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.
I found My Sixteen, and Her Sixteen – now what about Their Sixteens?
I’ve written at length about how helpful it was to focus on finding my Sixteen great-great-grandparents when I was starting out. But now I’m a seasoned (pronounced: “old”) amateur researcher with both My Sixteen and my wife’s Sixteen documented in 32 WikiTree profiles. (Plus our “Great 28” generations, with WT profiles for me, my wife, our parents, grandparents, and great-grands.)
So, now what?
My Wavetops posts are helping me organize and map out how far I can see beyond the Sixteens. But what if I wanted to set a goal to document the Sixteen great-great-grandparents of of My Sixteen?
If I made a chart like this for Her Sixteen, it would have 4 total – and those are ancestors of Daisy Deane (Frederick) Putnam (1870-1964) who I have not confirmed, yet. The majority of Her Sixteen were immigrants from Germany or Scandinavian countries, so for many of them, the concept of “surnames” doesn’t apply.
I’m only close to having all Sixteen of one of my Sixteen – and I only have 41 of my 256 identified. Most of those profiles exist thanks to the work of other WikiTree contributors, and I need to go in and verify that the profiles all have source citations and identify the correct people.
The Best Kinds of Goals
When I think about the numbers this way, it helps me wrap my mind around concepts that I don’t easily understand. I am not a numbers person, though I am somebody who has worked with and supervised “numbers people” in the course of my career. Doing this math and thinking about the amount of work that goes into confirming the connections between each individual in a family tree helps me scope realistic goals for myself.
It also helps me appreciate the amount of work already put into the family history, both by me and by my cousins. By now, I realize that I am an anomaly when it comes to fellow non-professional genealogists. Most people who get interested find a single line of ascent (usually their paternal line, or their mother’s paternal line) and their goals tend to revolve around going “as far back” as they can. I don’t want to discourage them, but that’s not what propels me.
The whole concept of “Mightier Acorns” revolves around a focus on the little people, the people history considers inconsequential as individuals, but the people who create history by getting up every day, making a lunch, sharing memes with their friends, and taking care of daily business. Documenting their lives can be hard, if they didn’t see a value in documenting it for themselves.
For now, I don’t think aiming for my 256 is within reach, but perhaps someday, if I keep doing the hard work of finding sources and building profiles, I’ll be closer. I’ll stick to adding a few acorns at a time, and we’ll see how big a forest we can grow.
As promised, I’m back from a brief summer hiatus. Kate and I took a road trip to Baltimore to visit the kids, and grab some pie at Perkins, and now we’re ready to settle back into our regularly scheduled programming.
I haven’t exactly been idle on the family history front. There are a several things going on behind the scenes at Mightier Acorns that I plan to share with you all. And I’ve been tidying up the archives to make the old posts easier to navigate.
Tags and Categories
One of the features that attracted me to WordPress as a platform is the ability to add Tags and customized Categories to my posts. Substack has “tags” (which did not port over when I imported my archive) but they have their own ideas about SEO, so using them in a way that is useful to me and my audience was difficult.
I’ve been going through my imported Substack posts and adding Tags for each surname important to that post, and adding a number of categories to capture the places, occupations, and historical events prominent in each post. When I’m done, readers should be able to use a Tag link to find (for example) all of the “McCullough” posts. And if they want to know about ancestors from “Lewis County, NY” or ancestors who served in the “American Civil War,” there will be Categories for those.
Even if you, the reader, have no use for those features, they’ll help me quickly scan through my archives and ask myself, “Which families have I neglected?” Or maybe I’ll notice I have a lot of posts about a topic or occupation, and that will inspire me to give you an overview of trends related to the family.
Pingbacks!
As I go through and find places where I linked from one post to an older post, I have been replacing the Substack link that came over in the import with a WordPress link. In the process of doing that, I re-discovered another feature: the Pingback!
Basically, anytime someone links to an old post, their link should show up in a comment on that post. In Substack, when I linked back to an old post, that was all that happened. But in WordPress, that link in the comments means that if somebody finds the older post first, there will automagically be a link to the future post and no need for them to search through the archives manually to see if I finished my “series.”
(I anticipate that one day, the Substack will be deleted, but I want to be settled in on WordPress, first.)
Processing Artifacts
My family recently shared two interesting artifacts with me that I plan to share with you, eventually.
My maternal grandparents, Bert (Alberta) and Russ Clark had a video made for their 44th wedding anniversary in 1990. My plan is to make an edited version of the video that I can share here (taking out a lot of private information about living people and keeping bits that show their personalities), as well as transcribing it for use as a source that I can cite on their WikiTree profiles. The bulk of the video is Grandma Bert reading off all of the places she and Grandpa lived after they were married. (There were a LOT of places!)
The other recording was made by my paternal grandmother, Nancy (Witter) Callin, interviewing her mother, Merle (Huff) Witter. This audio cassette came to me from cousin Pat Witter, and once I’ve made a digital copy [update: I made the digital copy on Juneteenth!], I plan to transcribe that, too. Pat tells me it has a lot of great-grandma’s memories about her family’s move from Kansas to Arizona in the years just before its 1912 statehood.
Ongoing Works in Progress
In case you’re new to Mightier Acorns, I am working behind the scenes on a couple of long-term projects:
This is my attempt to run a one-name study for the variations of the Callan/Callen/Callin surname. I’m not the only one doing this (see the links on that page) but I launched the page on WikiTree and I’m in the process of doing the research before adding profiles for individuals and their families to WikiTree. There is also a DNA study organized by Stan Courtney on FTDNA (again, linked from the Callan Name Study page) that you can get involved with if you’re interested.
The Scotland Project on WikiTree is a volunteer-run program to introduce people to the basics of conducting research in Scotland and building profile for Scottish ancestors.
I signed up to learn what I can, and I’ve been on a waiting list since April. [Update: I got my Level 1 project on Juneteenth!] But once I’m done, I hope to be more helpful to the community in general, but (selfishly) I want to find my Murray ancestors and find out where they were in the 1700s.
This is NOT the official re-launch… you and I will have to wait a couple of weeks for that.
BUT…
FTDNA and WikiTree have announced THIS EXCITING NEWS and since I kind of “live” on WikiTree, I couldn’t wait to talk about it.
Of course, I’ll have to wait, because I’m not quite ready to re-launch, yet. But when I do, you can bet there will be a very breathless post about all the fun I’m having matching DNA matches to a collaborative tree that more cousins can see for FREE!
Welcome to the third incarnation of “Mightier Acorns.”
My name is Tad Callin, and I started blogging in 2003. In 2007, I started a genealogy blog just for a specific group of cousins called “Mighty Acorns” (more about that on the About page), and in 2009, I started an open-to-anyone genealogy blog I called “Mightier Acorns.” That incarnation lived on Blogger for about ten years.
Two years ago, I moved to Substack, mainly so I could take advantage of the community-building features. I like the other genealogy ‘Stacks and found some kind and encouraging friends there. Unfortunately, Substack’s founders have decided that are okay running “a Nazi bar.” After two years of thinking they might change their minds when they see the damage done by welcoming and profiting from the worst of humanity…they have not.
I can’t do much to influence a corporation that does not care about my concerns, so, here I am, on WordPress. Starting over… sort of.
If you’re just stumbling across Mightier Acorns for the first time, Welcome, cousin! (We’re all cousins if you go back far enough.)
I like to post twice a week, and I try to keep my posts between 500 and 1500 words. My hope is that by rotating through the different branches of my children’s extended family tree (writing about my ancestors and my wife’s ancestors) there will be something interesting for a broad spectrum of genealogists of all skill levels no matter how distantly related we might be.
Since Substack doesn’t do Tags or Categories in the same way WordPress does, I’ll be going back through my imported archive to add them to older posts. Meanwhile, I find the “Sixteen” pages are a good staring point if you just want to look around:
In that time period Genealogy was quite a fad, consequently many are badly written and poorly sourced. Their resources at the time included interviews with oldsters in the family and connecting through genealogy want ads in newspapers. So much of it is backed by the collective memories of the oldest memories of the family. The purpose of those books was not facts and truth, it was the creation of the families’ origin story.
As we learn more about our collective family history, we inevitably learn more about the mythology America’s European colonizers built around their experiences. And it is important to keep in mind what mythology means, because “myths” are not simply “true or false.” When they are the stories we tell about ourselves, they can incorporate facts, capture elements of our self-image and of our aspirations, and they can shape the way we interpret which parts of the stories are factual.
A Callin/Callen Family Myth
For example, the 1911 Callin Family History and The Callen Chronicles, published in 1990, both include what appear to be different versions of the same story. I discussed both stories on the old Mightier Acorns blog in “The Perils of Polly (or Margaret),” where you can read them side-by-side.
In The Callen Chronicles, the story is that the twin daughters of Patrick Callen, about six years of age, were taken from his home in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, during a raid by hostile Native Americans. One of them returned to her family after a white trader (one of those mythical frontiersmen) came to the village where she and her sister had been living for about 12 years.
The story George Callin recorded tells of Polly, a daughter of James Callin, who was taken in a raid, presumably from his home in Westmoreland County. In that story, James summoned a posse, which chased down the raiding party and recovered Polly, who was permanently injured in the ensuing fight.
Determining which parts of these twin stories are “true” is challenging. The account in The Callen Chronicles contains more details, including a mention of the relationship between Margaret (the twin who was recovered) and Patrick Callen’s grandson, Watson. It is also a less dramatic story, told in a way that sounds more factual, although neither story has any facts that are likely to be verifiable by research. My theory is that the Patrick Callen version of the story is probably “true” and that the version told about “Polly Callin” was altered and adapted as George’s grandfather and great-uncle retold the story to their children in Ohio, and was further adapted by those children when they told the story to their children.
Framing this story as part of a larger American Mythology has nothing to do with whether or not it is “true” and everything to do with how the people telling the story felt about it. And in the story of the stolen daughters, the people telling the story felt threatened by an outside invader…even though, strictly speaking, they were the outside invaders.
James Callin, Indian Fighter
I still don’t have enough evidence to make a proof argument connecting my Ohio ancestors to the Revolutionary War veteran named James Callin, whose military career I have written about before:
So far, my research amounts to speculation about who my 5th-great-grandfather might have been, and if he was this person, I further speculate that the story told about Patrick Callen’s daughters was turned into a story about James Callin’s daughter as James’s descendants created the family’s origin story.
I have to acknowledge that I am continuing to create that origin story. Even if I can find evidence to prove that the brothers who settled in Milton Township, Ohio, in the early 1810s, James and John Callin, were the sons of the Revolutionary War soldier named James Callin, all of this is still part of the mythology recorded by George and the Callen researchers.
As I learn more about our history and try to trace my ancestors’ place in it, I can see why the story of these girls was necessary to the mythology built up around our family. Because without this dramatic tale of being attacked in our homes and having our vulnerable children snatched away by “invaders,” James Callin would have no honorable reason to join General Scott’s Kentucky cavalry and be a part of the war to push Native Americans out of the Ohio Territory.
Whether James claimed the story of Polly as his own, or (more likely) he repeated the story of what happened to Patrick’s family to his children and grandchildren, it became a part of the family’s mythology: a self-image of ourselves as victims fighting back against a terrifying threat. And our fear of that threat was used as part of a broader campaign to make us part of the United States’ plan to expand westward.
Our Family Origin Story
Whatever the specific facts may prove to be, my version of that family origin myth currently says:
“Our Callan ancestors came to North America from Ireland. In Ireland, they suffered from increasing oppression from their British neighbors and the violence and economic hardship brought on by centuries of religious conflicts. In America, they were caught between hostile factions of English and French colonizers who allied with warring groups of indigenous Americans at different times for different reasons.”
The Callans seem to have justified the part they played in displacing Native Americans from their homes by pointing to a specific raid that harmed and terrified them, and they have passed that story down for generations.
James Callin probably chafed under the Quaker government of Pennsylvania, as the pacifist Quakers and the British government were unwilling to provide soldiers or arms to defend the people living along the front lines of the French and Indian Wars. That could explain why he enlisted with a Virginia Regiment when Virginia sent recruiters through Westmoreland County, PA (which, at the time, Virginia claimed as Yohogania County), and that would explain how he ended up serving under General Scott.
Later, in 1794, when James likely joined the Kentucky cavalry to fight under Gen. Scott again, Gen. Scott had personal reasons for wanting revenge on the Shawnee people from Ohio who had killed his son. The need to see himself as defending his family, rather than framing himself as a genocidal aggressor, could explain how James’s descendants transformed a story about the raid on Patrick’s family into a raid on their own.
And that is how, despite whatever the facts might be, a myth is born.
The Power of the Modern Myth
Here in America in 2025, we tell ourselves similar stories to justify our actions. Americans whose ancestors came from around the globe to live here have become the native population that fears outsiders. I can’t help noticing that our fear of them probably has more to do with what we did to the indigenous people of North America when we were the outsiders than it does with any supposed actions by modern immigrants. Most of the stories we tell ourselves capture how we feel rather than reflecting the facts.
Too many Americans seem willing to accept lies about being “invaded” by people from other countries, and listen to men calling for an end to what they call “open borders”—a myth that ignores how the open borders between our states drove our unity and economic growth after the completion of the railroads in the 1880s and after World War II.
Too many Americans feel the economic disparity caused by decades of income inequality and buy into the idea that, because resources are scarce, we must accept further economic austerity and cruel policies towards our most vulnerable neighbors—a mythical argument that doesn’t hold up under the weight of historical evidence.
Our record of learning from our past and seeing through misleading myths is not great. Few of our average citizens are willing to do the hard work of figuring out what is and isn’t true, and prefer to embrace a version of their story that justifies their part in whatever they have already decided to do. If we’re lucky, we will still be here to recover after the consequences of their choices play out, and we’ll get to tell a more accurate version of their story.
When James Callin and his children told themselves their origin myth, they couldn’t have known the scale of the atrocity they were committing. To them, the continent was vast, and they were the underdogs. But by 1910, when George wrote his history, the brutal treatment of the Native Americans was mostly complete, and the establishment of America as a rising world power included a “cowboys and Indians” myth as part of our national image.
When George recorded his version of the family origin story more than a century after his grandfather’s time, he didn’t have many facts and accepted the version of the story that justified the family’s place in America. Now, more than a century after George, I still don’t have many facts and must do the best I can to tell our story.
I can only hope that in another century, researchers will find my work and that it will help them understand why we told that story.
You might recall that I talked about my wife’s ancestry in February—particularly the difficulty in tracing the Jones family of her 2nd great-grandmother, Alice Frances (Jones) McCullough. I had intended to follow up on the Jones family sooner than this, but today is the day:
Introducing the Brookhousers
Alice’s mother was Susanna (Brookhouser) Jones (1836–1924). After I wrote about the Jones family, another descendant of David Jones and Susanna Brookhouser reached out on Ancestry, and we have been corresponding periodically since then. I have to confess, she has been doing the heavy lifting, so right now, I’m building off of her work.
There is a lot we still don’t know about David and Susanna’s lives. If you look at Susanna’s WikiTree, I have Albert Jones (b. 1851) listed as their eldest son, but I haven’t been able to prove whether Albert was their child or not. If he was, he most likely died at an early age. And I am still trying to determine when they were married. The only evidence I have is the 1900 Census stating they were married in 1854. And I estimate that they moved to Iowa between 1864 and 1870, probably after the end of the Civil War.
Susanna was the daughter of Adam Brookhouser, Jr. (1803–1865) and Mary Stokes (1808–1881), born in 1836 in Pennsylvania. Her family lived in Hayfield Township, Crawford County, Pennsylvania. When Adam was born, his parents lived in Crawford County. They appeared in Meadville on the 1800 Census. Mary Stokes was the daughter of John Stokes and Margaret Elizabeth Peters (1780-1876), and was also born and raised in Crawford County.
Adam and Mary had ten known children, including Susanna. My goal is to flesh out their biographies on Ancestry and then add them to WikiTree in the next couple of weeks. Once that is done, I’ll be able to connect Adam Jr.’s profile to the existing family that currently ends at his father’s profile.
Ascending the Brookhouser Tree
As you work your way through your family tree, you probably have one or two generations of ancestors who don’t get the attention they deserve. For whatever reason, one person’s biography will get less focus than their children and their parents. In this family, that person is:
Adam Brookhouser, Sr. (1776-1863) will eventually get more attention, but for now, I need to finish documenting his grandchildren. And while I’m doing that, cousin Jodie keeps finding interesting sources to tell us about the rest of the family. For example, here is the biography she found for Adam Sr.’s father:
JOHANN ADAM BROOKHOUSER
JOHANN ADAM BRUCHHAUSER later BROOKHOUSER, tailor {9,27}, born Obernhof in Rheinland-Pfalz, near Koblenz, Germany, 2 March 1734, son of Johann Jacob Bruchhauser and his wife Margaretha Elisabetha Klumb {1}; emigrated to Philadelphia in 1764 {3}, and later lived in Berks {5}, Northampton {6,7}, and Westmoreland counties {8} before moving to Crawford County, Pennsylvania, by 1800 {9,10,19}; died 2 February 1818 {17}; married Swedes Church, Philadelphia, 6 June 1768 {4} ANNA MARIA HAUCK or Houch, born Germany in 1743 or later, died Hayfield Township 22 December 1839 {17,19-21}; both buried there in Brookhouser Cemetery.
Each of those {digits} is a source that needs to be examined and verified before I can incorporate it into the existing profile for Johannes Adam Brookhauser (1734-1818)!
I will have to take special care since I have three generations of men named “Adam Brookhouser” with records in the same county.
Meanwhile…
Though it takes time and effort to properly care for a family tree, it can help to see the work laid out ahead of you. And I find the prospect of turning names and dates in a list from data points into people to be a fine motivator.
They may be beyond caring about what I do, but I like to think that someday soon, there will be a well-sourced story behind each of these faces.
David E. Jones (bearded) and Susanna (seated to his left); William (b. 1870, center) flanked by Alice (b. 1857, to his right) and Martha (b. 1864, to his left); Bert (1878) on David’s lap, and Bessie (1881) left of Susanna; about 1887, 13792 Haugh Road, Waterford, Erie, PA
As I’ve been writing about the branches of my children’s ancestry this year, I’ve had to consider many points of view that are very different from my own. Most of those differences are due to the religions practiced by those ancestors.
The history of America was driven by the choices people made, often in the name of their religious traditions. The founding of the British and Dutch colonies was as much about people fleeing from the violence and political upheaval caused by the mixture of religion and government in post-Reformation Europe as it was about conquest by those European powers. Westward Expansion of white American colonists had as much to do with the four major revivalist periods known as the Great Awakening as it did with the desire to exploit resources and crush the people already living in the West.
My recent posts about the families who took the Oregon Trail happened to be about people who belonged to the mainline Protestant denomination called the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), but there were dozens of groups moving westward together, hoping to find “new land” where they could build a community free of the “outside world” — and we often shy away from talking about the specifics of what that meant.
Sometimes, those specifics involved uncomfortable positions on sexuality.
A Core Belief
Determining the core beliefs of individuals and separating those from the teachings of a larger group is always complicated, at best.
Consider the Oneida Community that existed in upstate New York from the mid-to late-1800s. They formed at the end of the Second Great Awakening, which gave rise to many new religious movements in the United States, such as Adventism, Dispensationalism, and the Latter Day Saint movement. The Oneida famously practiced group marriage, lived communally (in the sense of communal property and possessions), and practiced “male sexual continence” – a concept I won’t go into here, but which is not typically associated with “Christian mores.”
The Oneida community waned, but The Latter Day Saints also have a history involving the practice of polygamy, and they have long struggled with separating the positions of the church as a whole from the individual practices of its members or of groups that broke off from the main church. The struggle has always stemmed from the tension between “orthodoxy” (the official rules of the main group) and “heterodoxy” (the individual freedom of members to be guided by their conscience).
The common thread that seems to bind all religious organizations throughout history is this: how do you convince individuals to accept limitations on their behavior while allowing those same individuals to believe their free will is not at odds with the church?
It’s about power: the balance of power between an organization that can only be as strong as its members allow, and individuals who agree to overlook and tolerate behavior they don’t condone for the sake of maintaining whatever benefits the organization gives them.
Or, to be more concise: it’s about the power to decide who gets to decide.
Conscience versus Conformity
Which brings me to Pride Month, my children, and where the Queer Spectrum fits into our research.
Yes, I buried the lede, and I apologize, but—if you’re someone who isn’t comfortable talking or thinking about this subject, I wanted you to consider the vast diversity of religious thought our ancestors represent. Because at the end of the day, embracing our Queer cousins is not about sex, but about accepting that someone else has fundamental beliefs about themselves that you don’t have.
And those fundamental differences don’t have to keep us apart.
A Brief History of Our LGBTQIA2-S Pride Flag from the LA County Dept. of Mental Health
In middle school, my eldest (top row, second from the left) brought home a homework assignment to “write a 350-word essay about a topic in the news” and turned in a passionate and articulate defense of the then-recent legalization of same-sex marriages. The argument turned on the fact that some people who argued against such marriages based their objection on their personal religious beliefs. My brilliant child recognized early on that whether you believe someone is “born that way” or is “making a choice,” the Constitution is supposed to protect people in either case from being forced to practice someone else’s beliefs.
Even at that time (around 2012), most of us didn’t know nearly as much about the variety of human gender and sexuality as we probably do now. I know I’ve learned a ton in the last decade and a half – and I would urge anyone to at least take a few moments to Learn About the Queer Spectrum. But what I remember is how impressed I was that my middle schooler arrived at such a concise legal defense of human rights, before they even understood that fundamental thing about themselves.
My eldest is nearly 30 and engaged to a delightful music teacher. And last October, my youngest (top row, second from the right) was married to someone who could claim several of those flags. I told you about their literal fairy-tale wedding:
More recently, we talked about Richard Zimmerman, whose WWII U.S. Navy discharge raises questions that still make people uncomfortable to discuss.
And, of course, there are dozens of relatives like Dr. Caroline Putnam, who remained single all their lives, and may or may not have considered themselves to be what we would now call LGBTQ—we simply don’t know how many of them may have belonged on that spectrum, or would have known it if they did.
Point being: there is a lot that we don’t know about the people living in the past. There have always been queer and transgender people, but if their society and their family forced them to conceal who they were, we may never know which ones they were.
So, if you’re still not comfortable thinking about it, take your time, and then come back and follow up with some homework later.
Further Reading
Thomas MacEntee is a professional genealogist who writes and speaks about family tree software. He has also written about the subject of finding and documenting LGBT ancestors at MyHeritage and on his platforms:
Mightier Acorns 
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