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.
  • Eating the Elephant

    Eating the Elephant

    An update on the Callan Name Study

    They say the only way to eat an elephant is “one bite at a time,” but there is also a pretty good story out there about the blind wise men trying to describe the elephant. That’s about where I am in this project.

    How to Describe an Elephant

    To do a comprehensive study of a surname, you have to cast a wide net and find out about all of the variants of that name, where they came from, and who made up the population of people using that surname.

    Most of the people I have found so far are Irish folks who spelled the name “Callan.” (“This elephant is like a wall,” said the monk who felt the elephant’s broad side.)

    There are also many Scottish records for people with several variations of the name, usually “Callan,” but also “Callen,” “Callin,” and “Callon.” (“This elephant is like the trunk of a tree,” said the monk who felt the elephant’s leg.)

    Of course, a large number of Callan folks emigrated to the Americas and Australia, using all of the possible spellings. (“This elephant is rather like a snake,” said the monk who felt the long, flexible trunk.)

    Naturally, the surname pops up in small numbers in Finland, Sweden, and Germany, usually as “Calen” or “Calin,” to keep us guessing. (“This elephant seems to be very like a rope,” said the monk who caught the tail.)

    There is also an African-American population that carries the name, but we must be mindful of the dark history of how and why they carry the name and, in some cases, the DNA. These cousins deserve some respect for the painful history they carry. (“This elephant is like a saber!” cried the monk who felt the hard, curved tusk.)

    This Elephant Is Like a Spreadsheet

    Actually, the elephant I’m compiling is a spreadsheet. You should be able to explore it at this link, if you’re interested.

    The first tab (bottom-left) is called “WikiTree links,” and I pulled the data from WikiTree using the One Name Trees app I talked about briefly in “Harmonizing With WikiTree.” I’ve begun the process of harmonizing by adding columns for FamilySearch profiles and Ancestry pages, and I’m adding links as I find them.

    The “Scotland pre-1855” tab may prove to be a failed experiment – I ran queries on Scotlands People (https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/) for “Callan” with the “fuzzy search” parameter, and I ran it across the Church registers for births, marriages, and deaths, hoping that I could find a way to match records belonging to the same person using the spreadsheet’s sort and find functions. Despite nearly 2500 lines, I’ve barely been able to match anyone.

    I’ve also got the “Louth c. 1910” tab, for residents of County Louth who appeared in the 1901 and 1911 Ireland census records. Those for whom I’ve found WikiTree profiles are already in the “WikiTree links” tab, as well.

    And that last tab, “Early Americans,” has proven to be the most elusive, since “early” is in the eye of the beholder, and I haven’t found a good way to pull comprehensive data out of Ancestry.

    What I’ve Learned

    The most exciting discovery was the One Name Tree app, which gives me a pretty solid understanding of what is in WikiTree. As I match WikiTree and FamilySearch profiles, I should be able to start categorizing the WikiTree pages so I can take advantage of some of the Connectathon events and Projects that already exist and have a lot of participants.

    For example, I know there are several profiles connected to Asberry Piner Callen in Kentucky:

    Callen, Asberry Piner1833-10-001903-10-16LC37-YZBCallen-415Atwood, Kenton, Kentucky

    I’ve got links to an Ancestry profile, a FamilySearch profile, and a WikiTree profile here, so if I added Categories to the WikiTree page for the Kentucky Project that indicated which profiles “Need improvement” or “Need family profiles made,” that would help their project members find these pages that could use their attention. And, if they need sources, they may be able to find some already on the other linked pages.

    Another family I found using the One Name Tree app was centered on this man:

    Callen, Alexander1900-11-021982-01-00GTKG-M3BCallen-391Virginia, United States

    This is an African-American family, and so far, they don’t appear to be connected to the World Tree. This would be a good starting point for someone looking to help out with the US Black Heritage Project.

    How You Can Help

    If you have any experience running a Name Study, any advice would be helpful. I feel like there is a lot of preparation and organization left to be done before I will be comfortable reaching out to ask folks in overlapping projects for help, but that may be precisely what I should do!

    I still need to figure out how the work I’m doing can benefit the other, existing Name Studies I found:

    The Guild of One-Name Studies has a Callan project with about 50 names listed. And Stan Courtney, who manages the Callan DNA study on FTDNA, maintains a Callan – Earliest Known Ancestors database, both at that link and on Ancestry. Callan households in Louth gives a pretty cool overview of the available data.

    The important thing, I guess, is that there is progress, and I’m enjoying the work. And that is all I could really hope for.

  • Ahnentafel #14: Bud Holmquist (1920-1996)

    Ahnentafel #14: Bud Holmquist (1920-1996)

    My wife’s maternal grandfather was many things: a wartime pilot, a suave businessman, and a notorious interstate stick-up man. He was handsome and charming, the son of Swedish immigrants, and until he was convicted and sent to prison, his was the kind of success story people remember from the 1950s.

    There is probably a lesson to be learned from that story.

    Growing Up in Lake Wobegon

    For some 30 years on public radio, Garrison Keillor would tell stories about a fictional “hometown, out there on the edge of the prairie,” ending each week by saying, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

    Mahtomedi, Minnesota, where Bud Holmquist was born, sits about 20 minutes northeast of the state capital, St. Paul, and calls itself “A Very Large Town City.” It is about 10 times larger now than in 1940, so one has to wonder whether stories like Keillor’s Lake Wobegon tales might not have resonated on the shores of White Bear Lake, where the Holmquists kept their home.

    Christmas in Mahtomedi – Bud is in the center/back.

    Bud’s full name was Arvid Wesley Holmquist, and he was born in Mahtomedi on 6 September 1920. He grew up with two older sisters, Ruth and Lillian, and a younger sister, Dorothy. Their father, Arvid William, was a custodian in the public schools. He had immigrated from Sweden when he was in his late twenties, and became a naturalized citizen in 1921.

    As Bud was William’s only son, we can imagine how proud he was when the young man landed an engineering job, which sent him to Iran for a year in 1942. When he came back from his year abroad, Bud married Merilyn Martin, the daughter of Howard Martin, a prominent businessman in Omaha. They were married in February 1943, and soon after, Bud was inducted into the air corps at Fort Snelling.1

    Down In Flames

    By all accounts, Bud enjoyed the adventure of being a pilot in the war. Afterward, he came home with prospects. He went to work for his father-in-law and was a successful salesman. He and Merilyn had two daughters, and by the end of 1950, one might think he had attained the American Dream.

    The story, as it was handed down to me, is that his girls wanted for nothing. Pretty dresses, expensive toys, including a child-sized car with a working gasoline motor for them to drive around! But by 1959, something gave way. In May 1961, newspapers across the Midwest reported the capture of the “Executive Bandit”2:

    Omaha (AP)–Arvid Wesley Holmquist, a 40-year-old salesman who told police he gave up a $13,000 a year job [about $144,796.77 in 2026] to become a bandit, was arrested Sunday as he sipped coffee in an Omaha restaurant.

    Police said he made statements about a dozen holdups in 7 states, including one Lincoln stickup. The loot ranged from $45 to $26,000. The biggest take, Holmquist told police, was in his first holdup at the Younkers-Davidson Department Store in Sioux City, Iowa [on September 29, 1959].

    The victims of the robberies listed had described the bandit as a calm, executive type.

    He said his formula was to wear a business suit and walk slowly, adding: “I always dressed good. If you want to be a stickup man, don’t wear a black leather jacket.”

    Referring to his formula, he said in the Sioux City holdup, he was walking out of the store with most of the day’s receipts in a bulging satchel and an employee opened the door for him.

    Bud admitted to about a dozen holdups he committed in seven states in 1960 and 1961:

    • Kilpatrick’s Store, Omaha, April 21, 1960, $1,900
    • Interstate Finance Co., Omaha, Aug. 1, 1960, $1,000
    • American Loan Co., Omaha, Sept. 19, 1960, about $100
    • Murphy Finance Co., Lincoln, Aug. 23, 1960, $1,700
    • Murphy Finance Co., Wichita, Kan., fall 1960, $200
    • Interstate Finance Co., North Kansas City, fall 1960, $200
    • Dial Finance Co., St. Joseph, Mo., April 1961, $850
    • A finance company in Rock Island, Ill., in the fall of 1960
    • A finance company in Phoenix, Ariz., in March 1961

    In total, Bud stole about $35,000, equivalent to about $389,837 today. “Asked what he did with the money, he replied, ‘I was trying to drown everything that happened.’ He added that he bought some race horses and did ‘quite a bit’ of betting.”

    I had always been told that his arrest ended his marriage, but the newspapers suggest that things happened the other way around. According to Bud, he was working as a salesman for an Oshkosh, Wis., clothing firm when he “got disgusted…. I gave up working…There was a divorce coming up. I didn’t care what happened and had a rather negative attitude at the time.” By the time he was arrested, he was living in a residential hotel, and said, “I was almost hoping I’d get caught and get it over with.” Detectives said he had $20.01 on his person when he was arrested.

    Paying the Cost

    Bud pleaded guilty to all of his crimes. He was sentenced to nine years by the Douglas County District Court on 25 May 1961, and the Lancaster County District Court sentenced him to another 11 years on 12 September. In 1965, newspapers reported that he was being considered for “commutation to detainer,” which meant that he could be given clemency in Nebraska, only to answer to other jurisdictions. Authorities wanted him in Phoenix, Arizona, and Wichita, Kansas.

    It’s hard to know when he was released from prison, but there is a 1974 divorce record for an Arvid W. Holmquist in Orange County, California, that might be him. Clark County, Nevada, records from 1979 and 1982 suggest that he was married to Hallie Harp for three years, and public records show him at a Las Vegas address in 1991.

    Bud Holmquist died in Las Vegas on 10 August 1996. He is buried in Union Cemetery in Maplewood, Ramsey County, Minnesota.

    As far as I know, he had no contact with his family, even though his sisters, Lil and Dot, outlived him until 2004 and 2008, respectively. I do know that his wife and daughters never forgave him.

    But that isn’t my story to tell.

    1. The Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, Iowa; Sun, Feb 14, 1943, Page 11. ↩︎
    2. Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, Iowa; Monday, May 15, 1961, Page:1. ↩︎

  • HAMP: Harmonizing with WikiTree

    HAMP: Harmonizing with WikiTree

    part of a series, “Harmonizing Across Multiple Platforms“

    When we last talked about harmonizing our research efforts using multiple online platforms, I said I would talk next about “why-to” use WikiTree. That was last summer, and since then, WikiTree and Family Tree DNA (ftdna.com) have partnered up so that users can connect their WikiTree accounts to their FTDNA accounts more easily, and I’ve been waiting to see how that works.

    I’m still not sure what I have to say about the FTDNA-WikiTree partnership, but a few months have passed, so let’s take a look at some of the other ways WikiTree might fit into your overall strategy of guiding and preserving your family history research.

    Why It Is Free

    WikiTree is 100% free to sign up for and to use. As their internal Help pages explain, they use ads that display to non-members to support the costs of running the platform, and they rely on volunteers to develop data analysis apps, to mentor each other, or to run the various Projects that seek to improve the information on the platform.

    Unlike other free services we’ve already talked about (Find-a-Grave and FamilySearch.org) WikiTree does not give you direct access to any records. What you do get is access to two halves of a single, collaborative family tree: the “wiki” and the “g2g” (short for “Genealogist to Genealogist”).

    G2G is a forum for asking questions, finding help, volunteering to help, and coordinating on Projects. When you first sign up for a WikiTree account, you should receive emails with instructions for finding the introductory tutorials on using the forum and the wiki.

    When you reach out for help with a question, or guidance on how to do something, just keep in mind that with an all-volunteer workforce, it can take some time to get a response – and sometimes the response will be “I don’t know that, either – let me help you figure it out.” In this case, the “cost” of a free platform is that you need to be a little more patient and be prepared to deal with Other People.

    One World Tree

    The “killer app” at the heart of WikiTree is the wiki – a single tree for all users, highly flexible, and editable by everyone. (We talked before about how scary “editable by everyone” can be in the first HAMP post.) Like the World Tree on FamilySearch, the goal is to have a single page (a “profile”) for every individual, instead of countless separate trees with conflicting or unsupported information. Privacy rules are in place to protect the profiles of living people and the recently deceased.

    Some people find the wiki markup language and editing features easy; others, less so. This is where the G2G forum and various Projects can come in handy: that’s where you can ask questions and learn.

    And there is a LOT to learn. But the cornerstone is the “Biography” section of each profile. That is where you should be putting your standard narrative paragraphs and source citations. When you sign up for your free account, you get your own profile, which is an ideal place to practice. Since you control your own privacy settings, no one has to see how many times you have to rewrite your own story, or how many tries it takes for you to learn how to format your citations!

    Once you have the basics of editing a profile down, you can move on to either finding or creating profiles for your family. Building out “My Sixteen” was an early goal for me. That meant creating or linking to 31 profiles (me, my “Great 28,” plus “My Sixteen”), and usually, by the time you’ve done that, you should have at least one ancestor linked to an existing WikiTree profile – connecting you to that One World Tree.

    Welcome to the Rabbit Hole

    From there, you can really start to take advantage of some of the interesting data analysis apps developed by enthusiasts around the world.

    This is probably the app most people have come in contact with – plug in your profile handle (mine is “Callin-50”) and any other profile on WikiTree, and the app will figure out how you are connected to each other. If you sign up for the weekly email from WikiTree, or for Watchlist notifications, they will include links based on a theme of the week (themes like “Famous TV stars” or “Founding Fathers’), but you can try this any time on the Connection Finder page.

    I’m only 20 degrees from Kevin Bacon – but I’m no movie star!

    Probably the most useful app – once installed into your web browser, you can use it to create an inline citation for (almost) any source record you care to put in a biography. For example, if you see a source in FamilySearch, follow the link to the record page, create the citation, and paste it into your biography. For most sources on free sites, it should create links to the record and, in most cases, to the image of the record, making your WikiTree page more useful.

    Note: you always want to proofread the output of any app like this. You may have formatting preferences different from the app developers, or you may need to add details (like page numbers) that the app can miss.

    • One Name Trees

    This one is fun for the data analysis piece of your favorite One Name Study.

    You can find it by clicking the pulldown menu from your name on your profile page, opening the Tree Apps page, and clicking the pulldown in the “Tree Apps” box – “ONE NAME TREES” is alphabetically sorted, about halfway down the list.

    I needed a way to access all of the profiles for the surname variations in the Callan Name Study, and this app allowed me to export them to a spreadsheet (using the “Sheet” button).

    The Magic of Harmonizing

    As with all of these family history tools, your mileage may vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish. WikiTree has become, for me, an End Goal – once I have done what I can to pull together the evidence to support what the Biographies and Profile connections claim, WikiTree is where the “finished” work resides.

    I see it as the anchor point for what I can do with all of the other sites and tools.

    And, of course, for people like us, it can be a lot of fun!

  • Ahnentafel #13: June Shuffler (1928-2010)

    Ahnentafel #13: June Shuffler (1928-2010)

    My wife’s paternal grandmother, June (Shuffler) McCullough, was the youngest of her four grandparents, and the last one to leave us. My wife inherited Grandma June’s “oatmeal butterscotchies” cookie recipe; our son inherited Grandma June’s eyes; and our youngest inherited her name. Someday, I expect, one of our descendants will inherit her fiery red hair.

    You may have heard of “Midwest nice,” but June was, by all accounts, “Midwest kind,” too. When her kids share memories of her, they revolve around the way she worked hard to raise them, especially the loss of Bob McCullough in 1983. Her grand-kids speak of her warm kitchen, her playfulness, and her welcoming nature.

    Much of what I know sounds like a stereotype of the Midwestern Lutheran church lady: the elongated “O”s in her speech, the inventive casseroles designed to stretch a budget, the warm kitchen always full of treats. These are the qualities that make impressions, but rarely find their way into family histories. Unless someone writes them down.

    A Child of Wartime

    Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1928, she and her older sister, Elaine, grew up there. Her family were members of Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church, where June was confirmed at age 13 in 1942. Her four years at Thomas Jefferson High School were bracketed by the beginning and ending of the Second World War.

    June and Elaine had no other siblings, and they grew up only knowing their mother’s side of the family. Their father, Don Shuffler, was the oldest of four brothers, and the only one who stayed in Iowa when their mother remarried and moved to Maryland. (You may recall The Ballad of Mrs. Steele talked about that family.)

    On the surface, it might appear that June’s family wasn’t touched by the war in the same way that others were. And it is true that none of the men in her family were of an age to serve in the military; but when your family is small and you are part of a large community, the parade of classmates who graduated and enlisted, the older brothers and younger uncles who never came back, has to make an impression.

    And it is evident that those years taught those who stayed behind how to cheerfully adapt and overcome whatever hardship came their way.

    The Hardship Heritage

    One of the hardest things to know about our ancestors is “how much did they know about their family history?”

    It is easy to look at the eight people in my grandparents’ generation and see that they were all impacted by the Great Depression and the Second World War. To us, looking back, they were living through history; but to them, they were just living. And the stories they knew about their grandparents gave them a sense that those were the people “living through history.”

    June and Elaine knew their Danish immigrant grandparents, Tom and Lena Thompson, and their aunt Dagmar. Their grandmother, Virgie Steele, probably visited, and their father probably remembered the loss of his father, Frank Shuffler, in a rail yard accident during World War I. But how much did they know about earlier generations?

    Did they know about the drama their Ballard great-grandparents went through, or about the Rupes1? Did they know about their Quaker heritage2, or the Shufflers who settled the Midwest before the Civil War? I know from talking to June and her kids that they recognized the name “Tiny Shuffler,” but did they know who Valentine Shuffler was3?

    We are all made up of the stories we know about those who came before us. But we never really know for sure how those stories shaped us.

    The Life Lived

    When we write biographies for WikiTree, or for our blogs, we display a bias for those stories that are unusual, or tied to specific historical events. It’s hard to write about a “normal life” (a phenomenon that disappears under scrutiny, I find) in an interesting way.

    We know facts about June and Bob McCullough from the Census, from city directories, from mentions in local newspapers. We know the impressions they left on their families. And we know scattered facts about things they did, though we don’t tend to think of those as “stories” the way we probably should.

    Take these two sentences from June’s obituary:

    “She was very involved with her church, Faith Lutheran Church, where she was active in choir and the guitar choir, Bible study, and she also helped clean. She also served Meals on Wheels.”

    She sang, she played guitar, and she was active in her church in a way that focused on helping others. That’s a story that struggles to break through our biases towards drama.

    As we continue to move up the Ahnentafel tree, this struggle becomes more and more difficult. As we move back in time, the obituaries, if there are any, will leave out “domestic” details and hobbies, especially of women. In a couple of generations, we’ll be lucky to know their names, let alone what they were like, or how they behaved.

    Hopefully, in the future, our descendants still have some sense of what it meant to bake cookies for grandkids and spend your retirement bringing food to your neighbors. And maybe as we study our past, we can find ways to remember and celebrate the ordinary lives of those who didn’t get lengthy hagiographies printed about them.

    1. See “Raising the Rupes” for those stories. ↩︎
    2. See “Records Don’t Tell the Stories” ↩︎
    3. See “A Valentine for Iowa” and “A Valentine for Indiana” ↩︎

  • Those Who Remained II: Uncle George

    To recap part I:

    John Callin (1870-1835) and Elizabeth Simon (1780-1864) were born and married in Pennsylvania, according to the scant information given about them in The Callin Family History. The good old CFH was published in 1911 by their grandson, George W. Callin (1846-1921), who was born a decade after John’s death. Most of what George knew about his grandparents probably came from his father, William. George may or may not have remembered Elizabeth, because she moved to Auburn, Indiana, with George’s aunt, Eliza (Callin) Ferguson, in 1849, when George was 3 years old.

    But Those Who Remained would have remembered his ancestors, too, and probably shared stories with him.

    Those Who Departed: John “Jr.”

    The oldest child of John and Elizabeth was also named John Callin. This John Callin was born in Pennsylvania about 1802 and came to Milton Township with the rest of his family in 1816. He died there in 1825, according to the CFH, but we don’t have a Find A Grave memorial or any information about his cause of death.

    Amazingly enough, young John was the only one of John and Elizabeth’s nine children who did not survive long enough to marry and have children. We already talked about the three sisters who left Ohio:

    That leaves five Callin siblings who stayed in Ohio, although, as we’ll see, they spread out through Huron, Richland, and Ashland counties, and many of their children went further than that.

    But let’s begin with the oldest surviving son: George Callin (1804-1879).

    George and Polly, Likely Abolitionists

    George’s wife was Mary Ann “Polly” Lewis, whose family moved to Ohio from New York. Our cousin from this branch of the family, Megan, wrote to me last time I posted about this family and offered additional info about Polly’s family:

    “[Polly’s] older sister, Hannah Simons, nee Lewis, also came to the Firelands, right to the same area the Callins settled. It is my guess that they brought Mary Ann [aka Polly] to Ohio. I have no idea who got here first, the Callin or Lewis girls…Hannah Lewis’s husband, Cyrus Simmons, came to Peru in what may have been inherited ‘Sufferers Lands’ or Firelands” (they were from Litchfield, Connecticut, his father was on the NY line in the revolution)…The Simons also had a daughter, SABRA Ann (1835-1930), and another [named] Mary Ann (Polly) (1821-1882), nieces to Geo and Mary Ann Callin.”.(of course a George, too.)”

    We have talked before about George and Polly’s faith1, and about the memoir by their grandniece, Rosemary Callin2, that claims their farm was a stop on the Underground Railroad, so this may not be new information for you. But Rosemary recalled being told this story by her father, George W. Callin:

    Father said they were warned not to say nothing at school about it, but their cabin was a station on the Underground Railway. I don’t know whether it was William or Elizabeth, probably the latter, who awakened them softly in the middle of the night and led them to the window. The moon flashed out and they saw a white man, maybe William, leading a string of blacks through the clearing around their cabin and into the woods. They were on their way to Great Uncle George’s barn. From there he would take them onto the next stop.

    Records of their marriage and where they lived before 1850 are elusive, but the 1850 Census places George and Polly in Peru Township, Huron County, Ohio. William – George’s younger brother and George W.’s father – had cleared his own farm in Milton Township (which was in Richland County in 1840), and moved to Peru Township in 1849. So Rosemary’s account almost certainly describes something that happened in the 1850s. If the story about Elizabeth taking the children to the window happened in 1855, George W. would have been about nine years old, and the youngest of the children, Zimri, would have been about five.

    Peru Township is north and west of Greenwich Township, on a diagonal with one other township between them. Greenwich Township was where the Society of Friends (Quakers) operated the Firelands “Underground” Railways. Early activity would have begun in the 1830s, and increased through the end of the Civil War in 1865.

    Echo of the Past

    As I write this post, America in 2026 is experiencing something similar to what George and Polly, and William and Elizabeth, experienced in the late 1850s. Political divisions over who we should be as a country created sharper and starker dividing lines as a minority of people who believed that a corrupted system based on treating human beings as property pushed for nationwide enforcement of laws that the Callin family (at least THIS Callin family) considered to be immoral.

    The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 explicitly put our two Callin families, and anyone else running an underground railroad, on the wrong side of the law. Slave patrols could cross into free states and kidnap enslaved persons, even those who were legally free, as in the case of Rosetta Armstead in 1855. Studying this time in American history, I can’t avoid seeing parallels with the 2025 surge of Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) operations to kidnap people who are in the U.S. legally, operations that exceed their legal charter, and lead to examples of violating the rights of due process guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and attacking U.S. citizens who object to this.

    As more of my friends and neighbors across the country are caught up in the protest movement against ICE, I also see family and friends who are choosing to ignore the immorality and illegality of what the federal government is doing. I am gaining a new understanding of the long, slow unfolding stresses and anxiety that families like George and William Callin endured as they resisted immoral laws without knowing when or how a coming war might affect them.

    The Next Generations

    George and Polly had two sons and four daughters. Two of those daughters did not have children; Amelia (Callin) Horton was the youngest child, and was described as suffering from “delicate health” before her death at age 50. The other was Sabra Ann, who we discussed not long ago3.

    Only one son, John C. Callin (1830-1905) had male descendants, but he only had two kids (a son and a daughter) and one grandson, Arthur James Callin, who never had children. John C.’s two children were James Callin (1855-1930) and Jennie M (Callin) Clausin Strohm (1857-1924). James raised his children in Huron County, but later moved to Chicago, Illinois, and then to Elkhart, Indiana. Jennie lived in Denison, Iowa, with her first husband, and lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and later, Saint Paul, Minnesota, with her second.

    James’s youngest daughter, Helen (Callin) Ladd, adopted two children, and his older surviving daughter, Ada Cecilia (Callin) Forgey, did not have any children. Jennie’s granddaughters were Jean Marjorie Clausin (1909-1964), who appears not to have had any children, and Louise Harriet (Clausin) Pattee (1905-1998), whose sons were Carl Bert (1930-1993) and Lloyd Garrison Pattee Jr. (1932-1998).

    George and Polly’s eldest daughter was Minerva (Callin) Smith Robinson Daggett (1834-1895). Minerva had five known children with her first husband, a blacksmith named John N Smith (1830-1867) who died in Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois. It is possible that Minerva knew her Aunt Sarah’s family, but George W. appears to have lost touch with her after the Smiths moved away from Ohio. Minerva had two more children (that I know of) with her second husband, Dana A Robinson (1818-1891), and they lived in Burlington, Coffee County, Kansas. I have been unable to find more information about her descendants.

    The second son of George and Polly was named after George’s brother (my 3rd-great-grandfather): William H Callin (1834-1919). He married an English girl4 named Ellen C. Channing (1838-1916) and they had four daughters, who they raised on their farm in Huron County:

    And lastly, George and Polly’s daughter, Lovina (Callin) Rickey (1839-1877), married Ed Rickey (1831-1896) and had two sons, so there may be a smattering of cousins out there with the Rickey surname. Ed and Lovina moved to Williams County, Ohio.

    The Thread of History

    Most people focus on their paternal surname when they get into family history; that makes sense, of course, since that’s “your name” and most novice researchers can be easily overwhelmed by the exponential increase in the number of surnames found in each generation.

    That bias towards the familiar is also compounded by geography. I’ve noticed that the people listed here that stayed in Ohio were close enough for George W. Callin to know and include in his book. Some of those who moved away were close enough to attend the Callin Family Reunions that were documented in local papers during the 1900-1910s, and their names, at least, appear in the CWF.

    But those who did not remain in Ohio offer the challenge of obscurity – a challenge that only focused research can overcome.

    1. See “Religion: Tool and Problem” ↩︎
    2. See “Silk or Satin” ↩︎
    3. See “Two Girls Called Sabra Ann” ↩︎
    4. See “The Girl From England” on the old Blogger site ↩︎

  • Ahnentafel #12: Bob McCullough (1927-1983)

    I never met my wife’s paternal grandfather, so I don’t have the same kinds of deep memories of him that made writing my own grandparents’ profiles both easy to write and hard to support with sources.

    And while I have asked if anyone would like to share their memories with me on this public platform, I haven’t heard back from anyone. I’m not surprised that those who remember him best wouldn’t necessarily want to open up to me. After all, I’m just a guy who married their niece and shows up in the Midwest once every decade or so. (They are also, mostly, in Minnesota, so they are occupied with more serious concerns.)

    For me, at least, this makes the challenge into a more familiar one. I’ve written hundreds of biographies for people I never knew. And I hope what I always hope:

    I hope I do him justice.

    Too Young to Fight in the Big One

    All four of my kids’ great-grandfathers served in the U.S. military, but Bob McCullough was still in school when the Second World War broke out. He matriculated as a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the fall of 1942, and graduated in the spring of 1946. He turned 18 in October of 1945, so he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, serving from January 1946 to 3 May 1947.

    His brother John was three years older than Bob, and also graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School. When John married his high school sweetheart, Elaine Shuffler, on 23 April 1945, Bob was his best man and Elaine’s sister, June, who was also a TJHS student, was the maid of honor.

    After he finished his year in the Air Corps, Bob married his high school sweetheart, the aforementioned June Shuffler, on 30 August 1948. This time, John was his best man, and Elaine was matron of honor. Bob and June established their family in Council Bluffs, where they had the first of their six children. Bob worked at the grain elevator.

    Then the Korean War broke out, and Bob served another tour in the military from 10 March 1951 through 11 July 1952. As it happens, he served with another young man from Council Bluffs named Charles Martin – we’ll meet Charles’s sister, Merilyn, in a few weeks!

    Bob McCullough’s senior yearbook photo

    From Iowa to Minnesota

    Bob and June moved to Minnesota around 1959. This is typically where standard research techniques start to fail us, and storytelling becomes more desirable, because the records I have can’t answer questions like, “Why did they move?” or, “What was different for them about life in Minnesota?”

    The newspapers of the time carried pretty descriptions of both McCullough-Shuffler weddings, and listed a lot of names that are useful for the FAN approach. Some of the names are familiar; family names like Roundtree and Jensen who I know are related to the two families I’m studying. The friends and families in Council Bluffs seemed to be a close-knit group before 1959, but as life goes on, friends marry and move away, older family members may die, and sometimes the sorts of tragedies and traumas that people don’t like to discuss (divorce, or the loss of a child, perhaps) may push a circle of friends and family apart.

    What I do know is that Bob and June settled into life in Shakopee, and I think Bob worked (at least for some time) as a baker. I know that their older children ended up back in Iowa, and the younger children tended to stay in Minnesota.

    A Step Back to Reflect

    The trick to writing a genealogy blog like this one lies in finding the “so what” twice a week. Most of the time, my expected audience (including my close relatives!) know as little about the people I’m studying as I do, so if I think something that I learn about a family from 100 years ago is interesting, chances are good that my audience will think so, too.

    But writing about more recent generations has an added risk, not just that the people who don’t know me or my family won’t be interested in what I have to say, or bored by stories I think are charming. I also feel I need to tread carefully so that people who did know the family I write about won’t be hurt by something I say.

    Every family has some drama; some more than others. Some families have dark secrets or traumas that they don’t want discussed. It’s possible that a researcher like me could stumble into something hurtful or harmful, or might share a “cute and innocent” story that triggers the darker memories, or whitewashes someone who did something wrong.

    Sometimes, people just don’t want to dwell on the sadness of having lost someone. Bob McCullough died at age 56, an age I’m close to myself. He didn’t leave behind any “small” children, but they were robbed of many years they should have had with him.

    And for many people, that is reason enough not to dwell in the past.

  • Amos Clark: Weighing Evidence

    Amos Clark: Weighing Evidence

    I found a secondary source that may help answer the questions I had when I wrote Wavetops: Amos Clark – but untangling what it says from what it means and interrogating the source on the question of how do you know that? may end up leaving me with a paradox: more information and more questions.

    The question I’m trying to answer has to do with the origins of my 3rd-great-grandfather, Amos Clark (unknown DOB-1848). Here are the facts I have:

    • He married “Sally Stumbough” on 8 April 1824 in Lawrence County, Ohio.
    • Their family appeared in Perry Township, Lawrence County, Ohio, in 1830 and 1840.
    • Amos died in 1848, and his will named his children1.
    • In 1853, the local newspaper in Ironton (Lawrence County), Ohio, The Spirit of the Times carried a Notice for the estate of Amos Clark2 on 12 April… and then a few weeks later, on 31 May3, printed that “The late advertisement of Amos Clark’s estate in our paper, was not that of Amos B. Clark, who is well and favorably known to many of the citizens of this county, as some have supposed. He is still alive and kicking.”

    At first, I assumed that the 1853 estate notice was for a different Amos Clark, because the husband of Sally Stumbough died in 1848, but I have seen that probate cases can take years to resolve themselves, especially when minor children are involved. So that estate notice could be for my ancestor. But we also know that we can’t assume any record for the name Amos Clark is my ancestor, because another Amos B. Clark was still alive and kicking in 1853.

    The puzzle I have to solve now is “which pieces of information pertain to my Amos Clark?”

    From New Jersey to Ohio

    One piece of information kept popping up on various unsourced family trees, so I decided to start investigating where that information came from. Supposedly, Amos Clark was born on 3 November 1802 in Westfield, Union County, New Jersey. After coming up empty on records searches, I finally found this book: Clark of Elizabeth Town in New Jersey by Elmer Sayre Clark.

    This book, published in 1942 by Professor E.S. Clark, a Fellow of the Institute of American Genealogy, is not organized like a family history document. It begins with a few pages labeled “Summary of Lineages” that lists families under 16 surnames. I assume these might be the author’s Sixteen great-great-grandparents, but he doesn’t tell us that.

    After the Summary, there are three pages that provide the heraldic definitions of the coats of arms for nine of the families, and then Professor Clark turns on the fire hose. What follows is more than 200 pages of will transcripts, correspondence with descendants, lists of names with what look like inline references, and essays with the byline “By the Editor” – an undifferentiated, un-indexed mass of genealogical information. Fortunately, since the book was digitized, we can search through the text for names.

    Despite these challenges, Professor Clark’s book appears to support the origin of Amos Clark that I kept seeing.

    • From the “Summary of Lineages“:
      • CLARK(E):
        • Samuel (1768-1856), of Scoth [sic] Plains, N. J. m 1791 Mary dau. of Elias Darby of Scotch Plains, N. J.; removed to Hanging Rock, Ohio, thence to Gashland, Mo.
      • SAYRE/SAYER:
        • Phoebe (1797-1845), m 1814 Samuel Clark of Hanging Rock, Lawrence Co., O.”
      • DARBY/D’ARBY:
        • Mary (1768-1806), of [Elias] m at Westfield, N. J. 1791 Samuel Clark.
    • From the “Letter from Daniel Carpenter, Oct. 20, 1913” on page 202:
      • “Samuel Clark was born in Elizabeth, N.J., March 11, 1768; died in Clinton County, Missouri, Oct. 7, 185-2, or 6… married to Mary Darby probably around 1790, who was born July 17, 1768…” [8 children were listed; I selected these five to make my case:]
      • [1.] Samuel was born March 20, 1792 [married Phoebe Sayre, above]
      • 2. Cornelius, born Nov. 22, 1793
      • 3. Joel born Oct. 10, 1795
      • 4. Hannah, born Feb. 14, 1798, m. Wm. Carpenter, 1812, d. Sept. 18, 1881
      • 6. Amos, born Nov. 20, 1802
      • “Cornelius, Joel and Amos lived and died in Lawrence County, Ohio, leaving a number of descendants still living there.”

    This still isn’t conclusive or primary evidence, but there seems to be agreement from multiple accounts provided by people who remembered their grandparents’ stories. You can piece together from the information above that Samuel Clark (1768-1856) and Mary Darby (1768-1806) married and had their eight children, and Dan Carpenter’s letter states that they moved, along with Dan’s grandfather, Benjamin Carpenter, to Lawrence County, Ohio, about 1803-5, settling on the river about one mile above Hanging Rock.

    There are more details to tease out of this book; as I said, it is densely packed with references, side comments, and details that need to be teased out and confirmed with primary source records. But the one thread that makes me think I’m on the right track comes from that 12 April 1853 Estate notice in the Spirit of the Times.

    Assuming that estate is for the Amos Clark who died in 1848, the administrator’s name is Cornelius.

    Tantalizing.

    But Who Was Amos B. Clark?

    That other item from Spirit of the Times telling us that “Amos B. Clark” was still alive in 1853 may lead to more of the information we need to solve this puzzle. There are some clues in Professor Clark’s book.

    As it happens, Professor Clark includes a biographical sketch of Ephraim S. Clark, sourced from another book, “Portrait and biographical album of Livingston County, Illinois,” published in Chicago by the Chapman Brothers in 1888 (pp 198-202). On page 207 of Prof. Clark’s book, he lists the fourteen children of Samuel Clark (1792-1840) and Phoebe Sayre (1797-1845), including a son named Amos:

    “Amos, born March 27, 1825, married Lucy Reither, and they have one child; Amos is a shoemaker by trade, but he is now [presumably in 1888] a travelling salesman”

    That sketch states that this Clark family relocated to Indiana around 1830, so further research into Amos Clark and Lucy Reither will be needed before I can say whether he is our “Amos B. Clark” or not.

    What Goes Into WikiTree

    If you haven’t already done so, you should follow the link to Amos Clark’s WikiTree bio, where you can see how the page has been edited to reflect these developments. Take note that the Biography section is meant to be a narrative constructed out of facts that can be sourced to primary records, while “unknowns” and theories can be discussed in the Research Notes.

    Wherever possible, I like to include as much information as possible for future researchers. You will probably notice that when I don’t know whether something is correct, I explain why I don’t think it’s correct and try to link to the sources so other researchers can examine them for themselves. I also try to provide a link to and a transcript of the relevant document, though a source citation doesn’t have to include either.

    When editing your own WikiTree profiles, make sure you proofread it a few times while asking that key critical thinking question: “How do you know that?” If the text answers that question, then you’re doing something right!

    1. The exception is that my 2nd-great-grandfather, Joel Clark, is either not named or is mis-named as “Jacob”; see Amos’s WikiTree entry for more. ↩︎
    2. Newspapers.com, Spirit of the Times, Ironton, Ohio; Tue, Apr 12, 1853, Page 3, https://www.newspapers.com/article/spirit-of-the-times-amos-clarks-estate/125497327/ ↩︎
    3. Newspapers.com, Spirit of the Times, Ironton, Ohio; Tue, May 31, 1853, Page 2, https://www.newspapers.com/article/spirit-of-the-times-amos-clark-still-a/21733341/ ↩︎
  • Ahnentafel #11: Alberta Tuttle (1925-2017)

    Ahnentafel #11: Alberta Tuttle (1925-2017)

    My maternal grandmother, Grandma Bert, was the last of my grandparents to leave us, surviving her first husband, Grandpa Russ1, by 15 years. She lived nearly 92 years, and she spent all of that time furiously pouring her energy into loving her family.

    What to Call Grandma

    Her name was Alberta, and Grandpa would call her “Bert,” a name I knew from watching Mary Poppins. But I don’t remember referring to her by her name when I was growing up, and it never came up until I had kids and had to figure out what to tell them to call my grandparents!

    This is NOT Grandma Bert

    When we were kids, if we were referring to them, we usually called them “Grandma and Grandpa Clark,” to differentiate them from “Grandma and Grandpa Callin,” and addressed them as either Grandma or Grandpa in person. So, when I asked how they wanted to my kids to address them, that was the first time I really saw how uneasy my grandmother was with her own name.

    I think she was aware that everyone talked about “Grandpa Bob” and “Grandpa Nancy,” and “Grandpa Russ” seemed to work for him, but Grandma was in a quandary. She didn’t seem to dislike the name Alberta, but she behaved as though it felt too formal for her warm and bubbly personality. She didn’t seem to mind when Grandpa called her “Bert,” but that seemed too familiar – and I heard her say once or twice over the years that she didn’t think she “should use a man’s name.”

    In the end, everyone close to her called her Mom, Grandma, or (if they weren’t related to her) Alberta, and my kids would call her Grandma Alberta or (maybe if they were talking about her) Grandma Bert.

    Aggressive Acts of Service

    Grandma was an intense and energetic person, forever busy and focused on others. After she died in 2017, I wrote this about her in “When Grandma Played the Organ“:

    It didn’t matter where they were, whether you were in their home or they were in yours; Grandma would be busy. She loved to take care of her family. She was forever bustling around the kitchen, cleaning up, playing with the children, singing – always showing us all how much she loved us through those acts of service.

    But also, when I wrote about times that she and Grandpa Russ visited us, in “A Fire in the Desert,” I said this:

    None of these visits ever lasted long enough for my sister or me, but Mom and Dad seemed to uncoil a little bit whenever the clouds of dust would follow the caravan du jour down the road toward their next stop – usually my cousin’s house a few miles away. Looking back, I can see how my dad, who was always happiest building and tinkering with his handy projects around the property, might have looked forward to not having his father-in-law offering advice on how to build and tinker better. And since they were mom’s parents, I could see how maybe there were lingering childhood issues that every family has that made her feel progressively less in control of her own home until the visits were over.

    Whenever Grandma was there, she did everything she could to help. She would dive into meal preparation or cleaning, always bustling ahead of mom or following behind and re-cleaning or “fixing” things – sometimes going overboard in her effort to help out. This would wear on mom’s nerves, but if she said anything about feeling pushed out of her kitchen or pointed out that coming in and “cleaning” the house she had just cleaned felt like criticism, Grandma would be hurt. “I’m only trying to help!”

    Now that I’m older and I’ve seen other families with a similar dynamic, I can understand what was going on. Mom was proud of her home and worked hard to keep it orderly. Grandma wanted so badly to show everyone how much she loved them, she couldn’t help sending the wrong message.

    I know they talked about it and worked on being gracious with each other, but every now and then, Mom might have to gently convince Grandma to just relax and visit with us. But a lifetime of energetic service to others meant that she was not in the habit!

    Life After Grandpa

    Grandma outlived Grandpa Russ by 15 years, and I know how lonely she was without him. I don’t remember much about those years, because I was busy moving my family across the country to Maryland, and once I got settled there, I often worked 14 hour days in addition to an hour-long commute. But I remember what Grandma said when she called me to tell me her good news.

    She had met a man at her church, Sherwin, and he had proposed. Once I congratulated her, and told her how happy I was for her, she joked, “We had to get married, you know!” She thought that was pretty funny, given that she was 79 years old and had a hysterectomy when she was in her fifties. I’m pretty sure she used that line on everyone in the family, and probably at the wedding. (In case anyone wondered how I acquired my sense of humor, I’m descended from four hilarious, and sometimes surprisingly inappropriate grandparents!)

    When Sherwin died in 2008, they had only been together for about four years, but he left her a nice house in Sun City and enough of a nest egg to keep her comfortable and independent. Once again, she struggled to stay busy and keep the loneliness at bay. I know she went through a rough time when her older sister, Lyle, died in 2011. They had lived 2,000 miles apart for more than 50 years, but she told me that loss was the one that made her feel like the only one of her generation left.

    But in her last couple of years, Grandma managed to find more friends at her church and stayed more engaged. She even met and married Jack, a preacher who reminded her a little bit of Grandpa, with big dreams to save the desert Southwest.

    In the end, Grandma did stay with us longer than the rest of her generation. She loved us all as vigorously as she could for as long as she could, and we were lucky to have had her in our lives.

    1. See Ahnentafel #10 from last week. ↩︎

  • Doing the FAN Dance

    Doing the FAN Dance

    For those who may not know, “FAN” stands for “Friends, Associates, Neighbors” – and it is a research strategy that encourages genealogists to look beyond their direct ancestors and examine the broader community surrounding them. Aryn Youngless posted a great intro to the FAN method on her Substack last October: “The FAN Method: Breaking Through Brick Walls“

    I have been on a quest to find the records I need to either confirm or refute the Theoretical Military Career of James Callin and to find out where in “Westmoreland County, PA” he raised his family. This quest has led me to pursue the FAN Method, starting with the Milton Township Diaspora. Looking at the Friends/Associates/Neighbors of the Callin family in Milton Township gave me a lot of information about James Callin’s children and grandchildren, but when it comes to the man I have been hunting, I have only found more questions, so far.

    At least they have been very interesting questions…

    Hints & Allegations

    We have an alarmingly small pile of solid evidence to work from, and much of what we have only hangs together if we assume that the information recorded by George W. Callin in his 1911 Callin Family History (the “CFH”) is correct. Here is a table to show what I mean:

    Person from 1911 CFH:Claim in CFH:Record(s):
    James “1st” Callin“…emigrated from
    Ireland to America about the commencement of the Revolutionary War.”    		– Muster rolls show James Callin (var. spellings) in 4th Virginia Regiment of Foot from 1777 to 17791.
    – 1773 tax roll in Hempfield, Bedford County, PA – same record shows Patrick Callen
    “…settled on government land in Westmoreland Co. in Western Penn., where they remained the remainder of their lives…”No records found in NARA or BLM-GLO databases; may be in Augusta County deeds, 1743-1800?
    James “2nd” Callin“James 2nd, with his family moved from Penn. to Ashland Co. and located on a farm about the year 1810. He was killed in an altercation with a man named Fowler who struck him over the head with a rifle, this occurred about the year 1820. He was buried in Oliversburg2 Cemetery.”– 1820 U.S. Census: places household in Milton Township, Richland County, OH; same page as a neighbor, Sutton Fowler.
    – Burial site never found.
    Mary “2nd”“Record of James 2nd…Married about 1800, name of wife Mary 2nd, name unknown.”– No marriage record found yet; possibly hiding wherever the land records are hiding (ie, Augusta County, VA)
    “Record of Alec Callin…2nd son of James 2nd…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.”    		– 1830 U.S. Census: Mary “Callon” is head of her household in Milton Township, Richland County, Ohio.
    – 1840 U.S. Census: Mary “Callen” household is in Milton Township.
    – Find-a-Grave memorial #62700832: Oak Grove Cemetery, Muscatine County, Iowa; died 26 April 1846.

    Finding Mary’s burial site in Muscatine County was a breakthrough, not just because a “Mary Callin” appeared in Iowa, but because of the other information on her headstone which might help answer the question:

    “Who was Aunt Mary?”

    The headstone over Mary Callin’s grave is an obelisk with four sides. One side has Mary’s information, but on another face of the same headstone you can see two more names:

    A third face records the burial of their son, John N Rayburn (1831-1856). So, now I have a LOT of questions, and this feels like a job for the FAN Method.

    “Who was Callin Rayburn?” – People don’t usually bury strangers in their family plot, so I would assume that “Aunt Mary” Callin is related to the Rayburn family in some way. If she wasn’t a relative, and the Rayburns were generously helping to bury an unfortunately destitute neighbor, I would expect her to have a separate marker, or no marker at all. And as it happens, Callin Rayburn is a son of Eleanor (Callen) Rayburn, the daughter of Patrick Callen, who we saw in the 1773 Hempfield tax rolls next to James “1st” up in the table above.

    Callin Rayburn’s wife was the former Mary Brandon, which we only learn from the 1932 death certificate of their son, Hiram Rayburn, who was born in Muscatine in 1845 and died in Renton, Washington, where they recorded his mother’s maiden name. Interestingly, Hiram had an older brother, Madison, who was born around 1840 in either Pennsylvania (per the 1850 census) or Ohio (1860 Census and his 1862 Civil War Soldier Record). This suggests that the Callin Rayburn family lived in Armstrong County, PA, until about 1837, and moved west around 1840, ending up in Iowa by 1845. If Madison was born in Ohio, that makes me wonder if the family stopped in Milton Township on their way West, and if that is what prompted James 2nd’s sons to move, too?

    Callin Rayburn’s sister was also named Mary, and her married name was Brandon; which means that our “Aunt Mary” was almost certainly not Callin Rayburn’s sister, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Aunt Mary Callin’s maiden name was Rayburn or Brandon, either.

    “Who Was Elizabeth Simon?”

    We’ve been focused on James 2nd and his wife, but we also have another name to provide a clue. James 2nd’s brother John married Elizabeth Simon in 1801, according to the CFH. The book also says she moved to Auburn, Indiana, with her daughter’s family, the Fergusons, and died there in November 1864. I have a single record, the 1860 U.S. Census, which places Elizabeth Collin in the home of James and Eliza (Callin) Ferguson in Jackson Township, DeKalb County, Indiana.

    While I have gone looking for a “Simon” family in those places where I suspect the Callin family lived, I have come up empty, so far. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Aunt Mary’s maiden name could have been Simon (or a variant spelling, like “Simmons” or “Simons”). I have kept an eye out for the name in census pages and local histories, too.

    What to Watch For

    The most promising lead I have at the moment is the database of land records for Augusta County, Virginia3, where I hope to find James “1st” Callin’s land records.

    If I do, I expect I might also find the Burget family (remember what I said about them in “Those Who Remained: Part I”?), and possibly some Rayburn, Brandon, or Simon families.

    Even if I don’t find James “1st,” I know that if I find any of those surnames in land records, that might at least tell me where to look for some of the missing marriage records – for James “2nd” and Mary, for John and Elizabeth Simon, and possibly even for James “1st” and his unknown wife.

    And if we find any of the above, we’ll be much closer to being able to “prove” our theories about this family!

    1. I think the muster rolls that show James on furlough in 1778 may indicate that is when he got married, which also matches the timing in the CFH account. ↩︎
    2. “Oliversburg” is a typo in the CFH; it should read “Olivesburg”. ↩︎
    3. Specifically, this source: Augusta County deeds, 1743-1800. ↩︎
  • Ahnentafel #10: Russ Clark, Sr. (1920-2002)

    Ahnentafel #10: Russ Clark, Sr. (1920-2002)

    My maternal grandfather, Russell Hudson Clark, Sr., was the first of my grandparents to pass away in 2002. When he died, I was told there were several contributing health factors, including Alzheimer’s disease and lung cancer. The lung cancer was attributed to the smoking habit that he had during World War II and the decade that followed.

    When I learned that fact, I remember thinking, “So that’s true, then,” because Grandpa Russ told me many things over the years, and it could be difficult to separate the strictly factual from the metaphorical. I put it that way because I don’t think his intent was to deceive me when he told me stories that weren’t strictly true; I think in his calculus, the things he told me were lessons, meant to instruct me.

    Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (KJV/NKJV)

    But good intentions don’t make things true, and metaphors do not make good source citations.

    The Power of a Voice

    Grandpa Russ told me, my sister, and our cousins many tales when we were growing up. Many of them involved tobacco, for reasons we never fully understood at the time.

    “When I was a boy, about your age,” he said, addressing a 12-year-old me and my 8-year-old sister, “I wasn’t supposed to cut through the barns where they kept the vats of sheep dip, but I did anyway, because I had found a big plug of chewing tobacco, and I didn’t want anyone to see me try it. You know, that big, furry monster in your Star War movie is called “Chewbacca” because it’s short for “chewing tobacco,” don’t you? They’re just trying to get kids to think it’s cool to use it, but I snuck into that barn and took a bite like I’d seen the men in our town do, and I didn’t know that you were supposed to spit out the juice… and let me tell you, that made me sick at my tummy!”

    When he told us stories, especially these cautionary tales, his oratory took on a cadence and style that I find reminiscent of blues singer B.B. King. I once mentioned this to him, and it made him uncomfortable. Here’s a clip to demonstrate – imagine the previous paragraph being told to you in this man’s voice:

    When he told the sheep dip story, he explained that the vats held a liquid for treating parasites and that the sheep would be lowered into the vat (dipped) and then set free. Then he told us that when he took his shortcut through those barns, he went up on the walkway above the vats, and he saw a nice hat floating in one of them. He fished out the hat and wore it into town, where a woman came running out of a store, screaming at him, “Where did you find that hat?”

    And, of course, the woman’s husband was the owner of the hat, and they found him in the vat when Grandpa showed them where the hat had been floating.

    “He was drunk on whiskey, and fell in to drown, and that’s why you must stay away from tobacco and alcohol!”

    Trust, but Verify

    I never found a shred of evidence to suggest that story actually happened. It certainly could have, but I can only guess at the year (about 1932), the location (somewhere in Kentucky or Arkansas), and I only have one solid fact to look for (man drowns in a vat of sheep dip).

    Most of the stories like this that Grandpa told us were unverifiable. Some were obvious retreads of morality tales, like those frequently shared by pastors from the pulpit. Some of those tales even showed up in email forwarding chains that spread around the early internet in the 1990s.

    But some of them did seem true. Or “truth-adjacent”…

    1 Thessalonians 5:21: “…but test everything; hold fast what is good.” (ESV)

    I joined the Air Force in the summer of 1994, and Grandma and Grandpa Clark came to visit when I returned home from language school for Christmas break. At one point, Grandpa pulled me aside to share several stories about his time in the Navy.

    In one, he was serving aboard a ship that was part of a convoy delivering materiel to Murmansk, Russia, under the Lend-Lease program. He described waking up one morning in a thick fog, and seeing the topsides of German U-boats passing through the convoy, looking for the American ships, but somehow unable to locate them.

    In another, he was on shore leave in England around Christmas time, and he described a great alcohol-and-heroine bender in which he found himself singing in a nightclub. After hearing him sing, a U.S. Army major came up to him and offered him a job with his touring group in the USO. The major took his name and contact info, and said he was headed out the next day for several performances, but that he would be in touch. That army major’s plane disappeared, and Grandpa never did get his chance to sing with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

    These stories might have been plausible, though there is certainly room for embellishment. They carried elements of the cautionary tale (with the inexplicable new addition of heroine use) mixed with facts that could almost be checked (assuming there are records of a ship with Grandpa on it visiting Murmansk or England).

    But are they “true”? And if there is no way to know, is it appropriate to repeat them in his biography?

    The Hard Truths

    The difficulty of documenting a life like that of Russ Clark does not lie in finding evidence to show you what is true. I have documents. I have Grandma Bert’s Travelogue. I have our stories. The difficulty lies in how you curate his stories, how you frame them, and what you lead the reader to think of him.

    As a child, I was taught (in part by Grandpa Russ) that liars are bad, wicked, and evil people. Grandpa tried to teach us to watch out for evil people. The tool of storytelling he used on us sometimes put him at odds with his own definition of evil, but that contradiction led me to value the underlying truth of a story, even if it isn’t literally true.

    As an adult, I can look back at the people who influenced me and see what they were trying to teach me…but also what they taught me without meaning to. No one in my family intended to make me an atheist, or set out to formally train me in critical thinking skills, but I ended up being what I am and doing what I do because I spent my childhood trying to figure out how to test everything and hold fast to what was good. That’s my inheritance from Grandpa.

    Growing up in the poorest parts of America during the Great Depression with a father and older brothers who (probably) drank and (almost certainly) cheated on their wives shaped Grandpa’s idea of what a Bad Person was. “Gossiping” was part of what made a Bad Person bad, so he tried to avoid telling us directly that his father drank and left his mother to raise nearly a dozen children; but he made it pretty clear what he thought of people who would do such things.

    My job is to find the facts about those people, and I try to do it in a way that demonstrates some grace for their behavior, even when it did harm to those around them. At the end of his life, there was no way to know which of the stories he told were strictly true, which were “lessons,” or which were products of the Alzheimer’s disease that crept slowly through his brain and altered his personality. As he and his siblings left us, they took most of their stories with them.

    And all of this – this essay, these stories, the guesses I have to make about what was strictly true – is what we have to build on.

    Nirvana, 1993: “All in all is all we are.”