so I can prove that it happened. I can watch my children bouncing and having a ball.

    Facts are the feet of a jumper pressing into the elastic fabric of a trampoline; life is the exhilaration at the weightless apex of the jump. Life is the tuck and roll of the somersault. Life is feeling.

    Not all of our facts have good feelings to go with them. Sometimes I wasn’t the best parent. Sometimes I shouted in anger, sometimes I told embarrassing stories in front of impressionable friends. Nobody’s perfect. I made mistakes.

    When we make mistakes, there are three things that must happen before we can expect the feelings caused by the mistakes to change. We have to acknowledge the mistake, change the behavior, and try to make amends. Even if we do all three things, feelings may linger.

    In the stories I tell, I sometimes find facts about events that left everyone involved with hard feelings. We know about The Double Life of Uncle Jack, but we can only guess at how his daughter felt about being abandoned. We know the contours of Leo Callin’s “Tale of Two Mildreds,” but can only speculate what really ended those two marriages. The newspapers may tell us scandalous stories of alcohol, passion, interfering mothers, and hard economic times, but even if those are reliable facts, they may never reveal what the true feelings were.

    We don’t know, in those stories, whether mistakes were acknowledged, behavior was changed, or amends were made. But I know some of the facts of the untellable story, and I know that those three things did not happen. As far as I know, they were never attempted; and it’s possible that the disease that affected the sexual predator made acknowledging anything a moot exercise by the time it ran its course.

    Nomanisan Island

    None of us is every truly alone, and nothing we do is without consequences.

    The damage that abusers do is only part of the damage. They also depend on those around them to make excuses for their behavior, turn a blind eye to uncomfortable allegations, to believe them over their victims. There is a ripple effect as those around them who are not being directly abused contribute to the abuse, whether they know that’s what they’re doing or not.

    When you’re the target of abuse of any kind, especially for a long time, you learn who to trust and who not to trust. And you learn not to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, because even someone who thinks they are being kind can hurt you.

    “Surely, it’s not as bad as you think it is?”

    Or

    “It’s all in the past, now. Can’t bygones be bygones?”

    Well-meaning words that might be helpful in another situation. A situation that didn’t have an Untellable story in the center of things, a black hole shifting the gravity well that the speaker couldn’t see. That’s a consequence of not telling the story to everyone: they can’t know that they’re amplifying the harm done by the predator they are unwittingly defending.

    Leading to

    “Why are you holding a grudge? You need to learn to forgive.”

    No. In this case, you need to learn to live with not knowing the whole story, and show some grace to the survivor.

    No Closure For Abusers

    There is more than one kind of abuse.

    There is often more than one abuser. The one who is not a sexual predator may try to convince their target that their abuse isn’t abuse at all, or if it is, it’s not on the same scale as the predator. But that’s a lie. Harm is harm, and hiding behind a different kind of harm doesn’t change it into something good.

    There is a path to coming back from some kinds of abuse, but they all depend on the abuser’s choices. They must acknowledge what they did wrong. They must stop the abuse. They must find a way to make amends – and that does not mean that the target of their abuse must tell them how to do so.

    Demanding that the target of their abuse meet them halfway, or that they accept responsibility for any part in the abuse, is a continuation of the abuse. Making that demand nullifies the “stop the abuse” part of the formula. Is this an insolvable problem? It might be. I suggest seeking professional therapy to try to solve it.

    The End of the Story

    Since I can’t tell you the story, this will have to serve as the “ending” – I’m sorry if it is unsatisfying. I’m sorry if you are uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable with it, too.

    I’d tell you my part, but I can’t do that without doing more harm, and I can’t simply say nothing without doing a different kind of harm. Is this an insolvable problem? It might be.

    But I put this placeholder here to remind you that when you’re telling your innocent family stories, and you get a frosty response or a hostile reaction, that might be a sign that you are missing some jagged, uncomfortable pieces of the whole story.

    Try not to make it worse. Don’t press the issue or demand that someone tell you the whole story, because that may not be possible. Don’t react with anger. Just show some grace, and leave them some space.

    The truth is, most of our stories are Untellable.

  • Two Girls Called Sabra Ann

    One of the challenges of genealogy can be sorting through the biographies of people with similar names. The two girls at the heart of today’s story shared a name that stands out for its uniqueness among a parade of Elizabeths, Marys, and Catherines. As it happens, the girls were 1st cousins, born within a few years of each other.

    But telling you who they were depends on sorting out who their relatives were, and that might be a challenge.

    So Many Namesakes

    My 3rd-great grandfather was William H Callin (1813-1881), the sixth of nine children born to John and Elizabeth Callin in Milton Township, Ohio. The farm these nine children grew up on was established by their uncle, James Callin.

    According to the Callin Family History, those brothers, James and John, were the sons of James Callin, who we believe was a soldier in the American Revolution. Both brothers named sons James and John, of course, and William named two of his sons James and John.

    But we don’t have to keep track of all of them; we only need to know that among all of these namesakes, William had two brothers: George Callin (1804-1879) and James Callin (1817-1873).

    Older brother George had two sons, who he named after his father and his brother. (John C. Callin (1830-1905) and William H Callin (1834-1919), if you need to keep score.) George also had four daughters:

    Younger brother James only had two children, Mary Ann (born 1838) and Sabra Ann (born 1841).

    Remembering through Mothers

    George married Mary Ann “Polly” Lewis about 1829, and from what their descendants were told, George and Polly were both stern Presbyterians. This sternness was accompanied by strict discipline and sobriety, and the names they chose for their daughters suggests some familiarity with Greek legends (Minerva) as well as a departure from the usual names favored by other branches of the family.

    Records don’t tell us much about Polly at all, and nothing about her personality. But we have an interesting echo that was handed down to us through William’s granddaughter, Rosemary. William married Elizabeth Berlin, and they named one of their sons (can you guess?) George. He was the George Callin who published the Callin Family History, and had a daughter (Rosemary) later in life, with his second wife. Rosemary related several memories about her grandmother Elizabeth. In one section, Rosemary was sharing amusing things that Elizabeth had said to her son George over the years, including this:

    Another day she said to him. “The woman next door (mother) is going to have a baby (me).” After I came she said; “I guess you better call her “Melia”. (Sure glad they didn’t.)

    I noticed that George and Polly Callin had their daughter, Amelia, in 1849, when George and William lived on neighboring farms in Huron County, so Elizabeth would have known Polly at that time, and seems to have had the notion that Amelia would be a good name for her new granddaughter.

    Sabra Ann and Sabra Ann

    So George and Polly named their second daughter “Sabra Ann” – and again, we don’t know a lot about her.

    But George’s younger brother, James, married Susannah Stout in 1839, and they also lived in Huron County, not far from George and William. I suspect their families were close, since they named their first daughter “Mary Ann,” apparently in honor of Polly. And they named their second daughter “Sabra Ann,” apparently in honor of their niece, who would have been about four years old at the time.

    I have to stress again that we don’t know very much about these people. We can speculate, but that only gets you so far. My speculation is that the older Sabra Ann may not have been very healthy. She died in 1849 at age 12, and is buried next to George and Mary A. Callin in Riverside Cemetery, Monroeville, Huron County, Ohio. Her headstone reads “Sabry A.”

    Sabry died just a month before Amelia was born.

    Her cousin Sabra survived, but records show that she was blind. She was a pupil at Ohio Institute for the Blind in Columbus, Franklin, Ohio in 1870. She lived with her widowed mother in Rochester in 1880, and after Susannah died, Sabra went to live with her sister in New London.

    Sabra died on 1 Dec 1902 at the age of 61. While we don’t have much information to tell us what her life was like, I see glimmers and suggestions in between the cold facts that make it possible to believe that the family cared deeply for each other. They certainly tried to take care of each other. And we have one grainy photo that is simply labeled “Sabra Callin,” suggesting there is more to her story than what we have.

    Perhaps one day, we might find something that tells us more. Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with glimmers and speculate on the inner workings of the minds that gave us such whimsical names.

  • The Giving Season

    The Giving Season

    From the incessant ringing of Salvation Army donation buckets to the prolific inundation of end-of-year fundraisers, you may feel overwhelmed by all of the good causes that need financial support this year.

    You might be wondering if it is your imagination that the pleas for funding are more desperate than usual: it is not your imagination. Across the board, the content creators we love and the research resources we rely on are being squeezed between a worsening economy, increased reliance on extractive corporate-owned infrastructure, and competition from AI.

    Of course, if you’ve been hit hard this year, too, you may be struggling to support the providers and creators you value most. So I thought I would share some suggestions for making your donation budget more impactful, helping both you and those you wish to support.

    Use Your Library, Boost Your Budget

    When you consider your budget for donations, take the time to review where your money has been going.

    For one example, if you pay the $140/yr. fee for an Amazon Prime membership, you may feel like you’re getting a high value for that money, with the availability of “free shipping” or streaming services. However, the things that are “free” for you, the consumer, do cost money, and the story of how Amazon operated at a loss for 20 years as it undersold and bankrupted its competition goes a long way to explain how (like WalMart) they have become the only option for many people to receive services they used to get through a free market. (I’ll leave it to your conscience to research how these corporations spend their money to influence campaigns and public policy.)

    Your local public library actually offers many of the services you get through your Prime Membership, including eBook access, streaming services, podcasts, in addition to interlibrary loans and genealogy resources – all of which are free to you, with your library card. (Not to mention personal help from a human when you need it.) The big difference between public libraries and corporate memberships like Amazon is that while Amazon starves creators while extracting profits, libraries boost sales and support those creators. You are paying for the library, anyway, whether you use them or not.

    So you could be saving your money and still get the services by going through your library. The real cost to you might be convenience – having to wait for a reservation on a high-demand movie or book, having to drive a couple of miles to pick up your materials.

    If you’re paying membership fees or subscriptions to online services, you need to decide if that convenience is worth the price:

    • Amazon: $15/mo. or $140/yr.
    • NetFlix (no ads): $18/mo. or $215/yr.
    • Hulu (no ads): $19/mo. or $228/yr.
    • YouTube: $14/mo. or $140/yr.
    • Spotify: $12/mo. or $145/yr. (with a $99 annual option)

    What to Do With Your Bigger Budget

    If you cancel some or all of the examples above, your budget is now bigger by between $100 and $870 per year. These are just a few places I would recommend putting that money, instead:

    Support a local public broadcasting outlet. If you’re already supporting your local public station, and want to do more, that link takes you to an Axios article showing which stations need help most after federal funding cuts.

    Nebula – if you once found yourself addicted to educational or independent creators on YouTube, you may already know about Nebula, where many of them fled when YouTube began to eat into their revenue streams and block their content. Wikipedia article: Nebula (streaming service)

    Escape Artists Foundation – starting in 2005 with Escape Pod, one of the very first audio fiction podcasts, EA has grown into a US registered nonprofit producing five weekly genre-fiction shows for science fiction, horror, fantasy, young adult, and … cats. (Full disclosure, I am an editor for Pseudopod, the horror podcast, and have narrated for Pseudopod and Escape Pod.)

    Internet Archive – when I talk about old local histories, as I did in The Publication Puzzle, I’m most likely talking about resources I found on Archive.org. Starting as the Wayback Machine some 30 years ago, the Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”1

    Wikipedia – in my opinion, the best example of true, decentralized, evidence-based democracy in action. Because so many editors are doing so much more than I can find time to do, I began supporting them years ago with monthly contributions, and you may notice that I link to them all the time.

    Support Your Local Genealogical Society and/or Library

    Not all Genealogical Societies are created equal – some are independent of the public library system, some have partnerships with them. If you find that your local society has a genealogical library, and you’re already paying your dues, you can also scour estate sales, secondhand stores, and even online re-sellers like HalfPriceBooks, AbeBooks, or Alibris for materials they might be able to preserve in their collection.

    You can also help them and independent publishers by purchasing self-published works (like my own, for one example) that libraries often can’t order (depending on their purchasing policies), and donating them. If you’re going to donate a book for their collection, you may want to contact them first and make sure they know it’s coming, and that it’s an appropriate addition to their collection.

    1. Belanger, Ashley, Ars Technica, “Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost”, 3 Nov 2025. ↩︎
  • A Slight (or Sligt, or Sleight) Diversion

    A Slight (or Sligt, or Sleight) Diversion

    Note: Today’s featured image comes from the Baltimore Immigration Museum’s collection. Today’s family arrived in Baltimore aboard a bark named Blucher in 1854. Learn more about their experience at that link.

    Nobody likes to feel ignorant. This is why we are driven to learn. But no one ever truly knows what they don’t know, and sometimes the sense of remaining ignorant no matter how much one learns might compel someone to simply stop learning.

    When you go digging into your family history, the things that you don’t know can take on unexpected dimensions and layers due to changes in language, geography, or governments over time. Sometimes, evidence that suggests an ancestor moved a lot may prove later to show that they lived in a place that changed names or was claimed by more than one government. Records we need may not materialize until after learning about someone’s origins, or figuring out how their name might have been misspelled. And we may never find a clear record of where they came from if the name of the place they came from changed between their birth and their emigration.

    In other words, researching ancestors who came to America from Europe in the middle of the 19th Century can reveal our ignorance in ways that might seem designed to give us only wrong answers.

    So we need to learn to be flexible in our thinking, be willing to review our assumptions, and be prepared to forgive those who came before us for being ignorant of the things we’re trying to learn.

    Who Was John Slight?

    It would be easy enough to simply say, “John Slight was a German immigrant who arrived in Baltimore in 1854 and anglicized his name to assimilate,” but that leaves out a lot of interesting details that make his ancestry harder to trace.

    If you go by his headstone, found in the Oak Wood Cemetery in Ackley, Iowa, John Slight was born (Geb.) in December 1834 and died (Gest.) in June 1879. Of course, the records that tell us his story rarely render his name the same way twice. He could appear as “John,” “Jan,” or “Johann,” and as “Sligt,” “Slahet,” or “Sleight,” depending on how the clerk recording his information perceived his name.

    We learned a bit about the Slight family in “Family Reunion: Slight” and we looked at some of those documents and learned a bit about the history of John’s place of origin in the village of Tergast.

    The records we have say the Sligt family lived in the village of Tergast, which is located a few miles east of the city of Emden. Emden had been annexed by Prussia in 1744, some 54 years before Jan [John’s father] was born. It was then captured by French forces in 1757, during the Seven Years’ War, and by Anglo-German forces in 1758. In 1807, when Jan was about 9 years old, East Frisia was added to the Kingdom of Holland, which had been created by Napoleon Bonaparte a year before to control the Netherlands. After Napoleon’s downfall in 1815, East Frisia was transferred to the Kingdom of Hanover, which was officially ruled by George III, the king of England.

    All of this is to say that while John Slight seems to have been a speaker of the German language, and came from a place that we now identify as being in Germany, the Sligt family might not have been German, and may have even spoken one of the Frisian languages recognized in that part of Germany.

    The original Frisian people were descended from tribes of Angles and Saxons (you may equate the term “Anglo-Saxon” with England, but those were Germanic tribes) and they lived in a boggy, marshy territory around Emden that resembled the Netherlands more than other parts of Germany. It might be fair to say that some of the patterns we see in the way John Slight’s parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles were named more closely resemble the patronymic system used by our Scandinavian ancestors, than you might expect from more traditionally German families.

    The point here is that Germany itself has only been Germany since 1870, and when people came from places that were Germany later, they could be labeled with a variety of names that might or might not be helpful. We were lucky to see “Tergast” on the Sligt family’s immigration documents, because when we see documents that say they were from Germany, Prussia, or Hanover, we know that Tergast was, technically, part of each of those larger places during John Slight’s childhood.

    The Slight Sweden Diversion

    On March 23, 1856, Ogle County, Illinois, John Sligt married Margaret Sweden, according to the Ogle County marriage records.

    Margaret’s full name was “Frauke Margrette Swidden” or “Sweeden” (depending on your source) and unless you know to look for a variety of spelling permutations for each of her three names, you will miss her in the records. Many county clerks or newspapers that rendered her name would drop “Frauke” and list her as “Margaret” (as that marriage record did). But many documents, and her headstone (shared with her husband, seen above) indicate that she was called Frauke, which is a German diminutive for “frau” that means something like “little princess” or “little wife”.

    Unfortunately, that name is frequently mis-recorded or mistranscribed as “Franke” or some similar variation.

    Fortunately, once you know what to look for, it is relatively easy to connect Frauke to her parents and siblings with a variety of documents. There are immigration records and German-language newspaper accounts of the Swidden family leaving Emden aboard the Antje Brons, and from there you can begin to piece together Frauke’s ancestry.

    But once again, the “Americanization” of names complicates our search. For example, Frauke’s father was Marten Gerjets Swidden, born in 1805 and residing in Osterhusen, in Ostfriesland, when he and his wife’s family, the Boyengers, decided to migrate to the New World. His grave marker renders his name as “M.G. Sweeden” but he often appears in records as “Martin George Swidden” or similar.

    But that middle name, Gerjets, is not a German version of “George.” The German name for
    George is “Georg,” though that can also be rendered as Jörg, Jürgen, or Jörgen; all derived from the Greek name Georgios, meaning “farmer.” Gerjets, though, is an old East Frisian surname that means “son of Gerjet,” and is usually a surname. That name is derived from the German word, ger, meaning “spear” or “dart.”

    So the question is, did Marten choose to change “Gerjets” to “George,” or was that choice made by a clerk somewhere down the line because the two names sounded similar to him? It’s hard to say.

    What Did We Learn From All of This?

    There are a lot of specifics in the records of the Slight and Sweeden families that might not directly apply to your “German” families, but there are a few broadly applicable tips that will at least help you learn about your ancestors’ specific difficulties.

    1. Pay attention to how their birthplace is recorded. If the record is from before 1870 and it just says “Germany,” that could refer to any number of places throughout Europe – including modern Poland, Austria, Czechia, or really anywhere German was spoken widely, like France or Switzerland. If the record indicates more specific principalities (Prussia, Hanover, Hesse) take note of that, and look for more local towns or districts that fall into those areas when you find other records.
    2. Don’t commit to one “correct” spelling for names. It might be tempting to dismiss the different spellings you find as mistakes, either on the part of the immigrant (who might or might not be literate in English), the clerk (who might have assumed the immigrant was illiterate), or transcribers (who might see the “u” in “Frauke” as an “n”). Do your best to document the various spellings and pay attention to where they turn up; they may help you figure out that a “German” family actually spoke another language or belonged to another ethnic group, which could help you trace further back.
    3. Use the variations to find more records. This is tricky, because if you have to use fuzzier spellings or leave off a unique name (like “Frauke”) in favor of a more common name (like “Margaret”) you will get a lot of false positives. If you are able to identify her family members, you can use those relationships to help sift through those false positives and find what you’re looking for. (This is also where using the FAN Club techniques can help you.)

    And this last tip isn’t as much about genealogy as it is about current events: studying these immigrant communities has compelled me to be more gracious about how I view modern immigrants.

    The super-heated partisan discussions over immigration policy that have driven the dialogue over the last several decades often assumes that our European ancestors came here “the right way” and assimilated into “our” culture – but the reality is that they frequently came over with nothing, just showed up and brought whole villages of relatives with them, and took several generations to “assimilate,” which sometimes meant losing their native language and changing their names to fit in.

    But we can also see from the language on their headstones and their persistent use of “family names” that the towns and counties they inhabited had to learn to accept them and their “foreignness,” too.

    And that is a lesson in grace that more Americans need to embrace.

  • The Publication Puzzle

    The Publication Puzzle

    In history and genealogy, a secondary source is a record or document created by someone who was not an eyewitness to the event, often created later using primary sources. A primary source is an original record created during the time period being researched, providing a first-hand account of an event or person.

    The quality of secondary sources can vary wildly. They often do not cite their sources, but if you can find primary sources that support their claims, the biographical sketches and local histories they document can help you enhance your ancestors’ stories.

    So when you find a book that seems to mention your ancestors, what do you do with it? How do you evaluate it, and what do you do with books that are out of print or hard to find?

    Finding Secondary Sources

    Most secondary sources that genealogy researchers might find useful fall into one of two broad categories: 1) genealogies or family histories, usually compiled by a descendant of the family in question, or 2) local histories, like those popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

    Ancestry and FamilySearch have extensive databases of digitized books that fall into both categories. In the U.S., you can also access books through HeritageQuest online through your local public library.

    Many of the books you are likely to find this way were published during the period between the Civil War and the First World War, particularly around the time of America’s first Centennial in 1876. There were several booms in publishing these types of books, driven by the economic prosperity that came after the completion of the cross-continental railroad. More people had the means to spend time and energy researching their family history, and more Americans began to take an interest in establishing their family connections back to the American Revolution or to events like the arrival of the Mayflower.

    Some of this interest was spiritual, coinciding with the incorporation of genealogy into rituals of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some people were also motivated by nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments, and desired to establish themselves as part of the mythology of the rugged individualist and the Pioneer. When you consider the various motivations of the people creating these books, you can’t help but see a bias towards telling the stories of the “prominent men” in the communities being researched, excluding the stories of women, freed slaves, Native American communities, or more recent arrivals who did not speak English as their native language.

    Understanding that bias will help you understand what you can expect to find in these databases.

    Genealogies and Surname-based Family Histories

    Before the advent of the Internet, books like these served the role that many online trees serve today; and when you find them, you should approach them with the same skepticism you would apply to an online tree.

    One very flawed book, The Greene family and its branches from 861 to 1904 by Lora La Mance, proved to be untrustworthy when I was trying to confirm my connection to John Greene of Rhode Island. In a post from 2024, Simple Statements of Fact, I talked about how I used that book, despite its errors, to find more trustworthy sources, such as the 1938 manuscript published by H. Porter Matteson1 that addressed some of La Mance’s errors.

    Still, with a few notable exceptions, like the La Mance book, most of these family histories were created in good faith by people who wanted to be accurate. Even if they made mistakes, it can still be useful to see what they saw. You have more resources readily available to you than they did, and you have the ability to correct those mistakes, and and even going through that process is probably faster than doing the research they had to do in the last century.

    One good place to start looking for these types of books is WikiTree’s page for “Sources-Family Genealogies.” You can search through that page for your surname(s) and get an idea of what might be readily available.

    Local Histories

    For a long time, there was a market for “Commemorative” histories of counties throughout the American MidWest, particularly as these counties reached their local centennials. They suffer from the selection biases mentioned above, but they can still be interesting and informative. The editors of the books often got the biographies they included from surviving relatives of the subjects, which can give you some insight into the family’s opinion of itself.

    For example, I strongly suspect that the biography of my 2nd-great-grandfather, John H. Callin, that appeared in the Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County, Ohio (J. H. Beers & Co., Chicago, Illinois,1897), was written by his son, Herbert Byron Callin. He definitely exaggerated some parts of his father’s biography, and either repeated a family legend or created one when he said of John’s ancestry:

    “His father, William H. Callin, was born at Callinsburg, Clarion Co., Penn., September 10, 1813…”

    In fact, Callensburg, PA, was not established until 1825, and we don’t have any primary source evidence that tells us where William’s family were living when he was born. But most of the other facts Herbert recorded are supported by evidence, such as the details of John H.’s Civil War record.

    Herding the Cat(egorie)s

    Finding these books is an art. So is figuring out what to do with them after you find them.

    In addition to the databases mentioned above, copies may be lurking in local libraries, the Library of Congress, Google Books, the Internet Archive (my favorite), the Hathi Trust… which means that the dream of finding all of these books in one place will probably never come true. (WorldCat comes close, though it is the catalog and doesn’t give direct access to the books.)

    Whenever I find one of these books, I look for it on WikiTree’s page for “Sources-Family Genealogies” or (for local histories) dig down from Category:Sources. I make a point of creating a page for each book if one doesn’t already exist. (You can find a sample list of the pages I’ve built on my WikiTree profile.)

    There are two main reasons I do that.

    • A WikiTree page allows me to provide links to the digitized copies of that book that can exist in all of the places I just mentioned. Over time, as people add and update links, and use the page in their source citations, the usefulness of the page improves.
    • A WikiTree page allows me to document problems with the reliability of a book, and help caution future readers against including its errors in their work. And, of course, adding categories and links helps search engines find the book and its associated pages, which helps future researchers.

    Re-Printing and the Public Domain

    Occasionally, you will find out about the existence of one of these old, out of print family history books, but it won’t be available online at all. I found this to be the case with The Berlin Family, as I mentioned in my last update, A Surfeit of Berlins. (Fortunately, I was able to make contact with the man behind that book, and we’ll be discussing our options after the holidays.)

    When copies of a book are hard to come by, and the text is in the public domain, I sometimes wonder whether it would be worth re-publishing a particular book, either with a print-on-demand service like Lulu.com, or as an e-book. Most of the time, if that option is easy to do, someone has already done it. A search for the “Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County, Ohio” through Abe Books or Alibris will give you some examples, ranging from vintage copies to re-prints.

    Considering the limitations I learned about when preparing The Callin Family History for publication, I am leery of trusting re-prints that don’t give me a page count or explain why their edition is half as thick as the original.

    The first challenge of re-publishing a rare book is acquiring the text in the first place, but if you are able to get it in a PDF format, the real question is, how much effort are you willing or able to put into editing? Are you going to reprint it “as is,” errors and all? Or are you going to try to fix things… and how long will that take you?

    If you can find or create a digital copy of a public domain book, you’re probably better off working with one of the archive sites or a genealogical society’s library to upload it for general use.

    As much as I love the idea of assembling a physical family history library of my own, the reality is that my energy is probably better served by making those WikiTree pages as good a guide to the digital copies as I can make them!

    1. Matteson, H. Porter, “Mattesons in America”, Columbus, Ohio, 1938; pages 10 and 11 – accessed 12/31/2023; Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. ↩︎
  • Re-Finding Focus

    Re-Finding Focus

    Family history research often serves as a metaphor for life – there is so much to learn, so much to do, and so little time to do it all. If you’re familiar with “spoon theory,” this is the season when you are most likely to run out of spoons. And that’s okay.

    During the holiday season, we’re all going to experience that stretching sensation of having too much to do all at once. We will try to set healthy priorities, and ideally, that will mean putting our focus on the living. If you’re lucky, you may get to spend some of your time with family talking about your research. Hopefully, you’ve got a few entertaining stories about your common ancestors to share, and you might learn a few in return!1

    But after the visitors have all returned to their homes and the decorations have been packed away, and your time becomes your own again, you may find yourself overwhelmed when you turn back to your research. Where do you begin? What are your goals?

    What will your focus be in the coming year?

    Making Choices

    It is not lost on me when I write one of these “genealogy advice” posts that the advice I’m offering is advice that I’m struggling with myself. And one of my greatest recurring struggles is deciding which part of my tree needs the most immediate attention.

    Which tree can I grow this year?

    If you’ve been following my journey from Blogger, through Substack, and onto WordPress, you’ve seen the results of the choices I made during previous holiday seasons play out in weekly posts.

    For the first eleven weeks of 2024, I was “Climbing the Ladder to Providence,” taking the time to scrutinize the chain of evidence connecting me back to John Greene of Providence, Rhode Island. That choice led me to discover that I was probably not related to the John Greene who helped found the First Baptist Church of Providence along with Roger Williams and 10 others. That wasn’t the outcome I wanted, but that choice was a good one, because I learned a lot on the journey.

    In between those posts, I spent time each week looking at the families belonging to the 32 surnames of my 2nd-great-grandparents and those of my wife – My Sixteen and Her Sixteen – and then looking for the “Wavetop” ancestors: the most distant ancestors I could find along those lines.

    The lesson I have taken from doing things this way is this: Choosing where to put your focus is not a Zero-sum game. You aren’t choosing which research you’re going to do – you’re just choosing which research you’re going to do next.

    Personally, I forget that sometimes, and I need to remind myself that if I tried to do everything all at once, I wouldn’t get anything done! But breaking the task down into reasonable weekly goals means that eventually, I can devote some attention to everybody.

    Selection Bias: Telling You Where to Look

    If, like me, you are limited to doing the bulk of your research online, you may find that your choices are limited by what is available via the internet. (The missing 1890 U.S. Federal Census comes to mind as a big gap for many people.) When that happens, you may find it necessary to skip a branch or three until you can plan a trip to do local research, or until the records you need are digitized.

    Letting the gaps in available data guide your resource decisions is a form of selection bias – and it is something you need to factor in when you’re deciding where to spend your precious time. One way I have tried to overcome my own selection bias is to use this blog platform to document where my gaps are. While you aren’t wrong to move on and do the research that is available to you right now, you need to remember to circle back to those ancestors who seem out of reach. For me, that exercise in pursuing topics based on where the gaps are is an ongoing thing.

    This year, whenever I wrote about my most distant Callin ancestor, James Callin, I emphasized how much of what I know about him is theoretical. In James’s case, we haven’t found the records we would expect to find where earlier researchers suggested we should find them. And so, when I come back around to the Callin line, I need to think about filling in what we might not know about his wife’s family, or look for patterns, like the Milton Township diaspora, which might open up a new line of evidence.

    While James Callin might be a “brick wall” ancestor, there are avenues of inquiry that might get me around that wall someday. Sometimes, this can feel futile – like the old joke about the guy who dropped his keys in the road, but is looking for them on the sidewalk where the streetlight is, because he can see better there.

    The Callan Name Study is one of those avenues; researching the surname as it appears in places like Ireland or Kentucky may be a longshot, but even if I never find what I’m looking for, I can at least leave a map of where I have searched for those who come after me. Maybe I can build a path to get someone else to the goal.

    If you’ve been tracking my posts on the Milton Township diaspora, they are an example of what can happen when someone follows up on your research later on. George Callin didn’t actually know who all of his cousins and second-cousins were when he published the 1911 Callin Family History. But he included the names of those he did know about, and told us where they were last seen. When I came along in 2015 and started hunting for James Callin’s descendants, I was able to add the Montgomery families and the descendants of Sarah (Callin) Scott and to my 2020 Callin Family History.

    All of which is a long way of saying, “It’s okay to search where the light is, but also do what you can to move the light.”

    Taking My Own Advice

    As we muddle through December, I may need to prioritize the living over my twice-a-week blog schedule. I’m okay with that if you are.

    And as we head into 2026, and whatever awaits us there, I intend to keep working on the family history because it brings me joy.

    I feel fortunate to be spoiled for choice when it comes to the directions I could follow. No matter what direction I choose, I will have interesting things to tell you, and since I’ve done as much as I can with the “Sixteens” for now, I’ve decided on a new approach to coming up with topics on a weekly basis. (More on that later in December!)

    Hopefully, working through my choices will help you clarify yours. If so, I’d love to hear about it! Don’t be shy – drop a note in the comment section.

    1. I hope you’re taking good notes and/or recording these stories for your archives! ↩︎
  • A Sister for Abraham Witter

    A Sister for Abraham Witter

    The family trees we find online are rickety things, unreliable and often unsupported by evidence. You climb them at your peril, and you should never blindly accept what they say without applying some basic critical thinking skills to evaluating what they claim. (If someone tells you they have evidence for a claim but just aren’t sharing it, that’s the same thing as not having any evidence, as far as your research should be concerned.)

    You know this, but sometimes even your most careful research can lead you to a family that has been researched… let’s say “less carefully” than you might like. Whether you are curating a private tree on Ancestry or trying to help clean up a world tree at FamilySearch or WikiTree, everyone gets to a point where the only information you can find is missing sources and contradicts itself.

    For me, the Piper family from Amberson Valley, Pennsylvania, is one such family. My 4th-great-grandfather and his (probable) sister both married Pipers, and I’ve had a struggle sorting out who was related to whom, and how.

    Our Firm Foundation

    I laid out the chain of evidence I have for my Witter ancestry on WikiTree:

    My 4th-great-grandfather, Abraham Witter (1786-1882) married Catharine, “a daughter of Daniel Pipers, of Amberson’s Valley,” but even that evidence, taken from Abraham’s obituary, is unreliable. In 1968, Harry E. Foreman published “Conococheague Headwaters of Amberson Valley…” essentially a one-place study of Amberson Valley in Franklin County, PA.1 According to Foreman (pg. 151, in the WITTER section):

    Abraham Witter was married to Catharine Piper daughter of Adam Piper, Sr., and Mary Witter (1784-1865) was married to Daniel Piper (1777-1837), son of Adam Piper and brother of Catharine Piper Witter.

    Abraham and Mary were children of John Witter.

    If you want to review the evidence I have that Abraham is most likely the son of John Witter, you can take a look at the WikiTree profile for Johannis Witter. (If you’d like to revisit the process I went through to find and test that evidence, I talked about that process in Finding John Witter and Measuring Up to a Master.)

    With all of that background in mind, I’m pretty sure that it would be appropriate to attach the WikiTree profile for Mary (Witter) Piper to Johannis (John), and the fact that Foreman arrived at that conclusion seems to corroborate that finding. However: we’re still not in territory where we have “proven” the relationships between Abraham and the people we think are probably his siblings (Mary Piper and Samuel Witter).

    And I’m about to add another uncomfirmed name…

    A Clue! A Clue!

    Several weeks ago, Brad reached out to tell me he found something interesting in “Measuring Up to a Master;” I shared a newspaper item from The Franklin Repository (Chambersburg, PA) dated 16 October 1804, advertising John and Joseph Witter’s cloth processing business. In it, they advised customers to drop off the cloth they wanted to have processed at locations around Metal Township, including “Mr. Cridler’s tavern at the Burnt Cabbins.”

    As it happens, Brad is descended from Mr. Cridler, Frederick Kridler (b. 16 Feb 1770), and the Kridler family has passed down an artifact labeled “Family Register” that lists Frederick’s wife and 12 children, and their birthdates. According to Brad’s evidence, Frederick was born in 1770 in Frederick County, married in 1795, and re-located to Franklin County, PA, in 1799, where he was a tavern keeper.

    The family register provides the date of his marriage (April 4, 1795), and his wife’s name and DOB: “Elizabeth Weter born May 15, 1776.”

    What Consitutes “Proof”?

    This chain of evidence is thin; that spelling of Witter is phonetically closer than the name on some of John Witter’s documents (Wetter, Witters, Withers, etc.). And there are three unidentified females in the household of “John Withero [or “Withers”]” in Frederick, Maryland, on the 1790 U.S. Census – Elizabeth could be one of them. That puts the two families in the same county before Elizabeth and Frederick’s wedding date.

    But nobody has been able to find any documents that state that the Elizabeth Weter in the Kridler Family Registry is the daughter of John Witter, and until we find something like that, this relationship should be treated like the hypothesis that it is. (n., “a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.”)

    The thing that I find maddening about all of this is that I lived in Frederick, Maryland, from 2003 to 2005, and had I known any of this information about the Witters then, I might have been able to pop in at The Maryland Room in the C. Burr Artz Public Library, and get some hands-on help! (I also lived in Baltimore County for 15 years, so that would have been an easy trip to make.)

    For now, I’ve added Elizabeth to my Ancestry tree (The Nancy Witter Project), and I hope to find some clues that will either support or refute our hypothesis that she is the sister of Abraham, Samuel, and Mary Witter. If I find enough, and if it fits in the “support” column of the ledger, maybe we’ll build her a WikiTree page one of these days.

    There may be some useful documents out there; I know of at least one Kridler will with some names that seem to match our folks. However, the Kridler family was large and there were several people in it with similar names, so until I’m more familiar with who was who, I am not ready to use that will as proof of anything.

    Until we have proof, all of this is speculation and fantasy – and I hope that including her in my Ancestry tree doesn’t just add to the noise while I’m doing my homework!

    1. Foreman, Harry E., Conococheague Headwaters of Amberson Valley, Volume 5 of Harry Foreman collection; Length: 155 pages, Publisher: Harry E. Foreman, 1968. ↩︎
  • The Scott Family: Milton Township Diaspora

    The Scott Family: Milton Township Diaspora

    According to George W. Callin’s 1911 book, The Callin Family History, Sarah Callin (1801-1872) was born when her family still lived in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Her father was “John Callin, 2nd son of James 1st, [who] emigrated with his family from Westmoreland Co., Penn., to Ashland County in 1816 and settled on 60 acres of his brother James’ farm who gave him a life lease of it.”

    Sources disagree on her date of birth, but if it was in 1801, she would have been 15 when her family moved west to Ohio, and 22 when she married John Scott. All George knew about their family was summed up in one line:

    “Sarah, born 1808, married John Scott, moved to Ills. About 1840.”

    Like we saw with the Callin families who moved to Iowa, George Callin did not know what happened to his aunt Sarah after 1840, and he was born 6 years after the Scotts left Ohio. But that is just the beginning of their story.

    The Scott Family in Illinois

    Joseph Scott was born in Pennsylvania in 1765. He may be the Joseph Scott who appeared in Washington, Pennsylvania, on the 1790 U.S. Census, but according to other researchers, he moved with his wife, Elizabeth Mary (1778-1848), to Ohio where all of his children were born. His oldest child, John Scott, was born in Richland County, Ohio, on 6 October 1798.

    John Scott married Sarah Callen in Richland County on 18 January 1823. John and Sarah had their first three children there in Richland county before they left Milton Township about 1836. John and Sarah’s fourth child, Rebecca, was born while they were in Michigan, putting them in that state in 1837. And soon after that, they settled in an unincorporated area called Harrison, near Rockford, Illinois, in Winnebago County.

    Sarah and John lived out their lives in Harrison, and died just a few weeks apart from each other; he died on 20 January 1872, and she died on 6 February 1872. They are buried in North Burritt Cemetery.

    Scott Descendants

    John and Sarah had five children who survived to adulthood: George Scott, James Scott, Rebecca (Scott) Sharp, Cyrus H Scott and Lucina (Scott) Dobson.

    George Scott (1827-1905) was about ten years old when his family left Richland County, Ohio, so he likely had childhood memories of his Callin cousins from Milton Township. He and his wife, Lucetta Beach, had two sons and three daughters. Their grandchildren mostly remained in Winnebago County, though their sons both moved away later in their lives (to North Dakota and to San Diego, California). Their daughters married men named Knight, Johnson, and Wicks,

    James Scott (1832-1916) married Charlotte Brown about 1856, and raised a son and two daughters in Winnebago County. Their son, Christopher Columbus Scott, left no children behind, but their daughters did. Their older daughter, Mary (Scott) Taylor had one child; a granddaughter, Charlotte “Lottie” Taylor, who married Walter Scott Wicks, a grandson of George Scott and Lucetta Beach. Their younger daughter, Ina Belle, had seven children with her first husband, Bert Deuel.

    Rebecca Scott (1837-1928) was probably born in Michigan, before the Scotts settled in Winnebago County. She married Edward Robert Sharp (1835-1887) in 1856, and they gave Sarah and John six Sharp grandchildren. Of their two daughters, only the younger one, Donna A (Sharp) Randerson (1865-1940), had children: three sons.

    Cyrus H Scott (1843-1931) had four children with his first wife, Mary Wishop (1844-1902). Their daughter never had children, and their youngest son died at age 20, having never married. Cyrus had a daughter with his second wife, Ida May (West) McDonald (1864-1928). That daughter, Laura, married a man named Malcolm Ferns, but their daughter died in infancy in 1929, and Laura divorced Malcolm in 1932, and doesn’t appear in the records after that.

    Lucina Scott (1847-1910) married Joseph Dobson (1838-1928) and also had six children. Their grandchildren included 25 Dobsons, 10 Riels, and 5 Homans.

    Dozens of Cousins

    I did my best to document the Scott descendants in The Callin Family History, and if any of their hundreds of living descendants are interested in representing that family on WikiTree, I would be delighted to help. If the price tag on that 800-page tome is too hefty, there is a lot of information on my old Blogger site. (That link should give you a good start!)

    I’m still amazed that it was possible to find this branch of the family based on the very thin clues George W. offered in the original Callin Family History — a feat made possible because someone added John and Sarah’s grave markers to Find A Grave:

    From there, armed with their Richland County, Ohio, marriage record, I was able to pull together census records and kept digging until I found the 1916 death record for James Scott that gave his mother’s maiden name as “Sarah Callion” – which is probably as conclusive as things are going to get for this connection!

    So the lesson is, run down every lead. You never know how far you’ll have to go to find what you’re looking for.