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.
  • Family Pride

    Family Pride

    Family history research thrives on dates of significance. Birth, marriage, and death, of course, but also immigration dates, decadal census, and annual taxes all give us milestones to mark the stories of our ancestors and cousins. Some of these dates feel more important to us, whether it is the birthdate of someone you particularly admire, or the date you lost someone.

    Whether the observance is celebratory or solemn, humans like to commemorate things. That’s why this is only a partial list of monthly holidays and observances that fall in June:

    • Adopt a Shelter Cat Month
    • African-American Music Appreciation Month
    • Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month
    • Audiobook Appreciation Month
    • Celibacy Awareness Month
    • Cucumber Month
    • Dairy Alternatives Month (but, also, Dairy Month)
    • Fireworks Eye Safety Month
    • International Childhood Cancer Awareness Month
    • International Men’s Month
    • International Surf Music Month
    • Lemon Month
    • Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month
    • National Accordion Awareness Month
    • National Camping Month
    • National Candy Month
    • National Caribbean-American Heritage Month
    • National DJ Month
    • National Microchipping Month
    • National Safety Month
    • National Seafood Month
    • National Soul Food Month
    • Potty Training Awareness Month
    • PTSD Awareness Month (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
    • Women’s Golf Month
    • World Infertility Month
    • Zoo and Aquarium Month

    I have several favorites on this list (I am more than aware of accordions, for example), but one in particular stands out as important to my family.

    The Response to Shame

    People express many different feelings about the existence of LGBTQ+ people, and about Pride Month. Some of them are very strong feelings, and are not kind.

    As a result of the long history of strong, unkind feelings being expressed towards anyone who did not fit the straight, cisgendered mold, people have historically tended to hide who and what they were, and the feeling associated with hiding themselves was Shame.

    Shame is unpleasant. Shame does harm. And shame meant that people who did not fit into a specific expectation of their sex or gender were either brutalized, driven away, or forced to pretend to fit. Finding evidence of an ancestor who would have been what we call LGBTQ+ is highly unlikely, precisely because those individuals and their families are unlikely to have left a record behind.

    There have been societies and places where Shame did not rule the day. They are also rare, and they tend not to be obsessed with record-keeping, which makes it difficult to tease out the evidence that a genealogist needs. Our society has only recently begun to behave in a way that does not automatically suppress the existence of LGBTQ+ people.

    Pride Month was established to counteract that history of Shame. It is celebrated in June because that is when the Stonewall riots took place in 1969, a tragic event in which people demanding basic rights were met with violence. But because they insisted and demanded those rights, my family has benefited.

    Thanks to the activism and persistence of those who came before them, my children are part of the first generation in American history where those on the queer spectrum can live openly, marry, or have their own families.

    The Difference Between Us

    My wife and I are both Gen-X cisgender heterosexual people who chose to marry young (compared to others in our generation) and to have double the average number of children for our age group. We were teenagers during a time when pop stars or celebrities “coming out” was often the subject of national news, and was often treated as a scandal. From our perspective, it quickly became clear that who a person chose to love should not matter to the rest of us. Artists like Prince and Michael Stipe of the band R.E.M. each demonstrated in extremely different ways that whether a person’s differences were overt and over-the-top (like Prince) or understated and private (like Stipe), it wasn’t anyone else’s business.

    I may not have been gay or queer, but because I disliked sports and preferred chorus and theater, I was a frequent target for bullying that almost always included questioning my sexuality. I can’t pretend that I didn’t pay some of that forward. When I reflect on how I treated others during high school, I, too, could bully others, and did. But I eventually learned that bullying is the problem, and that treating others with respect is simply the better way to behave.

    Accepting that others are different from us should not be a radical idea. That is the foundation that any healthy society is built on. Those differences are what make our stories interesting. At least, that’s what I’ve learned from reading other people’s family histories.

    This Family’s History

    Despite not being LGBT ourselves, my wife and I are still unconventional. She is more interested than I am in things like power tools and grilling, and I am… well, you see how I spend my time. Two of our kids are openly queer with queer partners, whom we love spending time with. From the outside, our growing clan probably seems odd to those with an expectation of what a family should look like, but that’s who we are. To us, this is normal.

    Pride Month is a time when we celebrate the things about us that are different. It is also, for me, a reminder of how normal the rainbow of human diversity is.

    There are still those who have strong feelings about people like us, who are different. They may choose to focus on the spectacle, and they may react in ways that are not well thought out or kind. But most people are kind to us, and most people get that “live and let live” is a better way to behave.

    And eventually, when our descendants and cousins look back at us, they should at least have a record that we were here. Because we have nothing to be ashamed of.

    So, whether you celebrate Dairy Month or Dairy Alternatives Month, I hope you are well. Use sunscreen and hydrate. Don’t be afraid to be who you are. And don’t be the kind of person who treats others poorly because of who they are.

  • Ahnentafel #28: Arvid William Holmquist (1880-1962)

    Ahnentafel #28: Arvid William Holmquist (1880-1962)

    “What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

    Our First Immigrant

    William Holmquist is the first person in this Ahnentafel series who was not born in the United States.

    He was born on 6 October 1880 in Norra Vram, which, since 1997, has been located in the county (or “Län“) of Skåne. He was 29 years old when he arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the Arabic on 3 May 1910. An uncle, John Spence, was listed as the “Person in the US” to meet him in Stillwater, Washington County, Minnesota.

    In 1910, immigrants faced no passport or visa requirements. Anyone could purchase passage to the United States. Upon arrival, they were processed at centers like Ellis Island or Angel Island. The process relied on a pre-existing ship manifest, medical check-ups, and legal cross-examination to filter out inadmissible individuals, and typically took three to five hours. On average, two percent of arriving immigrants were excluded from entry. The most common reasons for exclusion were a doctor diagnosing an immigrant with a contagious disease that could endanger public health, or a legal inspector being concerned that an immigrant would likely become a public charge or an illegal contract laborer.1

    William was naturalized in 1921, a process that took 11 years. In the 1920s, U.S. immigration laws began to shift from a system of “qualitative exclusion” (banning specific categories of people) to a system of quantitative restriction (strict numerical caps, visas, and digital security screenings). It’s worth keeping in mind that when you read about “Open Borders” in America, that was more or less what we had for the first 150 years of our national existence, and for the 400 years before that. So when people talk about their immigrant families coming in “the right way,” they probably don’t realize that “the right way” was to simply show up and start living here.

    Boyhood In Sweden

    Born “Arvid William Holmquist,” William was the only son of Anders Holmquist and Elna Mårtensson. Anders listed his occupation as “husägare” in the Swedish clerical surveys available online, which tells us a bit about the family’s lifestyle.

    That title was most commonly used in towns and cities. Husägare generally owned the physical tenement or building, which often contained multiple apartments rented out to tenants, making them akin to small-scale landlords or property developers. In 1895, holding the title of Husägare usually indicated middle-class respectability. It implied a level of financial stability and social standing, as these individuals paid municipal taxes and often had voting rights in local town elections.

    The Holmquist family consisted of Anders and Elna, William, and four daughters, two of whom did not survive to adulthood. The eldest child, Gerda Elna, was born in 1874 and married Karl Kristian Rasmussen in 1910. A second daughter, Estrid Svedenborg (or Svenborg), was born in 1876 and died in 1890 at age 13. After William’s birth in 1880, Anders and Elna had Julia, who died in infancy in 1885, and Lydia Ruth, who was born in 1887. She married Hans Johan Björkeroth in 1915.

    Sweden in 1910 was going through some difficult transitions, which eventually led to the downfall of their monarchy. In the southern county of Malmöhus, where the Holmquists lived, deep class tensions were forming over a brewing political struggle for universal suffrage. The Malmöhus plains were incredibly fertile and dominated by large-scale farming, which required a large rural workforce. Still, the land was largely controlled by a wealthy, politically conservative landowning elite. The labor movement was making progress, but the violence and disruption from nationwide strikes threatened everyone.

    A small-scale, middle-class landlord like Anders Holmquist would have been caught between those opposing forces, with no real opportunity to move up and no desire to give up what he had. And his son, facing the same bleak outlook if he stayed in Sweden, decided to head where so many others were finding better opportunities.

    Living the American Dream

    Only two years after settling in Stillwater, Minnesota, William married Hildur Agda Leander, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, on 26 June 1912.

    After arriving in Minnesota, William worked as a carpenter until finding a job as a janitor in the Mahtomedi Public Schools during the 1920s. In 1932, he was elected as vice president of the Minneapolis public schools. As the children grew older and more independent, Hildur also found work as a custodian in the public high school.

    They raised three daughters, Ruth (b. 1915), Lillian (b. 1917), and Dorothy (b. 1923), and of course, their son, Bud Holmquist. But then the years of World War II came, and their children began to marry and leave home.

    In 1944, their youngest daughter, Dot, married Sidney Herbert Woodcock (1924–2011) and moved with him to Bremerton, Washington. William and Hildur decided to move there, too, and that’s where they lived in 1946. But in May of 1947, they lived in Seattle, where William asked Hildur for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty.

    A Full Circle

    The year after his divorce, William took a trip back to Sweden. When he returned to Seattle, he found work as a dishwasher in the restaurant of the Amherst Hotel. He probably lived off a pension from the Mathomedi schools, but worked part-time, too. In 1954, he married Ruth (Hart) Stevenson, the widow of Frederick George Stevenson (1884–1953), and in 1957, they lived in the Lorrington apartment building, where William was the manager.

    Being the manager of an apartment building where he lived seems like the exact sort of life William could have had if he had stayed in Sweden. He and Ruth were still living there in 1962, when he lost a battle with cancer and died on 26 September at age 81.

    1. Ellis Island, Overview and History; https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/overview-history/ ↩︎

  • Callan Name Study: Update for June 2026

    Callan Name Study: Update for June 2026

    The Callan Name Study keeps growing, and as it does, I intend to tell you about it. If you know of anyone with a Callan surname (no matter what spelling they used), take a look at the master list (a spreadsheet you can find here or on WikiTree) and see if I have them in the database. If not, you can add them with this form!

    What’s In a Name?

    “Why would I care about a Callan Name Study if I’m not a Callan?”

    I can’t really answer that for you. Maybe you can trace one of your ancestral lines to a woman born with a Callan surname; maybe you’ve discovered an adoptee in your line who was born a Callan. Your motivations and interests are your own.

    But one reason I’m posting these updates is that I think a lot of people out there are hesitating to dive in and run a study on their own surname. I figure if you are thinking about it, seeing the steps I take and the lessons I learn could help you get yours going.

    And if you want to practice on my Callan study before signing up to do your own, I won’t be sad!

    Visit Callan Name Study to get started.

    By Any Other Name

    Deciding what name variations count as “Callan” has been an interesting puzzle.

    The obvious variations are Callan, Callen, Callin, and Callon, and in most cases, it’s easy to see that the newer spellings were often chosen by a generation of educated siblings who were born to a generation or more of (usually) farmers who (usually) emigrated from Ireland and whose records were written down by clerks who weren’t familiar with their accents or the spellings used in the homeland. In other words, most roads lead back to people from Ireland using the spelling “Callan,” which itself is supposedly a simplified spelling of one of the older forms of the name in Gaelic.

    Deciding which spelling is “correct” often comes down to the question of how the family spelled the name on their headstones. If there are no headstones or if the family left no Bible or didn’t have a consistent spelling to use on their official documents, you may be stuck guessing which spelling they might have used.

    I did say “most roads,” and even though it’s too early for me to say much, I can see a few alternate origins emerging for a few groups of “Callan” folks.

    See more on the veracity of surnames from Elizabeth Petty Bentley over at Mission Genealogy: “What Was My Ancestor’s Surname?”

    For example, sometimes the spelling “Calen” is just a variation of “Callen” that dropped an “L” – but there is at least one family group that originated in Sweden or Norway, and took the surname from the land or township where they were living when the law regulating the use of surnames was passed.

    There are also some French and German lines that bear some resemblance to one of the Irish variations, and I don’t know yet whether that is because Irish immigrants to those lands were “localized,” or if those variations trace from another name, like Kälin. Several American “Callen” families came from Russia, and were either originally rendered as “Calinoff” or “Kalinov” or simply adopted an “American” spelling like “Calin” or “Callen” on arrival.

    I’m excited to learn more, but it will require some digging once the initial collection is done.

    Organize, Organize, Organize

    According to the advice I was able to find online before I started this endeavor, the first step in compiling a Name Study is to collect as many individual names as possible from available records.

    This means pulling together variations of the name that show up in local vital records, census records, cemetery databases, etc. The Callan One Name Study spreadsheet is where I’m trying to compile all of that information, which is why I keep sharing that link and inviting people to look through it.

    I’ve also taken some of the work I did based on the 1901 and 1911 Ireland Census for County Louth and folded it into the Ancestry tree, which can be found here:

    That took some effort, because I exported the GEDCOM from my Calln Family History tree, and then “pruned” it down from more than 19,000 names to just under 6,000, which took half of the month of May. Before and after:

    May 15
    May 31

    Barbara Tien, of Projectkin, asked whether I had considered joining the Guild of One Name Studies (GOONS), and while I’m not opposed to doing so, I haven’t seen a benefit to doing so right now. The services they offer seem like things that I will benefit from later, after I get things together and have something to publish. They seem to offer web-hosting and networking/advertising, which I will need at some point, but I’m not ready to take those steps yet.

    I did take some of the advice I’ve read about leveraging AI tools, and asked Gemini for help compiling lists from available census records, so I have a collection of spreadsheets that it was able to generate for each publicly available census in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Europe. What I don’t know is whether these are “complete” or accurate.

    Another reason I am hoping to attract more eyes to the spreadsheet – the more people I have going through it and looking for matches (to their family trees, to WikiTree, to FamilySearch, etc.), the better and more complete picture we will have of how many Callans there were in each of those censuses.

    This month promises to be busy enough to keep me away from the keyboard, so I don’t expect to make much progress until the end of the summer – but I’ll keep you posted, anyway!

  • Ahnentafel #27: Esther Anna Thompson (1908-1988)

    “What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

    What Is “Ours” to Share?

    Before I get into the substance of Esther’s story, I feel like I should address something about photographs.

    Specifically, there is an ethical grey area created by Ancestry’s end-user agreements and copyright law that makes it hard to know if or when I can share a photograph that I find on Ancestry. Genealogy is at its best when we can follow academic standards, cite our sources to stable, reliable data, and trust the provenance of the artefacts we come across, such as photographs of people or even of the things they made and/or passed down. But personal photos and artifacts rarely come with the sort of documentation that allows us to treat them with academic rigor.

    For example, I found a photograph of Esther and Don Shuffler on Ancestry. The user who uploaded the photo had a username similar to “IowaCousin123,” which makes it hard to trust that they are who they appear to be (are they in Iowa? are they a cousin?). The right thing to do before sharing that photograph here would be to reach out to that user and get their permission – except…

    • a) Ancestry’s privacy rules protect their identity. I don’t have any way to know whether they are who they say they are or whether they have any knowledge (trustworthy or otherwise) about the photo’s origins.
    • b) Under Ancestry’s copyright policy, photos and artifacts uploaded to their site belong to the user who uploaded them. But I can’t tell who originally uploaded a given photo.

    I took a chance last week and posted a found photo of Don Shuffler with his brothers, mother, and grandmother. After I did that, I found additional copies of the same photo, and others shared by several people, including this one of Don and Esther (which you might or might not be able to see, depending on Ancestry’s sharing rules):

    Ancestry Photo of Don and Esther Shuffler

    I’m not too worried about getting into trouble because I’m a small, independent publisher, not profiting from the use of these photos, and posting them for educational purposes. But I don’t want to upset anyone, either, or frighten others away from sharing, so unless I have express permission to post what I find here, I’m probably not going to do it.

    The Picture of the Midwest

    Esther Anna Thompson was the youngest of three daughters born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on 16 Jun 1908 to Danish immigrants, Thomas Christian Thomsen (1876–1951) and Lena Dagmar Jensen (1874–1952).

    Lena was born in Chicago, where her parents had married soon after immigrating, so technically, she was first-generation American, but Lena and Tom passed her middle name to their first daughter, Marion Dagmar, so I think it’s safe to assert that their family was still in close touch with their Danish heritage.

    That said, living in Iowa in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, the “Thomsen” family more often appears as the English-sounding “Thompson” in official records and newspaper references.

    The Thompson sisters grew up in Council Bluffs, and their father made a steady living as a car inspector for the railroads. They were educated in local schools, married local boys, and modeled the Midwestern middle-class lifestyle that so many people seem nostalgic for. Of course, the foundation of that middle-class lifestyle depended on the strength of the unions keeping wages high and work sites safe; high taxes paying for good schools; and the heavily subsidized railroads keeping commerce afloat. I’m sure the Thompson sisters didn’t have to think about those things, though.

    Four Weddings and a Funeral

    Esther’s eldest sister, Dagmar, born in 1901, married Hans Paulson Ranum (1896–1963) on 16 March, 1923. Hans was a recent immigrant from Denmark, arriving in New York in 1920. Hans and Dagmar had a son and a daughter, whom they raised in Council Bluffs.

    Esther, as you may know, married Don Shuffler on 4 June 1926, when both were 17 years old. Their elder daughter, Elaine, was born six months later, on 11 December 1926.

    Middle sister, Ruth, married William T Miller (1902–1935) at age 24 on 6 July 1929. They had a daughter named Bernice in 1930, but Ruth divorced William in 1932, accusing him of desertion. He died in a sanatorium in Missouri in 1935, at 33 years of age, another victim of tuberculosis.

    Ruth married Harry William Roundtree (1902–1985) on 2 December, 1936, and soon, they had a son together.

    A Quiet Life

    Clearly, life in Council Bluffs was not without its share of drama and tragedy. And yet, when we want to see our ancestors’ lives a certain way, we tend to look past those small, less fatal dramas and hold on to the nostalgia of what we think of as a better time. This is the puzzle for the family historian: finding ways to acknowledge the difficult while also capturing the welcome mundane moments in between.

    Dagmar and Hans divorced in 1945. Their son, Raymond, fought in World War II and in Korea, and served in the Naval Reserves for 40 years before retiring to teach middle school in Ventura, California. He died in 1993, leaving a wife, four children, and several grandchildren. Their daughter, Joyce, married in 1949 and moved with her husband to Washington, DC, where she worked for the government. She died in 1979 after battling cancer, also leaving behind four sons.

    Ruth’s daughter, Bernice, was adopted by her stepfather and grew up as Bernice Roundtree. She married Dick Fowler and had two daughters. Bernice was only 37 when she died in 1970. Ruth’s son, Thomas K. Roundtree, served in the U.S. Army and worked for the Council Bluffs Water Works for 40 years before retiring in 2001. He died in 2022, leaving behind two sons and a grandson, as well as several step-children.

    As for Esther and Don, their daughters married two McCullough brothers. Elaine married John Edward McCullough in 1945. They had a baby son, Earl Randolph McCullough II, who did not survive infancy. They remained together until 1959, when they divorced. Coincidentally, John’s second wife, Caroline “Kay” Taylor, was also a divorcee. Her first husband was Tom Roundtree.

    And, of course, you already know the story of their second daughter, June, who married John McCullough’s younger brother, Bob.

    The Story That Isn’t A Story

    Throughout all of this, Don and Esther seem to have remained a steady presence in Council Bluffs, as part of this extended family. When I started composing what I wanted to say about them, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of information to work with, but as I looked at their loved ones, I realized how important that role is – being a calm center and just showing up for decades on end.

    Sometimes, when a lot is going on, I forget how appealing that calm center can be.

  • Notable Callan: An Irish Physicist

    Notable Callan: An Irish Physicist

    The Callan Name Study keeps growing, and as it does, I keep finding interesting people to tell you about.

    If you know of an interesting Callan (no matter what spelling they used), take a look at the master list (a spreadsheet you can find here or on WikiTree) and see if I have them in the database. If not, you can add them with this form!

    An Electric Personality

    Nicholas Callan (1799-1864) was a boy from Dundalk in County Louth, Ireland, who became a Catholic priest and physics professor. He invented the world’s first primitive induction transformer, developed new galvanization techniques, and improved designs for large batteries while teaching at Maynooth University in County Kildare.

    Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14019393

    His WikiTree profile tells us his father’s name was Denis Callan. Catholic Church records, which usually record the Latin version of a person’s name, recorded Denis as “Dionysa” and Nicholas as “Nicholaum.” This may be useful information to factor into your searches, since we don’t always think to search for Latin spellings or Latin translations of names.

    The source cited on WikiTree describes Denis’s family as “a well-to-do family of considerable local reputation who, in addition to farming extensively, were bakers, maltsters, brewers and distillers.” There is a long tradition in European societies of families passing family assets or businesses to the first-born son and “giving” younger sons to the military or the ministry. And it appears that Nicholas had at least one older brother, Thomas, and possibly another called John, who did not enter the clergy.

    What Gets Remembered

    If you visit both of Nicholas’s profiles, on WikiTree and on Wikipedia, you quickly see how the two sites differ in the types of information they collect.

    Wikipedia has rules about notability and rules against including “original research” in its articles, which means that if I were to try to add the information I’ve found about Nicholas’s father, Denis, or any of his other siblings to his Wikipedia article, I would probably violate those rules.

    WikiTree doesn’t have the “notability” problem, in that anyone we can attach to the World Tree deserves their own profile page. And by the nature of the work we’re doing, most of our WikiTree work would be considered “original research,” because while the facts are in the sources we cite, we often draw conclusions about relationships between people that are not directly stated in those sources.

    “Articles must not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that reaches or implies a conclusion not clearly stated by the sources themselves.”

    When we find a birth record for Nicholas and then pull together additional records for his siblings by searching for the names of his parents, we’re analyzing the records and synthesizing that information to reach a conclusion. In WikiTree, that is our bread and butter; on Wikipedia, that is a poison pill.

    So, “what gets remembered” on Wikipedia is very different from what gets remembered on Wikitree. As we look at notable people on Wikipedia who belong to the Callan Name Study, you’ll see other situations where the information that belongs in one place does not belong in the other.

    Which means that we have to be mindful to put info where it belongs, and link the profiles and articles to each other so nothing gets lost.

    Who Gets Remembered

    I’m sharing Nicholas’s story today because I think that highlighting notable cousins makes the Callan Name Study seem more interesting and relevant to general readers. If the only things I said about the Name Study were “come look at this massive spreadsheet” or “come help do a bunch of work,” I doubt many of you would pay attention. And if you’re still reading, I suspect that proves the point!

    People tend to be more invested in a history project if they can see a direct connection to their own story, or if there is a chance that their family might have notable people in it. That’s not a criticism – that’s just how the brains of social primates work!

    But this presents its own set of challenges, because when we’re chasing what people tend to be interested in, we don’t always think to record things that they are less interested in. And that means that the record of a notable person, like Nicholas Callan, may not include information about his family. And the family record becomes important when our goal is to tie Nicholas – a celibate priest who had no known children – to the larger family tree.

    And remembering all of those people, or as many as we can, is the point of a Name Study.

    Your Call to Action

    If you’ve come this far, I hope you’ll feel interested and invested enough to do a little digging and take note of what needs work in Nicholas’s family. I know the WikiTree profiles for his parents and siblings need more work; see if you can find them on FamilySearch, and maybe add some sources to their WikiTree pages?

    Or maybe all of this reminds you of someone in your family tree you think of as “Notable” – maybe they are, but nobody has made a page for them, yet?

    If their surname is Callan, be sure to let me know what you find!

    Until next time, cousin…

  • Ahnentafel #26: Donald Francis Shuffler (1909-1977)

    Ahnentafel #26: Donald Francis Shuffler (1909-1977)

    “What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

    (If you noticed that this post is going out later than usual, I apologize. I had an unexpected technical failure. If you didn’t notice, then I accept your apology. Just kidding – we’re all busy.)

    As We Go Back Further…

    I find writing family history to be very different when I’m writing about people I don’t (or didn’t) know than when I’m writing about people I did (or do) know. The burden of the task shifts from an exercise in taking my perceptions and flawed memories and turning them into an interesting narrative that can be backed up with facts from documents, to the opposite task of spinning what I know about the context of the facts into a relatable story.

    It’s important that you, the audience, understand that neither story ends up being entirely “true,” because, even when I’m familiar with the person I’m writing about, I can’t possibly know all of the context. But I learned an important lesson when I wrote my own memories down and put them in a book: even I don’t know my whole story.

    So, as we go farther back along the Ahnentafel tree, the people I write about will become increasingly unfamiliar to me, and to you, and we’ll glean whatever truths we can from what we can learn about their lives.

    The Eldest Son

    Don Shuffler was born on 13 May 1909 in Pacific Junction, Mills, Iowa. He was a few months shy of his tenth birthday when his father, Frank, was killed in an accident at the railyard where he worked. In 1920, Don lived in a household with his mother, Virgie, his four younger brothers, and his grandmother, Virgie’s mom, Mary Ann Ballard.

    (You may recall reading about Frank and Virgie’s story in The Ballad of Mrs. Steele, and Mary Ann’s in Raising the Rupes.)

    As you might expect, times were hard for the Shufflers after Frank’s death. Virgie had to work to support the family, and that probably wasn’t a problem as long as her mother was there to help tend the boys. But sometime between when this photo was taken and 1925, Mary Ann moved to Oregon to live with her oldest daughter (Virgie’s sister), Florence Kim.

    The Shuffler boys: Don (center), Darrell (back, left), Dale (center, left), and Duane (front), flanked by Virgie (back, left) and Mary Ann (right); probably photographed about 1922.

    In 1925, Don (15) and Duane (9) lived with Virgie in Council Bluffs, but the two middle boys, Darrell (13) and Dale (11), resided in the IOOF children’s home in Mason City, halfway across the state. The International Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) dedicated the Orphans’ Home in 1903, and it housed both orphans and elderly residents. Sending her boys to live in another part of the state was probably difficult, but there is evidence that they were well cared for:

    Luella “Susie” BOUCK left the Iowa Odd Fellows and Orphans Home in 1930, at the age of 18. …”It was a good place to be,” said BOUCK of her early years at the home. … There were 123 children in the home when the ROSE children came. Her other siblings — Genevieve, Barney, Fred, and Dorothy — were placed in different departments, but “we were able to see each other; we were in close contact,” she said. … Unlike the Dickensian caricature painted of many orphanages of that era, the I.O.O.F. Home “was a wonderful place,” BOUCK said. … “I tell people that those were the best years of my life and I mean it,” BOUCK said.

    ~”Orphan Comes Home,” The Globe Gazette, Mason City, Iowa, published Sat. January 3, 2009; archived on IAGenWeb.

    By 1930, of course, Virgie had married Orin Steele and moved with him and her three younger sons to Cambridge, Maryland.

    And Don stayed behind, because his life was in Council Bluffs.

    An Early Start

    It’s not clear when Don Shuffler was hired to work for Pacific Fruit Express, but in 1930, he was listed as an iceman, which means he was working on the icing platforms built to cool produce as it was shipped cross-country.

    But what truly kept him in Council Bluffs was his young family. At 17, he married Esther Thompson on 4 June 1926. By the time his mother and brothers moved back East, he and Esther were the parents of two girls, Elaine Winifred (born December 1926) and June Margery (1928).

    The 1930s were hard on everyone, but Don’s steady job with PFE meant that his family was provided for during the Great Depression. Don worked for PFE for 45 years, working in both the Council Bluffs and Omaha plants. He retired in 1974, just two years before he became ill with leukemia, and three years before he died in 1977.

    Don outlived all but one of his younger brothers, Dale, who died in 1987. Their lives were in Maryland, but the impression I have is that they remained close despite the distance, probably because of their difficult beginnings.

    An Early End

    It feels like it’s too early to end Don’s story. There are bound to be stories and memories that his family can share that aren’t captured in records or newspaper items. Ending his story now feels like we’re eliding the years in between, but we should also remember that 45 years with the same company, making a full and complete life out of that career, is something that is hard to duplicate. Working for that long with the same company is almost unheard of these days, and “moving on” is often the key to success.

    And while 68 may seem very old to you, especially if you are young, it represents a longer life than many deserving people get. Don got to see his daughters grow up and meet his grandchildren. He had friends and a family who loved him.

    I may be leaving the years between his marriage and his death unexplored today, but it’s worth recognizing that he did lead a full life in those years because of his partner and his daughters.

    And we will fill in some of those years next time.

  • The Meaning of Honor

    The Meaning of Honor

    I went to vote yesterday. San Antonio’s primary runoff elections.

    I hand the poll worker my voter registration card and my ID, and she looks for the word “Veteran” on my Texas driver’s license, and says, “Thank you for your service.” I usually thank her for her service, too, because working the polls is also a civic duty that few people bother to think about.

    San Antonio bills itself as “Military City,” and whenever I buy things, at the register, they will ask me if I am a veteran/active duty/first responder, because almost every business in town has a discount or rewards program. I usually say “No,” because in order to receive the “honor” of a 5%-10% discount, I would have to register with their marketing department, which comes with the additional honor of having my personal information sold.

    And of course, there are the endless public displays of patriotism. The flags everywhere, on bumperstickers, flag lapel pins on executives, Stars & Stripes truck nuts, and yard signs/statuary/decals of soldiers or cowboys bowing their heads to a Christian cross with the command, “Honor the fallen.” A house in my neighborhood bought a covering for their garage door with that artwork – crosses, rifle planted barrel down in a grave, helmets and flags displayed, soldier on one knee – emblazoned with the slogan “Honor the Fallen, Thank the Living.”

    I find it hard to see where the “honor” is in these displays.

    The Honor We Gave

    To say that most Americans have a poor grasp of our history is like saying a mountain is tall: it is both obviously true and, because it’s rare that we can see a whole mountain from bottom to top, it is also impossible to grasp how tall it is.

    Most Americans know that we have holy days for Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and they assume that we have always had those holy days set aside to honor those who served. But in reality, both are relatively new concepts. Veterans Day was first recognized in 1954 as a holiday to commemorate service members of all of our wars, but its predecessor was Armistice Day, which recognized the end of World War I in 1918.

    Memorial Day was established in 1868 to honor the fallen on both sides of the Civil War, which, if you spend any time thinking about it at all (as my great-grandfather would have done), is not the kind of honor most people think it is. People who commit treason against their country are rarely honored alongside those who died defending the country from that treason.

    But despite strong public sentiment in favor of “supporting our troops” throughout our history, the country has rarely been eager to actually provide that support in a meaningful way.

    Pensions and land bounties were promised to attract enlistments during the Revolutionary War, and Congress passed legislation to fund additional benefits in 1818, 1820, 1822, and finally in 1832, when they made full-pay benefits available to anyone who served two years or more and removed the poverty means-testing.

    After World War I, promised benefits were slow to come, and veterans and their families turned out to protest in the Bonus Army of 1932, which was met with armed resistance and led to the shooting deaths of two veterans.

    After soldiers returned from Vietnam and began joining the anti-war movement in large numbers, treating them like traitors and ignoring their service experiences became a part of the government’s reaction to the protests, adding official neglect to the popular disapproval of the war. Even when Vietnam veterans began to receive more popular support in culture and media during the 1980s, it was framed as if the protesters were dishonoring the service of those soldiers, even when those soldiers were the ones leading the protests.

    In other words, it is common for people who have never served to pay lip service to honoring or supporting the troops – and since 9/11/2001, increasingly including first responders – while remaining fiercely ignorant of what “support” is or what “honor” actually looks like.

    To Honor Them, Have Honor

    The concept of “honor” is a broad topic full of nuance and contradictions. I don’t have time or space in this post to do a deep dive on what it means to different groups today, or what it meant to our ancestors.

    But it shouldn’t require a great deal of effort to think about what you mean when you say you want to honor someone. Usually, that kind of honor refers to respect. At a minimum, it means acknowledging that the service the person gave was given in good faith, in order to benefit everyone. That can be difficult to acknowledge, especially if you don’t believe their service was of benefit to everyone, or that it was made in good faith.

    And that’s the elephant in the room. The impolite thing that we don’t want to think about, let alone articulate.

    Because we don’t see our history in full, we see only the parts we want to see. We look at the lives of people in different times and places with curiosity and rarely apply our critical thinking skills to questions about what their actions were or what motivated them.

    We want to imagine glory and pageantry when we think about the Revolutionary War; that’s why the celebrations are so popular and large. But we don’t like to think about the grubby, human motivations of the people who took sides either against their King, or for the radical new idea that kings weren’t necessary. We don’t want to think about how badly the soldiers were treated, how badly they treated others, or how their families were ignored after their deaths.

    We don’t want to think about what the Army was doing between the wars.

    We don’t want to think about what our duties are. While we celebrate the benefits that we receive because of the events that transpired, we don’t like to think about who was harmed to get us those benefits, or what we are obligated to do to maintain them, or to make up for the harm we have done.

    And bringing any of that up is more likely to get you screamed at by someone wearing illegal American flag clothing1 than any kind of honor.

    When it comes to “honoring the troops,” it is less often about contemplating the honor of those troops, and more often about making sure everyone is acknowledging the beliefs of the person making the display. And that isn’t honor.

    An Honorable Apology

    If you feel that I’ve insulted you or called you out for behavior that you are uncomfortable acknowledging, I humbly apologize for my rudeness.

    I know that most people don’t intend to cause harm by carrying on thoughtlessly on their special day. But harm is often caused unintentionally, and if the only way to alleviate the harm is to say something, I feel obligated to say something.

    In 1994, I raised my hand and took an oath.

    I, _, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

    A lot of us took that oath. And judging by current events, few of us have revisited it, or read the document(s) we swore to support and defend. That includes the President, unfortunately, and 70 million people who cast their votes for him without considering what that would say about their honor.

    And this year, especially, when I’m at a register or otherwise thanked for my service, I’ll be thinking about what that service meant, what it accomplished, and what I still need to do to make it right.

    All I ask is that you think, too.

    1. The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general. 4 USC, Ch. 1 ↩︎

  • Ahnentafel #25: Mary Elora Blom (1886-1965)

    Ahnentafel #25: Mary Elora Blom (1886-1965)

    “What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

    TW: Part of this post deals with several tragic deaths, including a mention of suicide.

    A Story of Strength

    Our brains are full of shortcuts.

    Some of these are biases we are taught by others. We carry some because when we were small, we observed the world around us, and those observations shaped us. Some of these shortcuts are “wired” into our brains from birth: behaviors we don’t think about unless we are forced to.

    While some of these cognitive tricks can be explained as survival traits honed by evolution to help us quickly assess whether something rustling in the bushes is food or a predator, we tend to use them today to make snap judgments. Then we spend the time we would have been using to flee or to attack trying to justify our own hasty conclusions with confirmation bias and post-hoc rationalization.

    All of that is to say that I made two different hasty judgments about Mary McCullough at two different times, and neither is based on solid evidence.

    The first time I studied this family, I only knew her name and that there wasn’t much information about her available. My first impression was based on that lack of information, and I came away thinking of her as vaguely insubstantial. Elusive. Unknowable.

    Later, when I had more experience and took more time to dig, my impression changed to that of a strong woman at the center of two large families.

    So which version is true?

    A Child of Immigrants

    Mary Elora Blom was the oldest of five daughters born in 1886 to Bernard and Ida (Slight) Blom. They lived in Ackley, Iowa, where Bernard (known as “Barney”) worked as a carpenter and cabinet maker. Barney was born in the Netherlands, and his family settled in the United States around 1871. Ida was born in Ackley, but her parents were born in the German state of Prussia and had met and married in Illinois after immigrating with their families in the 1850s.

    Unlike the poor treatment faced by Eastern European or Irish immigrants in the 19th century, the German Lutherans and the Dutch Calvinists were respected for their tight-knit, well-organized communities and their general work ethic. The German communities often formed local groups to help newly arrived families learn English and assimilate into their new country.

    Mary’s sisters, Florence (born 1888) and Alice (1890), had survived at least one tragedy in 1893, when a fourth sister, Carrie, died at eleven months of age. Barney and Ida had one more daughter, whom they named Johanna, in 1900. They called her Jennie when she was little, but by the time she was 9 years old, “Jennie” had changed her name to Edith, and when she was old enough to insist on the spelling, “Edythe.”

    When Mary married Earl McCullough in 1906, she was 19 years old and a graduate of the local school. Considering that her two maternal aunts, Anna Brinkman and Hilke Muller, lived in Ackley with their substantial population of cousins, and her paternal aunts and uncles mostly lived in Iowa, too, it’s easy to imagine that she didn’t want to leave her family behind.

    I suspect that since Ackley was not a railroad town, Fort Dodge was a compromise between Earl’s hometown and her own. But she moved the 70 miles or so to a new town and started her life there with Earl.

    When Family Is Lost

    If you read Earl’s post, you know that in their first ten years together, Earl and Mary had two sons, Harry (1908) and Elbridge (1912), and then two daughters, Helen (1915) and Caroline (1917). Helen died at age two in February 1918, probably a victim of the Spanish Flu. But Helen’s death was not the first tragedy to hit Mary’s side of the family.

    Those years were difficult ones for the Bloms. First, Mary’s sister, Anna Brinkman, died in September 1915 at only 53 years of age. Then, in 1916, Mary’s widowed grandmother, Anna Marie Blom, died in a house fire at 85 years of age.1 Two months later, Mary’s uncle George, who seems to have blamed himself for his mother’s death, committed suicide near the site of the fire.2 The following May, Mary lost her father in a tree-trimming accident:

    While trimming a tree on Fred Trainer’s lawn, on Saturday, May 12, Mr. Blom was in the act of shifting his position, when the limb he was sawing broke down, and, coming in contact with a dead branch near, the limb turned and struck him in the abdomen. He sank into the crotch of the two remaining limbs of the tree, stunned by the force of the blow. Succeeding, a few minutes later, in climbing down the ladder, he finally reached home and Dr. Miller was called to give medical assistance. The case was so serious that the patient was kept under the influence of anesthetics to alleviate his suffering. The first glimmering hope of the family for his speedy restoration to health and strength soon vanished, especially as the patient could take no nourishment. Wednesday morning found him visibly worse. He was removed to the Miller hospital. A partial examination and operation were, however, that gangrene of the phlegmating, and he died in the faint hope that had centred about this last resort died away. … He died May 19, 1917, at the age of 55 years, 10 months and 16 days. (Ackley World Journal, 24 May 1917)

    All of these losses would seem too much in normal times, but these were also the years of the First World War, and when seen against the backdrop of those events, these three years must have taken a toll. But Mary and her family carried on, and the 1920s seemed much happier in contrast.

    Filling In Gaps

    We can see the evidence of these events, and we know how people usually respond to these kinds of tragedies. But I can only guess at how the McCullough family weathered them. I can form an impression of what Earl’s and Mary’s personalities might have been like, because I know some of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I have some idea what they are like.

    But I don’t know how Mary and her family related to each other or how they dealt with these events. Were they stoic in the face of grief, carrying on with the business of life? Did they bottle up their emotions, or did they spend more time with the rest of their family, sharing stories and talking about their loss?

    I suspect the answer depends on factors that never show up in records. Even when I find a heartfelt obituary or expression of sympathy in a newspaper, I don’t usually know who wrote it. Or, if I do know that, I know that it was written by a pastor or social organization, and may not be an accurate reflection.

    What we do know is that Earl and Mary raised their family through the 1920s and the Great Depression, saw their grandchildren grow up, and lived into the 1960s. Earl was 80 when he died in 1961, and Mary was 79 when she died in 1965.

    As for the details that live between those dates, they kept those to themselves.

    1. Evening Times-Republican, “Mrs. Bernard Blom Cremated In Her Own Home,” Marshalltown, Iowa, Mon, Mar 6, 1916, Page 5 ↩︎
    2. Evening Times-Republican, “Blom Ends Own Life,” Marshalltown, Iowa, Mon, May 8, 1916, Page 4 ↩︎

  • Callan Name Study: Update for May 2026

    Callan Name Study: Update for May 2026

    “Fumbling Towards Methodology”

    or

    “How I Hoped to Save YOU Time By Wasting My Own”

    What Am I Doing?

    Big Picture: I’m trying to gather whatever information I can about people who bore a variation of the Callan surname. Callan is the most widespread, modern form, but we’ve seen every imaginable spelling. (None of them is “wrong” – all of them fall under the “Callan” umbrella.)

    My selfish end-goal is to figure out how to find the ancestors of James “1st” Callin, the man from whom everyone in The Callin Family History descended. But if I’m going to make a big pile of data, I want it to benefit others.

    My larger goal for this One Name Study (heretofore, “ONS”) is to find as many unrelated groups of Callan folks as I can, and “make it make sense.” The resulting database should help people map their Y-DNA test results and track their paternal Callan line. Right now, everything’s still a mess, but eventually, if someone wants to use my data, they should be able to:

    • Access the Callan Name Study on Ancestry
    • access the spreadsheet
    • ask for a GEDCOM file for the Callan Name Study

    I know that others before me have tried. At least one of them (Hi, Stan!) has been doing a lot of good work to corral researchers and DNA tests – but I’m still in an experimental phase, trying to figure out the best way(s) to do what I want to do in the most collaborative way possible, which, if I came to them without a full plan, would be way too disruptive a process to impose on the manager of an existing effort (not to mention too restrictive on me).

    Rather than horn in on an established study and force the manager to deal with me and my million questions and suggestions, I decided to …do this instead.

    I’m still in the middle of the “start-up” phase, so this may not be very coherent yet, but I want to get in the habit of providing updates.

    How Am I Doing This?

    The “How” may change as I learn better ways of going about this, but for now, here’s the cycle I’m using:

    1. WikiTree – This is where I intend for all the information I gather to end up. It is a web-based, collaborative platform that anyone can access for free. It is also one of my three “starting points” for finding existing information, which I collect on an…
    2. Online spreadsheet – I used a Tree App to export spreadsheet files from WikiTree for each spelling of the Callan surname and combined them into one sheet. This allows me to coordinate between WikiTree and the other platforms I’m using to run this study, mainly…
    3. FamilySearch – Also a free, web-based, collaborative platform, and one that gives users access to online source records. There is an app for finding the FamilySearch profile for people on WikiTree, but so far, I have been searching manually and recording the profile ID on the Spreadsheet.
    4. RootsMagic – I built a “Callan Name Study” file in RootsMagic, and as I find family clusters on FamilySearch, I import them into RootsMagic.
    5. Ancestry – Once a family is in RootsMagic, I can sync that to my Ancestry account so I can work where I am most comfortable, finding sources and connecting trees.

    There are two main “workflows” I’m experimenting with:

    From WikiTree to Ancestry:

    1. Find a WikiTree profile (ie, Callon-95)
    2. Match the person in that profile to a profile on FamilySearch (in this case, 2MB1-QRH)
    3. Import 2MB1-QRH and his ancestors/descendants into RootsMagic
    4. Prune: I’m trying to limit this Study to people born with a “Callan” surname (or spelling variants) – so I remove anyone who falls outside the Study before syncing with Ancestry.
    5. Sync the RootsMagic tree to the Callan Name Study Ancestry tree.

    Once I have a family group in all three places (WikiTree, FamilySearch, and Ancestry), I can use the spreadsheet to keep track of what needs to be done for each individual. This will be the most fluid/non-linear and time-consuming part of the process.

    From Ancestry to WikiTree:

    1. Each family group needs to be thoroughly examined and sourced on Ancestry and FamilySearch, syncing between them and RootsMagic as I go.
    2. Once the documentary evidence is as good as we can expect it to be, either the existing WikiTree profile should be improved, or a WikiTree profile should be created for each person (with appropriate categories, etc)

    I’m still learning what works best for sending information from one platform to another, and I hope to find reliable ways to automate more of these tasks. I expect that I’ll spend the time I schedule for the ONS working through the spreadsheet and figuring out the most efficient ways to get all three online profiles (Ancestry, FamilySearch, and WikiTree) to agree with each other.

    Once a person is well-documented on FamilySearch, it can be relatively easy to use the WikiTree Sourcer App to generate a source list and create a WikiTree profile. Getting source information from Ancestry or other platforms, into RootsMagic, and then into FamilySearch is something I’m exploring this month. RootsMagic is key to this because of its tools for cleaning up Placenames, finding duplicates, and

    Do You Want In On This?

    Right now, this is a one-man operation, but there is plenty of work to be done, so I won’t turn down help. If you’d like to volunteer, I’m looking for people who are already comfortable using at least one or two of the tools I listed above.

    I have made the “Callan Name Study” tree on Ancestry public, and I can add Editors who would like to help source profiles and build trees along the Callan lines. (There will probably need to be some kind of application for that.)

    If you prefer FamilySearch, I could use help matching WikiTree profiles to FamilySearch profiles, and generally improving the FamilySearch profiles (adding source records, merging duplicates, etc.)

    And if you are a paid MyHeritage member, I am not, so I would welcome your insights on working that platform into the plan. If you have a favorite service and want to participate, let’s talk!

    Since I’m still figuring things out, I don’t have a lot of time or energy to offer mentorship, training, or guidance, but if you’ve been wanting to learn how to do an ONS for your surname, we can try to figure things out together.

    FAQ: Including those I ask myself

    “Have you considered using AI tools?” – Yes, but also no. The Sourcer app on WikiTree is automated, but I don’t think it counts as “AI”.

    What most people are calling “AI” is usually a large language model (LLM) that isn’t as good at dealing with unstructured data or the random human elements that make genealogy difficult. There is also a moral dimension to consider, as almost all of the large corporations rushing to push their immature tech into every aspect of our lives are doing so without regard for local economies or ecologies. Find me a tool that is capable of actually helping me reach my goals without harming its neighbors, stealing from artists, or enabling warfare, and I’ll consider it.

    “Is this project only for people with the Callan surname?” Yes, but no. If you want to be included because you are descended from a Callan, you are welcome, regardless of your surname. I stand by the notion that you are just as much a Callan as I am, if you’re a descendant. And we should make sure your connection is documented in WikiTree and FamilySearch.

    That said, I’m only including people with a Callan surname on the spreadsheet and in the Ancestry tree, because without that limitation, this project can quickly get out of hand. (I’ve already had to “prune” several thousand people who had no direct relationship to a Callan, starting with my extensive maternal side!)

    Relevant Links

    If you find a Callan profile on FamilySearch or WikiTree (or build one) and they aren’t on the spreadsheet, you can have them added using this Callan Name Study submission form.

  • Ahnentafel #24: Earl Randolph McCullough (1881-1961)

    Ahnentafel #24: Earl Randolph McCullough (1881-1961)

    “What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

    Heartland, Industrialized

    The first generation of people born after the Civil War were people who saw America becoming an economic powerhouse and growing into a world power. Once the transcontinental railroads were completed, getting goods from rural areas to urban hubs became so much easier that it would have been difficult to stop that transformation. Scratching a living out of a plot of land in the center of our continent was replaced as the pinnacle of achievement in the public imagination by the real possibility of reaching a worldwide market to sell whatever you could make, and the wealth that could be made in a factory overthrew the old notions of wealth that were tied to the land.

    That’s why historians call it the Industrial Revolution. And it happens to be part of Earl McCullough’s story.

    There is an irresistible urge in every human to compare their life, familiar and tedious, with that of another, different and strange, and imagine that whatever that other person has is better.

    Many of us spend time on genealogy because it lets us imagine a better life in the past. Studying the lives of our ancestors allows us to build a fantasy of a time when the world was simpler, slower, easier to understand, and free of the baggage, boredom, and stress of our modern world. We sit at desks doing post-industrial jobs that feel pointless and unfulfilling, and imagine that the lives our ancestors led were better, that they had answers we have lost, that they carried wisdom we should have embraced when we were younger.

    But we forget that each generation of our ancestry was made up of people who were also looking for something better, and part of figuring out their story is figuring out what their life was better than.

    The End of an Old Century

    Earl Randolph McCullough was born to an Iowa farm family in Missouri Valley on 30 October 1881.

    Our idealized, modern image of what farm life was like probably bears little resemblance to what Earl would have seen. Farm work supported the McCullough family, but farmers generally absorbed the worst shocks of the “boom and bust” economic cycles that came along with industrial growth. Good years probably outnumbered bad ones, and the farm kept the family from starving, but when the rest of the world is exploding with opportunity, there doesn’t seem to be much future in life on a farm.

    Missouri Valley, Iowa, 1905

    This is the world Earl saw in 1905. This is where he found a job in the rail yard, where he would begin a career as a signal maintainer. The next year, he would marry the daughter of a Dutch immigrant from Ackley, another farm town in the middle of Iowa. He married Mary Blom and they moved to Fort Dodge, where they began raising their family.

    In their first ten years, Earl and Mary had two sons, Harry (1908) and Elbridge (1912), and then two daughter, Helen (1915) and Caroline (1917). Helen died at age two, in February 1918, probably a victim of the Spanish Flu.

    Earl and Mary lived with their young family at 1123 Ave. B in Fort Dodge during the First World War. A family man in his mid-30s would have been “too old” to go fight, but Earl played his part. As we learned from The Ballad of Mrs. Steele, keeping the railroads running despite pulling a significant number of young men out of the labor pool to go fight was an important part of the war effort.

    But if people like Earl held any romantic notions about the great industrial machines they worked on and the corporations that owned them, the events of the War should have brought them back to reality. The dangers and company abuses drove the rise of labor unions, and the stories coming back from the trenches showed the dark side of mechanization when it was applied to killing soldiers.

    A New Beginning

    I may be reading too much into a gap between children’s birth dates, but I suspect that the stress and uncertainty of the war years had something to do with the four year gap between the death of Helen in 1918 and the birth of Earlene in 1922. Two years later, John was born, and two years after that: twins!

    Sadly, the twins, Bernice and Bernard, were born prematurely and did not survive. Bernard only lived 1 month and 23 days, and his death was attributed to “malnutrition, 4th degree,” which suggests the damage happened before he was born, and the treatment available in 1927 could not save him. Bernice lived for another couple of months before she succumbed to pneumonia.

    Again, I may be making assumptions, but I think the facts suggest that Earl and Mary soothed their grief over the loss of the twins by having one more baby. Bernice died in February, and eight months later, their youngest son, Robert Lee McCullough was born.

    The Golden Years

    Earl worked steadily for the railroads until about 1940, when he retired and began listing his occupation as “traveling mechanic”. By 1941, he and Mary had moved from Fort Dodge to Council Bluffs, on the Iowa side of the Mississippi River, across from Omaha. Most of their children and grandchildren lived there, so that’s where they wanted to be.

    And that’s the dream that so many of us still hold out hope for: that someday, we can set down our tools and have enough to live near those we love.

    Mary and Earl, 50th Wedding Anniversary in 1956; The Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, IA, 25 Mar 1956

    After living through one world war, Earl and Mary must have been horrified to see a second one. But while their two youngest sons did serve in the military (John, in the new “Air Force” and Bob in the Navy), their service did not cost them what it did so many other families.

    And just as Earl had benefited from a post-war boom at the beginning of his life, his final decade saw another post-war boom that placed the United States at the top of the international power structure. As far as objective reality is concerned, his life, like any life, was full of victories and defeats. But for Earl, there was a definite arc to his story, taking a poor farm boy through a career working around trains, and ending up in a comfortable, modern town, surrounded by children and grandchildren.

    It’s almost enough to make nostalgia a tangible thing.