Mightier Acorns

A Surfeit of Berlins

October 31, 2025

Last time I wrote about The Berlin Family Mystery, I was left with some questions.

Using the information in the excerpt from the Berlin Family book provided by the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Department, I was able to find some census records and clean up the mess I had made of John Berlin’s WikiTree profile. (It’s better now, if you want to go see!)

I’m satisfied that my ancestor, his wife, and his daughters and sons-in-law have better biographies now. But I still have too many records for too many men named John Berlin, and I’m not sure what to do with them all.

Cleaning Up Behind Myself

Over the years, I’ve added questions and half-supported theories to the wiki pages for my 3rd-great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Berlin) Callin, and her immediate family. This means that those pages are “works in progress,” sometimes for years, and for many people, having that sort of unfinished work out where anyone can see it is embarrassing.

I see it as an opportunity, though. The hope is always that someone will see where I am stuck and suggest a helpful resource. But in the case of the Berlins (John and Maria (Scheirly) Berlin, Elizabeth and William Callin, and Catherine (Berlin) Young and her husband Michael), those pages were simply unfinished for many years.

Now, even though there are still gaps and questions to be filled in, at least I’ve added narratives with source citations for anyone interested in working on that line.

Johns Berlin

Now that my own ancestors are ready for visitors, I’m not sure what to do with the information I’ve pulled together from various sources over the years trying to make sense of the documents and secondary sources describing men with similar names and biographical details.

There appear to be at least two other men who fought in the War of 1812.

John Berlin “A”: This is the man whose parents and wife are named in George Dallas Albert’s History of the County of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. From pg. 611:

“THE BERLIN FAMILY
“In 1794 one of the soldiers who came from Eastern Pennsylvania in the army to put down the “Whiskey Insurrection” was Jacob Berlin. He got a furlough in Pittsburgh to come out to that part of Franklin township now included in Penn, to visit his uncle, Jacob Berlin, who had settled there some twenty years before. He so liked the country that in the spring of 1795 he returned with his wife, formerly Miss Eve Carbaugh.
“He finally settled between the Fink and Lauffer farms. His children were four daughters and six sons, viz.: …John, Frederick, Joseph, Samuel, Powell, and Elias, of whom Powell removed to Forest County, Frederick to Clarion, and John to State of Ohio. Col. Elias Berlin, the youngest son, was born in 1803…His brother John served in the war of 1812.”

And there is this on pg. 668 within the biographical sketch of Jacob Baughman, father of Anna Baughman:

“After his marriage Adam Baughman settled on a farm in Armstrong County, about seventy miles up the Allegheny River, and here four children, viz.: Catharine, Michael, Polly, and Jacob, were born. Upon the death of his brother Henry…he sold his place in Armstrong County and returned to Westmoreland, and became the owner of and occupied the homestead until his death. Here the following children were born, viz.: Elizabeth, Margaret, Peter, Anna, Henry, Christian, and Lydia…Anna, wife of John Berlin, six sons and three daughters…”

John Berlin “B”: This is the man we know about from his extensive War of 1812 pension application. It is possible that he could be the same person as John “A,” but it’s hard to tell from the available evidence. I summarized his pension file thusly:

“John Berlin turns up in the War of 1812 Pension Application Files Index, 1812-1815 and from that record we learn that he served from 21 April 1813 to 22 November 1814, in both Captain William Craig’s and Captain Jonathan May’s companies in the Pennsylvania Militia. The record also shows that he married his second wife (the widow claiming his pension) in 1830 in Columbiana county, Ohio. (Happily, his first wife, Anna Coy, is also named.) It also lists residence dates for Van Wert county, Ohio (1851-1856) and Canton, Stark county (1871); he died in Stark county in 1874.”

I may have gotten the date of death wrong, however; that could have been the date of the application for benefits – if so, then John “B” died in 1878:

1878 Obituary John BERLIN
Article from Apr 11, 1878 The Stark County Democrat (Canton, Ohio) <!— –>
https://www.newspapers.com/nextstatic/embed.js
A Trip to the MidWest

Regardless of who those other John Berlin families might be, or how many there are, I need to figure out how to acquire at least the 4th volume of Reginald Berlin’s 5-volume book. There are two copies – one at the Allen County Public Library in Indianapolis, and one at the Midwest Genealogy Center in the Mid-Continent Public Library in St. Louis.

Before I make a long trip, however, I took one last stab at reaching out to the Berlin family in Pennsylvania to see if I can get their permission to re-publish the set of books on Lulu, making them more widely available to more people (whether to buy for themselves or to donate to their favorite local library or genealogical society).

Until such time as I can get my hands on a copy of that book, I will be waiting for the fall of this particular Berlin Wall!
When Faith Divides

October 29, 2025
In previous posts (see “Religion“) I have touched on ways that you can use what you know about your ancestors’ religion to learn more about them.

Knowing what specific faith group they ascribed to can tell you a lot. Sometimes you can learn about them from detailed church records, like the Quakers in the U.S. or extensive Roman Catholic church documents in Ireland. Sometimes, what you learn about their church affiliation can explain choices they made, such as their position on abolition or making risky cross-country trips to start a new life.

Studying your ancestor’s faith traditions will never be a straightforward process. Simply applying a religious label to a person is never enough to understand or explain who they were. We all contain multitudes – and no group of people is a seamless monolith.

Quakers (for one example) were known as pacifists, but examples of Quakers enlisting in the U.S. military go back to the Civil War¹. That kind of apparent contradiction is an opportunity to dive a little deeper into what makes a person a Quaker, and illuminate how your ancestor related to their time and place.

But that deeper dive will require you to ask difficult questions. These questions will be difficult both in the sense that the answers may be buried in dense, academic language, and in the sense that you may find yourself having to confront dearly held beliefs in a way that makes you uncomfortable.

Take a breath – and take notes on what you need to study later.

The Founding Myth: “They Came for Religious Freedom”

Like most American kids in the Cold War era, my grade school history classes breezed through the arrival of Europeans on the North American continent and simply described the Pilgrims and the Puritans as people who fled Europe because they were being persecuted for their beliefs. While this summary is not quite “false,” it fails to convey how violent everyday life could be throughout pre-colonial Europe, and it reduces all of the differences between people to a false binary. It also oversimplifies how that violence was driven by the corrupting power struggles between Churches and what we now call States or even Corporations, spanning a period of more than 1,000 years.

That way of telling the history also fails to admit that those fleeing persecution immediately began persecuting everybody else as soon as they had the power to do so:

The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as “inforced uniformity of religion,” meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst. In some areas Catholics persecuted Protestants, in others Protestants persecuted Catholics, and in still others Catholics and Protestants persecuted wayward coreligionists. Although England renounced religious persecution in 1689, it persisted on the European continent. Religious persecution, as observers in every century have commented, is often bloody and implacable and is remembered and resented for generations.

“Religion and the Founding of the American Republic; America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 1″ (Library of Congress website)

The way we were taught our history allowed us to believe that the religious persecution in Europe magically ended when those persecuted groups arrived in the colonies, allowing students to assume that since modern America has “religious freedom” and “separation of church and state,” those were concepts that existed here already. But, in fact, the Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony treated their neighbors just like their oppressors in Europe had treated them, due to their “conviction…that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary.”

It took European colonists nearly 300 years (from arrivals in the 1500s until the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789) to establish a country where the law of the land assumes that people with differing faiths can live in the same town without murdering each other. To this day, it is considered impolite to discuss Religion or Politics, not because “you might offend someone,” but because a lot of people still struggle with the notion that their personal beliefs should not be “inforced” on everyone.

The downside of not talking about Religion, of course, is that few people are capable of thinking rationally about religious concepts. Like these:

All Schisms Great or Small

Do you believe that individual people have free will?

If you are an American, I predict that you will answer “Yes” without thinking about it². But in certain parts of Europe during the Protestant Reformation, Calvinists taught a strict notion of predestination that ruled out free will; and disagreeing with their position could get you arrested, prosecuted, and in some (admittedly rare) cases, killed for your heresy. Today in America, Calvinist denominations like Presbyterian and Reformed churches still exist, though I wonder how much emphasis they place on this concept, or how divisive it is.

The point is that these sorts of schisms in Christianity are as old as Christianity. Some of the earliest divisions were stark, revolving around the question of Jesus was human or divine or something in between. Since I was raised as an evangelical Christian and never met another Christian who thought this, I was surprised to learn that “53% of folks professing Christianity and 43% of evangelical Christians agree with the statement, ‘Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.’”³

One of the most influential schisms was between the original view of Peter and the Apostles that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and the view of Paul that led to the development of the Christian church separate from Judaism. If you are familiar with Christian history, you should be aware of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. in which (among other things) decisions were made about which books would be included in the Bible and which would not. If you read up on the various schisms from the first 300 years of church history, then read the statement of faith known as the Nicene Creed, you might see how the Council attempted to bridge differences that seemed at the time to be unbridgeable. And if you study the Protestant Reformation that took place more than a thousand years later, you might recognize some of the same arguments cropping up again with some new twists.

The Great Awakenings

Understanding at least the general background of all that history is necessary to understand the periods in American history referred to as “The Great Awakenings” – which is where most Americans will find ancestors intersecting with religious history.

Many of you will be able to trace your own religious heritage through at least one line of your ancestry. I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, both of my grandfathers were ordained Southern Baptist ministers. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845, so it wasn’t really a choice for the generations before the Civil War. On my paternal grandfather’s side, folks seem to have favored either the Methodist churches or one of the non-denominational groups, usually (confusingly) referred to by names like “the Christian Church,” “the Church of Christ,” or “Disciples of Christ.” My paternal grandmother’s people were descended from “Pennsylvania Dutch” groups, consisting mostly of Lutherans or German branches of different Protestant groups. And, of course, I’ve written before about our Quakers.

However far up you may trace your religious roots, as you work your way back “down” your tree, you may find cousins belonging to newer, increasingly more diverse, faith groups that grew out of those Great Awakening periods, especially those founded in the 1840s. In each case, you will need to learn what drove those different groups to form or to split from older churches. Did they differ over ideas like adult baptism vs. infant baptism? Did they follow a strict orthodoxy guided by clergy or did they base their faith in their conscience and a direct, personal relationship with God?

This is where your personal beliefs may create a bias that makes it harder for you to understand the beliefs of your ancestors. Perhaps your grandparents converted from an older faith, and passed down acrimonious notions about that older faith to you. Will you be able to look past “that group is wrong and bad because they teach X” and understand your great-grandparents were really like?

And how deeply did they “believe” in the things you associate with their church? (Were they strict or lax about “rules” like swearing, dancing, drinking, etc.?) Were their political beliefs driven by their religion, or the other way around?

Everything Is Relative

In genealogy, you often have to decide “what is true” without having solid evidence. We do the best we can, and some evidence (like courthouse records or personal letters) are as solid as we can get. Even with the best records, we know that clerks can make mistakes and not every event gets recorded⁴. And personal letters might be unreliable, depending on context; one unreliable narrator can foil a whole theory.

Once we arrive at a conclusion, we like to assume that we can rely on that conclusion, and often reject new evidence that casts doubt. Especially if the work to gather and analyze that evidence was hard to do. Religion is often about placing faith in a “firm foundation” – believing things without evidence, and rejecting ideas that challenge that foundation. Combining the two disciplines can create a conflict between evidence and belief.

But if you want to be sure your foundation is solid, you have to be willing to re-examine it, test it, look for cracks, and be willing to repair it.
1. Schmidt, Mark A.; West Chester University, Digital Commons; “Patriotism and Paradox: Quaker Military Service in the American Civil War“, HIS 480 (submitted April 18, 2004); Web adaptation copyright 2004 by Jim Jones. ↩︎
2. Yes, I am aware that most people aren’t aware of the differences between “choice,” “agency,” and deterministic philosophies. This is a broad assertion meant to make a point, not an academic dissertation. ↩︎
3. Cory Allen Heidelberger, “Majority of Christians Think Jesus Was Just a Good Teacher, Not Divine,” Dakota Free Press, 14 December 2022. ↩︎
4. Not to mention studies that indicate about 5% of the population may discover a “non-paternity event” (unexpected parent) after DNA testing. ↩︎

Alexander Callin Buys Some Land

October 24, 2025

After a lot of digging, I’m ready for the next part of the Milton Township Diaspora – but this part of the story didn’t go where I was hoping to go.1

Our Story, so far…

Let’s begin with a condensed timeline of what the 1911 version of The Callin Family History tells us. This is the outline of the story that can be backed up with records:

James “1st” Callin – supposedly came to Pennsylvania from Ireland and fought in the Revolutionary War. James married in late 1778, and had at least two sons: James “2nd” and John, who settled on a farm in Milton Township, Richland County, Ohio.
- James “2nd” settled in Milton Township around 1810, and died in 1820, when he “was killed in an altercation with a man named Fowler who struck him over the head with a rifle”.
- John brought his family, allegedly from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, about 1816; John died of tuberculosis in 1835.

James “2nd” and his wife, who we’ll call “Aunt Mary,” had six children (that we know of):

Two daughters, Elizabeth (1798-1834) and Sarah (1807-1830) married sons of Benjamin Montgomery – we discussed their descendants in a couple of previous posts.
One son, Thomas (1802-1841) married Nancy Burget and their surviving children remained in Richland County after Thomas’s death. (We’ll talk about them another day.)

The other three sons married and had families by the time they decided to move to Iowa around 1840:

Hugh (1803-1846) – married Lucinda Montgomery, probably the daughter of Benjamin Montgomery.
Alexander (b. 1808) – referred to in The Callin Family History as “Alec.”
James (“3rd,” I guess?) (1810-1844) – married his cousin, Margaret Callin, the youngest daughter of John Callin.

What George W. knew, and when he knew it.

George W. Callin, who published the 1911 Callin Family History, was born in 1846, so he didn’t know any of these relatives. But his father, William, the older brother of Margaret, was the son of John Callin, and William grew up on the farm in Milton Township alongside all of these older cousins.

What we know from George’s account is that after his cousin/brother-in-law James died, William left his wife and small children at home in Ohio and made the 600 mile trip to Iowa to bring Margaret and their two small sons back to Ohio. Here is what George said about that:

“James Callin with his wife and baby moved to Iowa where he died in 1844. William Callin, brother of Margret, went to Iowa and brought her and the two above named children home to Ashland Co. after her husband’s death.”

George tells us about those “two above named children” – William Callin and Warren Callin – but he does not tell us anything about Hugh, or about the two sisters who married Montgomery men¹. However, here is what George tells us about Alec (emphasis mine):

“Married and moved with his family and mother to Iowa about the year of 1840.
“The mother referred to was “Aunt Mary”, wife of James 2nd who was killed with a gun. She sold the farm and went with Alec to Iowa where she died some years later. Nothing has been heard from that branch of the family since 1845.”

So, beginning from the assumption that the three sons took their mother and their wives and moved to Iowa around 1840, I was able to find records to support these general facts². I know Hugh’s family lived in Louisa County, and that Aunt Mary is buried in Muscatine. I gather that there was a significant outbreak of one or more disease (cholera, typhus, typhoid, who knows?) which took James 3rd in 1844, and may have taken Hugh and Aunt Mary in 1846.

But what about Alec “with his family”?

The Search for Alec

For a long time, I didn’t find any records that I could tie to our elusive Alec. I eventually found a handful of land purchases using the U.S. Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records database, but no census records. So periodically, I would go back and search again to see if there were newly digitized records, new databases, or variations of the search that I hadn’t tried before.

These records show Alexander Callin/Callen buying land in Iowa:

CALLEN ALEXANDER	IA1880__.223	CALLEN, ALEXANDER	5/1/1843	8345	Des Moines
CALLEN ALEXANDER	IA2050__.436	CALLEN, ALEXANDER	3/1/1850	17047	Des Moines
CALLEN ALEXANDER	MW-1016-024	CALLEN, ALEXANDER, REID, JAMES	9/5/1850	32169	Des Moines
CALLIN ALEXANDER	IA2120__.196	CALLIN, ALEXANDER	6/15/1854	20952	Louisa

If you read that 1843 transaction, it describes him as “Alexander Callen, of Washington County, Illinois.” And looking again, there is a record for an Alexander Callan in “Illinois, Public Land Purchase Records, 1813-1909” dated 12 October 1838. Plugging the location info from that record into the BLM-GLO database gives us two 1840 records for 40 acres each in Washington County, Illinois:

Screenshot of a map from the BLM-GLO website showing Alexander Callan's land in Washington County, IL.

Armed with some certainty about his possible locations, I was able to find an Alexander Callan in Wapello, Louisa County, Iowa, in the 1850 Census, and in Des Moines County in 1854. This 1854 record provides his name and the number of people in his household (5 males, 4 females). The 1850 Census only lists him as a farmer age 30 (born in 1820), born in Pennsylvania, and living in the household of the Gilliam family. This suggests the rest of his family lived somewhere else.

Casting a slightly wider search than I had tried before netted another land transaction for Alexander Callan dated 30 October 1857 in Schuyler County, Missouri. That lead me to an 1870 Census record in Fabius, Schuyler, Missouri, where 56-year-old Alexander (abt 1814) lived with his wife, Elizabeth and 8 children, four of whom were born after that 1854 record!

Two Steps Back – One Inch Forward

Long Story/Short: the man I have been chasing through land records all these years is not the Alec Callin from The Callin Family History. The man in Schuyler County, Missouri, was Alexander CELLAN. All of the evidence I’ve been gathering fits the story told on his Find-A-Grave memorial. The land purchases he made (mapped out in the image at the top of this post) match up with the places mentioned in that biography, and if you look at where each of his children (listed in 1870 and 1860 Census records under the names “Callen” and “Kellan”) the place of birth for each child lines up with the land purchases – showing his eldest born in Philadelphia, and subsequent children born in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.

But…

There is one small sliver of silver lining. Remember that 1850 Census in Wapello? The Cellan family (spelled “Alexander Kellon”) also appears in the 1850 Census, living in Yellow Springs, Des Moines County, Iowa. The 1854 state census record in Yellow Springs also fits with the Cellan family, but that 1850 record in Wapello that doesn’t fit into their story.

So I think record for Alexander Callan in Wapello in 1850 might be the man I’ve been looking for, after all! The date and place of birth fit, and the land record I mentioned above in Louisa County dated 1854 describes a land purchase by “Alexander Callen of Muscatine County” – none of which matches the records associated with the Cellan family.

These are two big discoveries for me. 1) I finally found a record for Alec Callin where I have been expecting to find him, and 2) I have another name variation (CELLAN) to include in the Callan One Name Study.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and revise the family tree in several places.

The records and my reasoning showing that Elizabeth, and Sarah are likely the children of James “2nd” were laid out in two posts on my old blog: Elizabeth’s discovery was in Echoes & Rhymes (2018) and Sarah’s were in Here We Go Again (2020) and The Other Montgomery Connection (2020). ↩︎
The case for Hugh being the brother of Alec and the others was made in: The Iowa Branch of the Callin Family (2021) ↩︎

No Kings: A Family Tradition

October 22, 2025
For those of you reading this in the far future, the second “No Kings” rally was held last Saturday. My wife and I are both U.S. Air Force veterans, and the small, non-partisan grass-roots veterans group we belong to was invited to speak at the rally in San Antonio. Our speaker closed by evoking our shared anti-fascist family history:

I stand here with the ghosts of my grandfathers at my back, brave men who fought fascism in the Army and the Army Air Corps during WWII. We, brothers and sisters and siblings, in uniform and out, we volunteered to share the burden of protecting democracy, promoting justice for all, projecting the best of us for the world to see. The Constitution we swore to defend is calling upon us again. And I cannot ignore the call to stand up and answer this administration’s chaos, fearmongering, and open displays of hatred with this reminder of why we serve.

My family is proud that all four of our grandfathers played a role in stopping Nazi Germany from creating an empire based on European Christian nationalism and fascist-style dictatorship. But at the time, before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans were starkly divided over the question of whether America should join the war, and on which side. Fascist and pro-Nazi Americans rallied around an “America First” policy, arguing for an isolationist position of neutrality that would have allowed the Axis Powers to overtake Europe and Russia. Many of those Americans bought into pseudo-scientific ideas of a Christian, European “superman,” a master race, that had the right to rule over everyone else.

But others in America had a different idea about what a Superman should be.

How Superman Mobilized the WWII Home Front, by Greg Daugherty, History.com, July 08, 2025.

The comic book Superman embodied “truth, justice, and the American Way” – a useful propaganda tool for reminding people that the American experiment was about preserving democracy, a system with flaws, but one that rooted political power in those being governed.

There has never been a simple binary of political thought in America, even during World War II. But when push comes to shove, we have, as a nation, historically chosen to fight for more democratic ideals. And the reward for defending those democratic ideals has generally led to more prosperity, less violence, and more equality for the citizens of democracies.

That support for democracy is supposed to be the foundation for all of the things that have made our society more free, more equal, and more prosperous – but it would be a mistake to pretend that significant numbers of our own citizens disagree strongly with the notion of democracy and the concepts of self-government.

Not Our First Conflict

American involvement in World War I was far smaller that World War II, and my own family’s involvement was smaller, too. My great-grandfather, Dick Witter, enlisted in the Army and was stationed at the training base near San Diego, California¹; but he never went overseas or saw combat. Few of my distant cousins did. But that war did represent the first time that America was seen as a major influence on world events.

Dick Witter, left, and his brother Clarence, during World War I.

One of Kate’s ancestors was Frank Shuffler, who was too old to enlist in World War I, but was killed in a train accident after taking a job with the railroad to make up for the number of young laborers who did enlist. We touched on Frank’s story, and on the part the railroads played as America began growing into a world power in The Ballad of Mrs. Steele.

And all of that growth and development only began after the war that was fought over the existence of slavery.

The War Between the States

When you reduce all of the arguments about the causes of the American Civil War down to the most basic question, that question is: does any person have the right to own another as property?

After the Revolution, and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution², Americans struggled with the contradictions inherent to any democratic form of government. In the states that allowed slavery, those with the power to own others argued that it was their God-given right to do so. Even though the secessionist movement leading to the Civil War saw themselves as resisting a tyrannical federal government in Washington that deprived them of their rights to their property (ie, other people), many of them sought to restore a system in which those who own land own the labor of those living on that land.

Many of my ancestors fought to preserve the Union, and to establish basic, fundamental rights for every individual. Even though many of them personally held segregationist views and believed that the freed slaves could not live side by side with white Americans³, they still fought for the principle of individual freedom. Just a small sample:
- John Henry Callin, 21st Battery of the Ohio Light Artillery (author of War Poems) and his brothers:
  - George William Callin, 21st Battery of the Ohio Light Artillery (author of The Callin Family History)
  - James Monroe Callin, 67th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry
- John Riley McCullough, 1st Regiment, Indiana Heavy Artillery Battery
- Joel Clark, 45th Regiment, Kentucky Infantry
- Jacob Edward Opp, 13th New York Infantry Regiment
- Joseph Frey, 5th Regiment of Infantry
Of course, there was one exception, that of John Shaw May, who was commissioned in the Confederate 6th Regiment, Kentucky Cavalry. (See Dangerous Times in Kentucky for that story.)

The Original “No Kings” Event

And, of course, the more I dig, the more I uncover ancestors who played a role in the American Revolution. People who risked far more than anyone marching with a snarky sign surrounded by inflatable cartoon costumes.

James Callin, of course, as well as James McCullough, William Bowen, and even a Hessian soldier who decided not to go back to life under a king after being held as a POW in New Jersey, Leopold Zindle.

There are those today who try to argue that only people whose ancestors were here for these wars can be counted as “real” Americans, or “heritage Americans.” Many of the descendants of these men would like to hold them up as heroes and claim a piece of their valor to justify choices that undermine the foundational principles of democracy that they all fought for.

I can’t do that.

I can be grateful that they fought for their principles, and acknowledge that my life has been better than it might have been had they not fought, and not won, their battles. But I can’t claim their valor as my own, and I can’t pretend that they were anything other than the flawed humans that we all are.

If my theory about James Callin is correct, then he participated in the last battles that drove the Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), Miami, and Wyandot people from their ancestral lands. And before fighting in the Civil War, Joseph Frey (newly immigrated from Germany) fought in the Mexican War that helped the slave-owning Texans move the U.S. border on nearly 80,000 Mexican citizens and a large but unspecified number of Native Americans. These events are a part of U.S. history that modern Americans are ashamed to talk about. Our history of accepting slavery and the violence that followed Reconstruction poisons our political discourse to this day.

But despite their mistakes, the world my ancestors fought to give us is one in which each individual has rights. The government those individuals choose, using the rules agreed upon in the Constitution, is supposed to derive its power from those people, and use its power to preserve those rights.

Today’s government was barely elected by a plurality of voters – and the current administration’s actions since taking office certainly resemble the grievances against the King of England that led my ancestors to fight in the Revolutionary War.

I believe to my core that there is a peaceful resolution available to us, and it’s in the Constitution that I swore to uphold. It will require courage from elected officials, many of whom are not known for their willingness to put their voters ahead of their donors. But that solution is still there, and that is why I will continue to demand it from my representatives.

And even if you don’t have a pedigree of American soldiers like mine, if you’re an American now, you should demand that, too.
1. See Grandma Merle’s Travelogue where she talks about Dick’s time in the Army. ↩︎
2. I highly recommend that you read Pauline Maier’s book, “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788” sometime. It reviews the arguments made for and against the ratification of the Consitution in each of the original 13 states, using press and pamphlets from that time period. Some of those arguments will sound painfully familiar to modern readers. ↩︎
3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. published “Lincoln on Race and Slavery” and it is eye-opening to see how the Great Emancipator talked about these issues in his speeches and letters. ↩︎
Planning Ahead

October 14, 2025

As I type these opening sentences, it is Tuesday afternoon, October 14, 2025. Despite having all the time in the world, thanks to the ongoing Disruption, I find myself in the position of not having any new content ready to post this week for the first time in nearly two years.

Facing the blank page with a deadline, even one I set for myself, is a stressful thing to do. I work the way I do so I don’t find myself in that position very often. So my first thought when I realized I have backed myself into this corner was:

What an opportunity!

Staying Ahead

Normally, I keep several weeks’ worth of posts in my Drafts folder. That means keeping track of about six posts at any time, in various stages of development. During normal times, I only get to work on family history stuff in between the normal business of life, usually stealing an hour or two after work during the week or digging in for a few hours on Saturday or Sunday.

My process involves taking some of that precious time and going through the trees I have on various platforms. I go looking for gaps or questions, and add notes and updates to new draft posts, tacking ideas onto them until I can string together a thousand or so words into something like a story.

When I keep enough new ideas going in draft, it is easy to spend a little time each week scheduling those that are ready to be posted, reviewing and editing, and maybe finding or making something to illustrate the post.

The furlough began a couple of weeks ago, after I had already decided to put some quality time into working on the Callan One-Name Study. Putting time into that project ate into the time I usually reserve for putting the blog together, and now, I have “caught up” to myself!

Getting Ahead

For those of you who aspire to write regularly, I suspect that many of you struggle with this “blank page” moment; and I can recommend taking a few steps to get out ahead of your own deadlines so that you can be more in control of your production schedule.

First: pace yourself.

Don’t feel like you need to produce a fully researched master’s thesis every week to be successful. This is a blog – a web log – tracking your progress and giving you a platform to say, “Here’s something interesting!” I’ve set my pace for Mightier Acorns to be two posts per week, and while I usually have to fight to keep my word count under 1500 words, I also remind myself that 500 words can be enough.

When I plan out the drafts for several weeks in advance, I can also identify those ideas that “have legs” and threaten to expand to several thousand words, and break them into pieces.

Second: “Perfection is the Enemy of the Good”

Nobody likes to feel like their content is disposable, but… it kind of is. For me, the content on my blog is meant to be fun. (We all have different ideas about what “fun” means.) As far as I am concerned, the work that needs to be of the highest quality is what ends up on WikiTree. (And even that is meant for constant, small improvement over time.)

If the point of your blog is to act as your personal JSTOR, then yes, you should work hard to make everything correct. But if the point is to share highlights to draw your family in or share tips with your fellow genealogists, they will forgive you if you have an occasional grammatical error. So don’t spend too much time on “making everything perfect” or you will never get ahead.

Third: Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.

Not only am I happy to re-post favorite essays (usually adding either an illustration or a research update), I’m also happy to cover the same terrain as older posts. (See “On Writing Consistently” for some of these tips, written differently!)

Take A Break Sometimes!

In drafting this post, and looking at my schedule, I can see that I’ve been doing much of what I set out to do with Mightier Acorns since re-launching on WordPress in June. And, since I know I’m going to be busy for much of the rest of this week, especially Saturday, I think I can allow myself some time off.

So, if you have read this far, be advised: I will not be posting anything new on Friday. And if Saturday goes horribly wrong, you may not see anything the week after… but rest assured, I’m still enjoying this work, and I’m looking forward to rejoining you soon!

Until then…
Raising the Rupes

October 10, 2025
The life and times of Mary Ann (Rupe) Ballard

A while back, we heard The Ballad of Mrs. Steele – a story about Frank Shuffler and Virgie Ballard, who survived Frank and went on to marry Orin Steele. Virgie was one of my wife’s sixteen great-great-grandparents.

We already know about some of the tragedies Virgie’s family survived, such as losing Frank to a train accident during World War I. But there seem to be other moments in her life that probably caused some trauma. And figuring out what happened may require reading between the lines of the records.

Isaac Ballard: Upstanding Citizen or Scoundrel?

Virgie Ballard’s father was Isaac Emmerson Ballard (1859-1923). He grew up in Iowa, moving with his family to Missouri around 1870. Isaac moved back to Iowa by 1880, when he lived with his widowed sister, Rachel Fredericks, and her three children in Glenwood, Mills County, Iowa. In 1885 he resided with his parents, who had moved to Pacific Junction in Plattville Township, Mills County, Iowa. Their neighbors were a family named Rupe.

Mary Ann Rupe was born on 3 Mar 1867 in Nebraska City, Nebraska. After Mary Ann married Isaac in 1886, they had five daughters, the youngest, Vivian, born in 1894. Isaac seemed to have steady work as a brakeman for the railroad, and served as a constable in Mills County. In 1896, he was elected as marshal of Pacific Junction, in addition to already serving as constable for Platteville township and the depot policeman for the C.B.&Q. railroad.

I.E. Ballard of Pacific Junction – “holds more police offices…than any other man in Mills county.” Article from Apr 16, 1896 The Opinion-Tribune (Glenwood, Iowa)

But despite the praise of his “efficiency and faithfulness,” trouble lay ahead. Isaac was sued in 1901 for false arrest, along with fellow constable Oliver Zorns and former Council Bluffs policeman Jack Pinnell. The complainant was a man named Joseph S. Scott who alleged that he and his father were arrested by the constables in October 1899 and were held overnight in an unheated room, leading to the untimely death of Scott’s father.¹

In May of 1901, Isaac was acquitted by a jury², but that did not end his problems. He was separated from his family on 15 April 1901, and he filed suit for divorce against Mary Ann “on a charge of abandonment” in December 1903.

Despite the fact that Isaac sued Mary Ann for abandonment, events suggest there was more to the story than that. He soon remarried Edna May Purvis (1879–1972) on 18 Jul 1904 in St Joseph, Missouri, and they moved to Oakland, California, where Isaac was working as a switchman for the railroad. In 1912, the couple had twins, a boy and a girl, before moving back to St. Joseph by 1920.

When Isaac died there in 1923, his obituary only mentioned his second family:

“Isaac E. Ballard, 51 years old, died at his home near Lake school at 3:15 oclock [sic] Monday afternoon. He is survived by his wife, one son, and one daughter, Ellis and Evelyn Ballard, and one brother, James, at Battlett [sic], Iowa. Ballard was a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen lodge No. 92. Funeral services will be held from the family home at 2 oclock Wednesday afternoon. Burial will be in Ashland cemetery.”

While we may not know the circumstances, we can tell that the breakup of the Ballard family left Mary Ann and her daughters to get by on their own. The fact that none of his living daughters were mentioned in his obituary suggests a deeper story that isn’t in the available records.

Before I create an idea of what kind of person Isaac was, though, I need to see what I can learn about Mary Ann.

The Rupe Family

Mary Ann was the oldest daughter of James Douglas Rupe (1842–1916) and Amanda Jane Martin (1845–1906). She grew up with two younger brothers and two younger sisters. Another sister, Jennie, was born in 1880, but appears to have died in infancy.

James Rupe was a private in the Confederate army, according to his gravesite record in Glenwood Municipal Cemetery, but because there was more than one James Rupe serving in the Confederate army from Missouri units, I don’t know which one he was. I also don’t know exactly when or where he married Amanda Martin; the 1900 Census says they were married in 1864, and Mary Ann, their eldest, was born in Nebraska in 1867.

James was a farm laborer, and he took the family to live in Green Township, Nodaway County, Missouri, near Maryville, when Mary was small. Her sister, Sarah Margaret, was born there in 1871, but by 1875, the Rupes had returned to Mills County, and Mary Ann’s siblings were born in Pacific Junction. All of them remained in Iowa, and most of them had large families of their own.
- Sarah Margaret (Rupe) Fitch (1871–1948) married Simeon Fitch in 1900, and they had two sons and a daughter before Simeon died in 1916. This was Simeon’s second marriage, and the oldest of his five children from the first marriage was a year younger than Sarah.
- John Redmond Rupe (1875–1945) and Samuel Levi Rupe (1881–1947) married sisters, Henrietta and Elma Livengood. John and Elma had two children, plus Elma’s two sons from her first marriage to Allan Arnold (1863-1904). Samuel and Etta had nine children between 1901 and 1923.
- Louella (Rupe) Hill (1877–1949) married Sherman Henry Hill (1868–1926) in 1895, and they had eleven children, ten of whom survived to adulthood.
All of which suggests that Mary Ann’s children had a lot of kin nearby when they were growing up. So, how did Isaac’s and Mary Ann’s daughters fare?

The Ballard Daughters

Virgie’s older sister was Florence Ballard (1887-1964). Florence married Hart Mantor Allen at age 16 in October 1903, but by 1905, Florence was living alone under her maiden name in Glenwood. Mr. Allen remarried in California in 1908 (to another woman named Florence), so it seems likely that this first marriage during the same time frame that her parents were divorcing may have been what we would call “acting out” today. Florence married a second time in 1917. She and William Kim (1881-1952) did not have any children of their own, and they moved to Salem, Oregon, by 1920, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

Bessie M. Ballard (1891-1975) married Daniel J Aalberg (1882–1963) on 26 Nov 1908 in Minnehaha County, South Dakota, where they raised a their family of two sons and three daughters. Bessie and Daniel divorced during the 1930s. Dan Sr. was remarried to Mrs. Myra Baker by 1940, and Bessie married Alfred P Thorvalson in 1936 in Minnesota. Their children were mostly grown by then, with their three eldest married with families of their own (Hobert, Virginia Fenner, and Lorraine Morris), and Dan Jr. in the Army at Fort Francis E Warren Military Reservation, Laramie, Wyoming. Their youngest, Gwendoline, lived with her sister, Mrs. Lorraine Morris, in 1940.

Virgie’s youngest sister, Vivian, married Bert Glancy Gatch (1889-1964) in 1912, after she turned 18, and the couple moved to Sonoma, California, during the 1920s. They never had children of their own.

Virgie had one last sister: Hattie Ballard, born December 1892. She appeared in the 1895 and 1900 Census with her family, but I wasn’t able to find her in the records after 1900. Some of the unsourced information I can find on Ancestry gives a date of death on 10 July 1902, which I can’t confirm. But, if their 10-year-old daughter died in that summer, it’s plausible to think that the trauma of that loss could have been what drove a wedge between Isaac and Mary Ann and lead to their divorce the following year.

Left With Speculation

Sometimes, even though we can find records to give us names, dates, and places, we are left with questions. Even when we have contemporary newspaper accounts, or if we had letters from the people involved, we can’t entirely trust the points of view expressed.

When that happens, answering questions like “What happened to their daughter?” or “Why did they divorce?” can only be answered by a best guess: speculation. And as long as we make it clear when we guess, that might be okay.

But we should always keep digging.
1. Newspapers.com, The Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, Iowa; “Sues Officers For Damages“, Sat, Aug 25, 1900, Page 4. ↩︎
2. Newspapers.com, The Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, Iowa; “In The District Court.” Wed, May 29, 1901, Page 4. ↩︎
The Power of Magical Thinking

October 8, 2025

The human brain is incredible.

I mean that in every sense of the word. The things a human brain is capable of doing are “impossible or difficult to believe,” and yet, we owe our existence and continued survival to our brains doing those unbelievable things.

“Belief” is the focus of this essay, by the way. Belief and stories, and the place where they run up against reason and evidence.

Where Stories Come From

We tell ourselves stories for several reasons. The earliest known writing system, cuneiform, was used by ancient Mesopotamians living in what is now the modern Iraq to record transactions in clay tablets, but the same Sumerian culture also wrote down The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest known work of fiction.

We know that before writing was invented, human cultures relied on oral traditions, passing down their histories and their genealogies through memorization and repetition. This continued even after the invention of writing. African griot traditions carry into the modern age even though the power structure of the kings who used to sustain the griot caste no longer exists. Evidence found through archaeology tells us that art, whether the music of the griot or the paintings found in caves from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, has always been a part of human life.

The writer John Green talks about the paintings found in a cave in Lascaux, France, in 1940, and I often think about what he said in his Anthropocene Reviewed essay, after pointing out that the hand stencils found in the cave tell us how different life was for early humans:

But they also remind us that the humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands indistinguishable from ours. These communities hunted and gathered and there were no large caloric surpluses so every healthy person would’ve had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water. And yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

I don’t believe art or storytelling is optional for humans. Our brains constantly process information received through our senses, and making sense of all of that information requires us to build a framework, a story, to explain what we see, hear, or feel.

Sometimes, as we do with our family history research, we create scenarios to explain the information we find, and to help predict where to look for more evidence. But often we find ourselves without evidence or an easy explanation, and that’s where our storytelling and imagination tend to run wild.

“Not Knowing” Is Scary

We don’t like to sit with “I don’t know” for very long.

How many times have you run into a dead end in your family history research and told yourself a “placeholder” story to explain the gap you have found? I didn’t know for a long time what happened to William Zardy Sly, the grandson of Harriet E. Callin (1838–1907), so I told myself that he must have died after 1907, leaving a widow and a small child behind. Telling myself that story led me to stop looking for evidence, until another cousin filled me in on the Double Life of Uncle Jack! Without the evidence of cousin Leanne’s testimony and personal knowledge that Zardy had left behind his old life, created a new identity, and became her Uncle Jack St. Clair, there is no way I could have arrived at the truth using my usual sources of evidence.

When genealogists run into dead ends like these, it is tempting to make leaps or to rely on the hearsay and guesswork of others. We ran into an example of this with my Livingston ancestors in Two Steps Back. I’m sure you have your own frustrating examples of someone stringing together a version of your tree that doesn’t hold up when more evidence is found.

And it can be frustrating to try to correct the record when the person who strung that fanciful version together doesn’t want to let go of the story they have been telling themselves.

Invested In Stories

There are a lot of reasons why someone might insist that a story they tell themselves is true even when the evidence shows otherwise.

We are social primates whose survival depends on our family and community, and so if the community has decided that something must be true, we risk losing that community if we don’t accept it, too. This can lead to a range of consequences, from simply having to admit to being wrong to losing jobs or relationships that we value.

The stakes aren’t always that high, but as human beings, we tend to prefer the first version of a story we hear, especially if it has some emotional core that appeals to us.

Take the story I first learned about my Hessian soldier ancestor, Leopold Zindle. I really liked the version of his story that I found in 2014. The story that he defied a British officer who struck him with a sword in the street, and that the people of Morristown, NJ, came together to protect him and accept him held a deep appeal to me. But as I learned later, in the story behind the story, Leopold did not defy a British officer (it was a German-speaking American officer), he did not defy him alone (there were two of them involved), and the event did not happen in front of the town (it happened on the road to Philadelphia, and led to the return of the German prisoners to Morristown).

I liked the romance of the first version of Leopold’s story, but as I found new facts and evidence, I had to let go of that romance so that I could get at the truth of what happened to him. And the truth was much more interesting and complicated, even if it was less appealing to my romantic sense of story.

In the case of Zardy Sly, I wasn’t deeply invested in his story. I am not his direct descendant, and I didn’t have an idea in my head of what kind of person he was. But I imagine that his abandoned daughter might have built a story to explain why her father was gone. And if she told herself a story that gave her comfort or helped her heal from his loss, finding out that he had a second life with a second wife (one that his parents and siblings knew about) could be emotionally devastating.

If you spend any time in a genealogy forum (like r/Genealogy on Reddit) examples abound of what can happen when DNA evidence reveals a “non-parental event” (NPE) that upends years of research.

Revising our personal stories and histories can be upsetting, and sometimes we are motivated to resist that revision, no matter what the evidence says.

Magical Thinking: What You “Believe In”

I’m using the phrase “Magical thinking” to describe the idea that wanting something to be true badly enough can make it true.

This goes beyond the countless examples of people inventing stories to explain evidence that doesn’t make sense to them. People often fall back on magical thinking to explain away new evidence that contradicts a story they love. Magical thinking is never about what you can prove; it is always about what you believe in.

For example, even though we have seen 400 years of advancements in astronomy, archaeology, and biology – discoveries about DNA, the finding of new burial sites and ancient settlements, and the building of more powerful telescopes – despite the growing body of evidence that shows with greater and greater precision the age of our planet and our universe, and how our ancestors came to be, there is an alarming number of people who insist that their story about an Earth that is only 6,000 years old is real.

And if you have encountered someone who believes that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, you know how upsetting any argument about it can get. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that other people who share their faith have found ways to reconcile the old stories with the new science. The idea that they should let go of this story becomes an attack on their identity, on their sense of who they are, and on their community.

When you are in a conversation with someone and you realize that they feel that their beliefs are being challenged, the best course of action is usually to back off. If they arrived at their position without evidence, it is unlikely that any amount of evidence will convince them to change their position. At least, not in the moment. And forcing the issue can lead them to double down on their beliefs, dismiss you and your evidence, and make it harder for you to present your case to them in the long run.

Such is the power of magical thinking.

So, What Do We Do?

The truth is, I don’t know an easy way to convince people to change their minds once they have decided to protect their story from evidence to the contrary.

The best suggestions I can offer are to model the behaviors you wish they would adopt. Do your best not to alienate the other person, and then demonstrate how you work:

Document the evidence you have, including the context needed to understand it.

Be open about your doubts; allow for the fact that your interpretation of the evidence could be wrong. But also make it clear what evidence you would need to either prove or refute your story.

Build on what you can prove without a doubt, and on facts that are not in dispute. Frame your disagreement around the points that you agree on. “We know that grandpa enlisted in the army, but we don’t know what happened to him afterward. If he died, we would expect to see a document; if he started a new life with a new name, we might see DNA evidence.”

Avoid absolutes. And avoid framing your conclusions as “beliefs.” Rather than saying, “I believe the newspapers version of Leopold’s story is false,” say, “The evidence provided by his commanders and the letters of his fellow prisoners suggest that Leopold’s story was this, instead…”

Above all else, you have to be willing to let people be wrong. Especially when their being wrong presents no threat of harm.

If we were talking about the welfare of a child or a case where being wrong does present a harm (like, allowing someone who doesn’t “believe in” vaccines to put your health at risk), you wouldn’t just “let it go.” But if we’re talking about the stories of people who are long dead, there is no reason to try to force someone to accept your facts.

Sometimes, the wisest course is to let the elephant think the magic feather allows him to fly. Just make sure he doesn’t try to jump off the roof.
Update: Callan One Name Study

October 3, 2025

There is something soothing about diving into a database of messy, human data and bringing some sense of order to it. King Crimson captures the feeling I experience in their classic 1981 track, “Frame by Frame”:

Frame by frame (Suddenly)
Death by drowning (From within)
In your own, in your own analysis
Step by step (Suddenly)
Doubt by numbers (From within)
In your own, in your own analysis

The first time I heard Adrian Belew and Tony Levin hit that harmony on the word “analysis,” I felt the way I feel when I am deep inside a spreadsheet, pulling information from query results and putting it into profiles, wiki pages, or online trees.

“Doubt by numbers”… yeah, that feels like the practice of critical thinking!

Frame by Frame

Which brings us to the Callan Name Study, and my ongoing effort to know what can be known about the Callan (or Callen, or Callin) folks who found their way from Ireland to America. If you recall one of my earlier posts about this, I had started collecting the households from the 1911 Census for Callan (and spelling variants) in County Louth. I quickly saw the value in combining the data from the 1901 Census, too, and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve devoted some time to refining what I’ve learned documenting links to Ancestry, FamilySearch, and WikiTree profiles in my Callin One Name Study spreadsheet.

As of this writing, I have recorded nearly 670 individuals, and I have at least one link to a public profile (most of them on Ancestry) where the records can be examined by anyone who is interested.

This can be some slow and painstaking work, but as I press on, I expect that some helpful patterns will emerge. New DNA connections to me through these Irish Callan families would be very helpful, of course, but they will be very distant. There is a small chance that I’ll figure out who Dr. Fred visited in 1907. I might even stumble across the family that came to Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War – though I suspect that will be a long shot.

There are a lot of possible goals and several ways that putting this work in could benefit my research down the road. But, if I’m honest, I don’t really expect any answers to my immediate questions to come from this effort.

I just like doing it.

Suddenly, a Story

Nicholas Callan is one of the first profiles to come out of this effort. Born in 1838, he’s the father of 11 children and was a tenant farmer in Allardstown until his death, sometime before 1901. His widow was the former Mary Feehan (or Feeghan), and she maintained their farm in Allardstown through the 1901 and 1911 Census, with the help of several of her children. Two of their daughters, Elizabeth and Josephine, lived with Mary’s brother, Patrick Feehan, and their cousin (Patrick’s son, also named Patrick) lived with Mary Callan in 1901.

A lot of the records we have give us imprecise information, or facts that are hard to match up with other records. For instance, the eleven children were all baptized in the Roman Catholic church, and almost all of them can be found in baptismal records, which list both of their parent’s names and two sponsors. While the sponsors aren’t necessarily relatives, most of the sponsors I found had the surnames Feehan and Callan, and several of them were women with the surname Hughes.

These sorts of relationship clues, combined with the very specific information about the towns, townlands, parishes, and baronies within County Louth may not provide a solid proof of certain connections, but studying all of that information can help figure out where to look for more records.

It’s a lot like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, in that the contours of the pieces may take a while to start forming the big picture.

And so, we keep sorting the pieces.

Frame by Frame.

Doubt by Numbers.

In your own analysis.
Disruption

October 1, 2025

Today, 1 October 2025, is the beginning of the next fiscal year, FY2026.

Yesterday was the official date of separation for dozens of my former colleagues, friends, and mentors who chose the deferred retirement option offered earlier this year. I can’t help but feel a sense of deep loss and sadness at this unnecessary exodus.

And today is the beginning of a government shutdown because Congress couldn’t agree on a spending bill. So I will be furloughed from my federal job starting today. Rumors are that this furlough is going to be used to illegally fire many more federal workers.

Unlike the highest ranking civilians in charge of the federal government these days, I am bound by laws and an oath I took to support and defend the Constitution, so I am not going to tell you my opinions about this, or give you a call to action. I’ll simply state that whether you are one of the ~70 million people who actively chose this, or you are one of the 90 million who allowed it when you refused to vote last November, it’s not too late to contact your elected representatives and tell them how you feel about the situation we find ourselves in. I trust democracy, even in a country filled with people who seem intent on maintaining an ignorant, alternative reality, and I trust that if everyone adds their voice to demand a fix, those in power will eventually have to listen to reason.

While we sit at home, mostly helpless, and wait for this situation to be resolved by those elected representatives, I will try to set aside the anxiety and stress of not knowing what my personal fate will be, and will try to treat this the way I have treated previous shutdowns. In the past, they have been too brief to harm me and my family – a privilege that I know is not shared by everyone – and the law provides back pay once we we return to work. If the law still matters.

Finding myself with extra time on my hands in the house should mean that I get to dive a little deeper into the Callan One Name Study, and maybe take some time to write the sort of genealogy posts that I don’t usually have time to write.

Here’s to hope.
The Great Eight

September 26, 2025
Everybody¹ has eight Great-Grandparents – the parents of their four grandparents. For my kids, those eight people are vague memories from photos taken when they were too small to understand who all the people around them were.

If you’ve been reading Mightier Acorns for any amount of time, you’ve run across many references to My Sixteen (or, for my wife’s side, Her Sixteen), but in my efforts to reach back further in time to more distant ancestors, it can be easy to lose track of those more recent generations.

To help my far-flung cousins, and those of my wife’s family, I’ve been building separate, public Ancestry trees based on each of our children’s’ eight Great-grandparents. If you’re descended from one or two of these fine people, or from their ancestors, take some time to explore their history…and yours.

The Robert Callin Project

Bob Callin, also known as “Grandpa No-Bob” to me and my cousins, was a sweet man with a wicked sense of humor. Many of our stories about his antics involved Grandma Nancy telling him, “No, Bob!” – thus the nickname. His Ancestry tree is The Robert Callin Project.

The Nancy Witter Project

Like the desert climate she grew up in, Nancy could be intense, but she was known for her fierce love for her family and friends. Married during World War II, she and Bob were public school teachers who spent their free time traveling the country in their RV. Her Ancestry tree is The Nancy Witter Project.

The Russell Clark Project

Russ Clark was A Fire In the Desert, and wanted nothing more than to save your soul. Not surprising considering the heritage of Baptist ministers in his tree! His Ancestry tree is The Russell Clark Project.

The Alberta Tuttle Project

Grandma Bert followed Grandpa Russ to the ends of the earth, usually in a camper or trailer. Whenever she could she took her organ. Her Ancestry tree is The Albert Tuttle Project.

Here is a snapshot gallery if you’d like to see their trees without visiting Ancestry:

Robert Callin Project

Nancy Witter Project

Russell Clark Project

Alberta Tuttle Project

Robert McCullough Project

My wife’s Grandpa Bob died long before I had a chance to meet him, but his family remembers him fondly. His Ancestry tree is the Robert McCullough Project.

June Shuffler Project

Grandma June’s legendary Christmas cookies are well known in our house. Her Ancestry tree is the June Shuffler Project.

Arvid Holmquist Project

We know a lot less about “Bud” Holmquist, as his infamous criminal career upended his family in the 1950s. We are still figuring out the story between his prison sentence and his death in 1996. But his Ancestry tree is the Arvid Holmquist Project.

Merilyn Martin Project

Grandma Merilyn also died before her great-grandchildren had a chance to meet her. Her Ancestry tree is the Merilyn Martin Project.

Here is their snapshot gallery:

Robert McCullough Project

June Shuffler Project

Arvid Holmquist Project

Merilyn Martin Project
1. Almost everybody – occasionally there is some endogamy and pedigree collapse, and we at Mightier Acorns intend no judgment. ↩︎