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.
  • Intentions vs. Reality

    Intentions vs. Reality

    A cautionary tale about subscriptions.

    Somehow, a decade or so ago, I signed up for Ancestry’s Worldwide Access membership around the holidays. That means that every Christmas, when budgets are being trimmed with tinsel and assaulted by cats, my wife would find a not-quite-$500 charge that she hadn’t taken into account.

    Now that we’re a bit older and the kids are all independent, it’s not the problem that it once might have been, but it is a large expense that coincides with the holidays. My wife has been asking me to change our billing cycle, and this year, I remembered to do something about it.

    Ancestry allows users to “pause” a subscription, so I did that. Rather than buy my annual membership in December, I hit pause until February. What that means is that Ancestry keeps all of my trees intact, with the sources I have attached, but I can’t view any of the sources that aren’t included in their free membership level.

    And that feels like a problem, because after ten years, I have put an investment of nearly $5,000 and untold hours of my labor into building what I have built on Ancestry, and there is no mechanism for maintaining that investment of money and labor in any permanent way. At least not one that doesn’t commit my future cousins and descendants to paying Ancestry more money.

    Copyright and Public Records

    U.S. copyright laws are notoriously (and needlessly) complex beasts, and while I don’t like the way that complexity seems to always work against someone like me (ie, someone who is not a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders), it’s not the fact that someone is making money off my labor that bothers me. What bothers me is the way the maze of rules and guidelines that outline “the Right Way” to do things never leads to me benefiting from my labor.

    The first thing to understand is that Ancestry does not hold, and does not claim a copyright on public records – but they do claim copyright on images they made of those records and the indexes they made of those records.

    Ancestry does not claim an exclusive right to images already in the public domain that it has converted into a digital format. However, the Websites contain images or documents that are protected by copyrights or that, even if in the public domain, are subject to restrictions on reuse. By agreeing to these Terms and Conditions, you agree to not reuse these images or documents except that you may reuse public domain images so long as you only use small portions of the images or documents for personal use.

    (Ancestry Terms and Conditions, Revision as of August 1, 2014)

    “The Right Way” to do what I do, from Ancestry’s point of view, is to pay them for access to their proprietary images and indices, and then cite them on sites like WikiTree (using their Sharing Links) or include smaller screenshots (as I often do here) with attribution.

    In practice, that looks like this. For example, when I wrote about Finding John Witter, and built his WikiTree profile, the source citation looks like this – see the “Ancestry Sharing Link” in the third citation:

    Detail from Sources section of “Johannis Witter” WikiTree profile.

    If you follow that link, you go to the Ancestry page created when I generated the link using the Sourcer App – and this is all you get unless you are also a paying Ancestry member:

    Ancestry Sharing Link landing page for the 1790 federal census.

    And as unsatisfying as that is, especially for those who can’t afford a full Ancestry membership, that’s the best we can expect. A few individual WikiTree profiles might be able to get away with re-uploading an image of a census page or other record, but that is a lot of work and it puts the user at risk for violating WikiTree’s terms of service about hosting copyrighted images.

    You can also try to find other sources for the same records, but… if they aren’t on a free site like FamilySearch.org, you won’t have a lot of options.

    The Right Way Forward

    While I’m not entirely satisfied with the prospect of leaving behind a well-documented tree that no one will be able to access without paying a hefty sum to a corporation, I don’t have any other real options at this point. I’m using Ancestry and WikiTree “the right way,” and plan to keep doing so. I just need to figure out a better End Goal. I don’t know if that will end up being some form of hard copy publication or a digital Thing(tm) to pass on to posterity. I guess I will have to keep paying attention to the rest of the community to see what they are doing.

    If you’re not already aware of the annual RootsTech convention, it is happening in March, and you can read about it and register here: RootsTech 2026

    You can also find other writers trying to tackle the topic; here is Linda Stufflebean – Going Digital with Genealogy Research (Nov 2024).

    And you can find more folks, particularly in the Substack communities, through Robin Stewart on GenStack – check out her “Your Sixteens” challenge if you need prompts for writing down the stories you have uncovered with your research.

  • Ahnentafel #8: Bob Callin (1920-2007)

    Ahnentafel #8: Bob Callin (1920-2007)

    Let’s begin our new weekly Ahnentafel series with my paternal grandfather.

    Sprucing Up a Profile

    One of the great things about a wiki – like WikiTree – is the way it saves the previous versions of every page. There are a lot of reasons why this is great. For one thing, if someone else makes edits that turn out not to be correct, you can easily go back to an earlier version of the page. But for my purposes today, the great thing is that I can show you some “before” and “after” views of Grandpa Bob’s page.

    If you click on this link, you can see that I replaced the placeholder information that had been in the Biography since 2019 with a complete, sourced biography on 1 December 2021.

    In the 5 years since I made those edits, I’ve learned a lot about making better source citations on WikiTree. You can do a lot more with a citation than you could do even in 2021, giving any interested cousins access to the documents you used to write your biography, and often allowing you to link to images of the documents, where available.

    And creating those source citations is easier than ever if you install the WikiTree Sourcer App. (Here’s a handy How-To guide.) You will still need to review any citations you generate using the app carefully to make sure they have the information you expect, and to make sure they display correctly after adding them to your profile. (All magic comes with a price, dearie!)

    Expanding a Biography

    The version of Bob’s biography that I added in 2021 came from The Callin Family History, which I published a couple of months later. Since then, I’ve learned a few things and found a few more sources and stories I’d like to add. When you look at the profile now, the sources should all have publicly viewable links to Ancestry documents or media files (particularly for his diplomas). You can also see that I added small details, like:

    • The story of how he was accidentally scalded by boiling water as a 2-year-old, which was found in a newspaper clipping from his mother’s scrapbook.
    • Two 1950 Census records showing his young family living in Glendale while he pastored a church near Prescott.
    • A possibly apocryphal story about his name, added in the Research Notes section.

    There is always more to add, such as the small details gleaned from transcriptions of letters written by Nancy, his parents, and others. Some of those details are already touched on in his obituary; some of them give the reader a sense of the family’s relationship dynamics, and hint at the drama in their lives.

    But you also have to consider whether a future reader of this WikiTree profile will be interested enough in those details to make it worth the effort of documenting, citing, and uploading images of artifacts to websites.

    What Might Not Make the Cut

    It’s impossible to distill everything you knew and loved about a person into a sourced and documented history, so WikiTree also has a section for adding “Memories” – special personal recollections about a loved one that might not have a source outside of you. (I added a Memory about Grandpa Bob’s love of western novels and trains.)

    There are other things that probably bear mentioning, but are hard to include on a WikiTree profile. We know that Bob was an aircraft mechanic during the war, and I remember him showing me this postcard of the AT-6, a training variant of the T-6 Texan, and telling me that was the aircraft he maintained at Luke and Yuma airfields, where U.S. pilots trained. I also know that he got his personal pilot’s license in 1968 – we have this photo of him with his airplane, and a pilot’s log that was in with Great-grandma Bertha’s scrapbook and all of the Callin/Witter/Huff photos.

    The AT-6 – like those Bob worked on during the war.
    Bob’s time piloting small airplanes

    But there are a lot of unknowns involved in telling that part of his story. I don’t know why he stopped flying in 1971, for example. It may have proved too expensive to keep up; he may have decided to prioritize family camping adventures. I do remember that he was very proud to see me in my U.S. Air Force uniform when I came home for my first visit after enlisting in 1994. (See the featured image.)

    And then there are the hints of family strife.

    When Brothers Part

    Bob’s brother, Norman, died in Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1964. I never met Norman’s family, even though I lived in Baltimore County for 15 years. But I may have found a small clue to understanding Uncle Norman’s Missing Family.

    When Bob and Nancy were living in Glendale, his folks, John and Bertha, lived in Orlando, FL, and wrote to them often. In November 1948, John mentioned something vague when discussing the family’s plans for Thanksgiving:

    I don’t know for sure what we will do. Norman + Ruth + family are trying to come down here [to Florida, from Baltimore] but he has been so sick so much I don’t know whether they will be able to make it or not. Norman is back at work. Sorry they have to act as they do t’word you, but just forget it. They will see the error someday.

    I know that Bob and Norman visited Florida at the same time in the 1950s, because I inherited some photos of them at the beach. In one, you can see their dad, John, just off camera, so that visit must have occurred before 1956. I would guess that both photos were taken on the same day, since Norman appears to be wearing the same shirt in both. (I’ll refrain from comment on Bob’s attire!)

    Bob (left), Yvonne, and Norman (c. 1955)
    John (off left), Bob and Norman (c. 1955)

    But while I can see the contours of a story there, it’s not enough to assert that I know anything about the nature of their relationships. And since everyone involved has died, we may never know what happened.

    Ancillary Editing

    For now, I’m happy to have Grandpa Bob’s profile as complete and up-to-date as I can make it. While reviewing his page, I can also take a look at his siblings’ pages, and see if there are any improvements I can add to them or their childrens’ pages. (I owe Aunt Vicki’s page an overdue update, too. We certainly have enough material for a proper biography!)

    Next week, look for “Ahnentafel #9: Nancy Witter” – and if you’re reading this in the future, look for a link to it in the comments section below.

  • Who We Displaced

    Who We Displaced

    About 1810, James Callin brought his family west from Pennsylvania and established a farm in what is now Milton Township, Ashland County, Ohio. James and his brother, John, raised 15 children on that farm, most of whom were born in Pennsylvania before the families relocated.

    Finding records of the Callin family’s arrival in Ohio have been fruitless, so far, but we do see both brothers listed in Milton Township on the 1820 Census, so we know they were there. We have so far taken the word of John’s grandson, George W. Callin, who claimed in his 1911 Callin Family History that James came to Ohio from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1810, and that John followed with his family in 1816.

    We also know from the history of the area that Ohio became a state in 1803. The Lewis and Clark Expedition began to survey the territory in 1803, which made it possible for the Federal Land Office system to sell that land to white settlers. Before that, the American army fought a campaign known as the Northwest Indian War, which culminated in the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers, near modern day Maumee. We have talked about how it is possible that the James and John Callin listed in the Kentucky Mounted Volunteer Cavalry present at that battle were the father and uncle of the James and John Callin who settled in Milton Township.

    Breaking the Binary

    Humans love binary thinking. This is why so much of the history you find is centered on conflict. The stories we repeat tend to reduce those conflicts to Us vs. Them, with clear lines and precise dates. We like heroes (Us) and villains (Them) and only enough nuance to drive a dramatic narrative in which the heroes win and the villains die or limp away to cry in obscurity.

    Even when we try to break that pattern, to “correct” the narrative, we have a tendency to simply re-cast who the heroes and villains were, or add a third group that we can think of as “neutral” – which causes its own set of problems when you are trying to find out What Really Happened.

    If the father of James and John Callin fought in the Northwest Indian War, his sons probably knew it. They almost certainly shared many of the same fears of the native populations that other European settlers carried – as shown in the stories passed down by two Callin families we talked about in Fear of the Foreigner. “Breaking the binary” means altering the formula of their story, allowing for more nuance than the traditional European view allows for.

    Altering the formula does not mean changing the facts. The facts are that white settlers like James and John Callin were given an unprecedented opportunity for people of their class and status: to acquire land. That acquisition meant everything to them. Not just wealth, not just status that was unattainable in Ireland or rural England, and not just survival. A chance at controlling their own lives. And no matter who they saw as a threat to that chance, they were going to do whatever was necessary to take it.

    They didn’t see themselves as “white settlers” or “European” at that time. They saw themselves as part of a bewildering kaleidoscope of culture, ethnicity, and religion. Scots-Irish Presbyterians like the Callins probably had a British identity thrust upon them, but even within the broad category of “British” you had a variety of competing groups of English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish people who spoke their own languages and belonged to various Protestant groups or Catholic traditions (and possibly a few less official holdovers from centuries-old Celtic and Norse traditions). The “Dutch” among them would have included any number of people from early colonial Netherlands, as well as more recent German-speaking arrivals with their own religions and political allegiances. The U.S. version of North American history also tends to forget or minimize the presence of French and Spanish groups, especially those who lived outside of the British colonies.

    To the Callin family, that crowd would have been reduced to “Us” in the coming generations of storytelling. So who was reduced to “Them”?

    The Wyandotte Nation

    The Wyandotte Nation is a Native American Tribe of 7,150 tribal citizens, headquartered in Wyandotte, Oklahoma. According to their website,1 they are made up of “remnants of the Tionontati, Attignawantan and Wenrohronon (Wenro), all unique independent tribes, who united in 1649-50 after being defeated by the Iroquois Confederacy.”

    The origins of these tribes can be traced back to an earlier Iroquois group known as the Wendat. By the 15th century, the precontact Wendat occupied the large area from the north shores of most of the present-day Lake Ontario, northward up to the southeastern shores of Georgian Bay. From this homeland, they encountered the French explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1615. They historically spoke the Wyandot language, a Northern Iroquoian language. They were believed to number more than 30,000 at the time of European contact in the 1610s to 1620s.

    The Wendat were not a single nation, but a confederacy of several nations. The bewildering kaleidoscope of culture, ethnicity, and religion that described the encroaching European settlers certainly described the people who were already living on the continent. The Wyandot people who survived diseases and wars brought by the French, Dutch, and British colonists were displaced from Lake Ontario into the area south of the Great Lakes. They tended to ally themselves with the French, who called them the Huron. Their adversaries, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Five Nations, or Iroquois), tended to work against the Huron and allied themselves with the Dutch, and later, with the English who displaced the Dutch.

    Disease cut the numbers of these Huron/Wyandot people in half, and their conflict with the Haudenosaunee drove them out in 1649, into the upper Lake Michigan region, where they settled at Green Bay, then at Michilimackinac. One hundred years later, after surviving numerous conflicts over trade with other indigenous nations and Europeans, the Huron-British Treaty of 1760 recognized the Huron (Wendat) as a distinct nation and guaranteed that the British would not interfere with the nation’s internal affairs.

    And End to Centuries of Ongoing Conflict

    Of course, the 1760 treaty wouldn’t end conflict in the area. A treaty with one European government was only good until that government ceded territory to another European government after one of the endless series of wars going on around the globe. After the British ceded the Northwest territory to the new American government, the Wyandot would join the Northwest Confederacy and spend nearly 10 years trying to prevent American settlement in their lands.

    But after 1795, the Treaty of Greenville forced the Northwest Confederacy to cede southern and eastern Ohio and to recognize the U.S. rather than Britain as the ruling power in the Old Northwest. For the Wyandot people, this was the beginning of a 35 year period of struggle that would end when the U.S. forced them to relocate to Oklahoma.

    For settlers like the Callin family, 1795 represented a watershed moment when the possibility of truly breaking free of the centuries of conflict in Europe and finding a place they could build their own lives on their own land became a tangible thing. If we choose to believe that James Callin fought in the Northwestern Indian War, we can also imagine that his motivation was to finally live free of the constraints of Europe’s overbearing conflicts over religion, feudal fealty, and constant conquest. I don’t say that to excuse the cruelty the new American government chose to inflict on the survivors of the defeated indigenous confederacies, but only to add the perspective that from James Callin’s point of view, he was just one individual taking advantage of a chance that few have ever had.

    If that chance came at the expense of strangers he would never have to face, he probably found it easy to dehumanize them and ignore their suffering, allowing his God to take the blame or credit for whatever happened. And by 1830, when the Wyandotte nation was removed from Ohio to Oklahoma, his grandchildren had already begun to outgrow their new homeland and move further West.

    Dispossessed vs. Diaspora

    Humanity has learned a lot in the 200 years since the Callin family settled in the State of Ohio. And we still have a lot to learn. For example, I don’t really know for sure that any specific Wyandotte people spent much time on the land now known as Richland County, Ohio. They, or rivals groups, may have passed by or camped there. No one would have recorded that information. But I know they were in the general area, and I know what happened to them.

    If I had the ability to go back and tell James Callin about the miracles and wonders that would come about within a few generations of his, I doubt I could change his mind about the wars he fought, or make him fear his indigenous neighbors less. Perhaps if he had been able to see that we would figure out how to fight off disease with sanitation and vaccines, or feed millions of people with industrial fertilizers, he might have been able to see the Wyandotte people as less of a threat.

    I’d like to think that, armed with the knowledge I have, I would have done something differently in that time, but if I had lived then, I would not have had knowledge of what was to come. No one can see the future. We can barely see the present, and look how hard we have to work to see the past!

    So I’ll keep doing my best to see my ancestors, and those they impacted, as whole people with entire cultures and histories that I can barely wrap my mind around. And I’ll do it for as long as I’m allowed to do so.

    1. I encourage you to visit https://wyandotte-nation.org/ and take some time to get to know the history and people who remain. ↩︎

  • A New Weekly Feature: Our Ahnentafel

    When we are just starting out in genealogy the best piece of advice we get is to “start local.”

    Depending on your immediate family, this might be very simple, or (more likely) unexpectedly complicated and messy.1 Growing up, I was taught to think of the classic nuclear family (one dad, one mom, 2 and 1/2 kids) as “Normal” – with the assumption being that mom and dad also came from a similar family.

    Of course, reality is an endlessly inventive and creative beast, and families can vary wildly from what I was taught to believe was “Normal.” So wildly, in fact, that “Normal” turns out to be a rare oddity.

    (Would you like to see a song about it? Well, here ya go!)

    Sorting out the Who’s Who of your immediate family is step one. Talk to the living, learn their stories. If your grandparents, aunts, and uncles are still there when you are starting out on your genealogy journey, learn what they can tell you about where they lived, how they grew up, and what they experienced. Take the best notes you can! (Record who said what for your future citations!) Along the way, you’ll learn about their parents and find yourself needing some kind of family tree software to keep track of them all.

    Building That Tree

    Whether you come from a blended family or from a sprawling extended family, or from a relatively small “nuclear” family, finding out about your ancestors starts with who you know, but takes you back through time, beyond what the living can tell you.

    That’s where the research comes in, and that’s where all of the different systems for reporting who your ancestors were can start to make sense.

    The Ahnentafel system is one way to do that. Actually, if you check out that Wikipedia article, you’ll see that there are several systems that share some of the same characteristics – but basically we’re talking about a way to count backward through ALL of your previous generations. Usually, it starts with yourself as the subject:

    The subject (or proband) of the ahnentafel is listed as No. 1, the subject’s father as No. 2 and the mother as No. 3, the paternal grandparents as No. 4 and No. 5 and the maternal grandparents as No. 6 and No. 7, and so on, back through the generations. Apart from No. 1, who can be male or female, all even-numbered persons are male, and all odd-numbered persons are female. In this schema, the number of any person’s father is double the person’s number, and a person’s mother is double the person’s number plus one. Using this definition of numeration, one can derive some basic information about individuals who are listed without additional research.

    You or your family may also need to account for adoptions, non-paternity events, same-sex couples and/or transgender individuals – and some software and online trees have begun to account for those factors. The Ahnentafel concept is designed to count your biological ancestors, so before 1978, when in vitro fertilization became practical, it will probably work for 99.9% of families without much need for adaptation.

    Outgrowing “My Sixteens”

    If you’ve been a Mightier Acorn for more than a few months, you’ve probably read about My Sixteen and Her Sixteen – my effort to document all 16 of my 2nd-great grandparents, and all of my wife’s 16. The goal for that extended exercise was to make sure that all 32 of those individuals have WikiTree profiles. (And there are copious links on both of those Sixteen pages!)

    I’m ready for the next step, which would be to move back to the next oldest generation – but I’ve also learned a lot about what makes a good WikiTree profile good, and before we go further back in time, I feel like I need to do some “gardening” on the more recent generations.

    So what I’m going to do is this:

    Starting with my own kids as “1.” (the “probands”), I’m going to skip the living generations (me and my wife, 2 & 3; our parents, 4-7), and start with the Great Eight. Every week, staring next Friday with #8, Bob Callin, we will look at the health of their WikiTree profile, and I’ll talk about what I’ve learned about the life story of each person, how I learned it, and what I might still need to learn.

    If you want a preview of who is coming up from week to week, there is an easy way for WikiTree users: go to my WikiTree profile (Callin-50), click the pulldown arrow to the right of my name, and look for “Tree Apps”.

    Once you’re there, change from “Fan Chart” to “Ahnentafel Ancestor List” using the pulldown:

    As we work our way back through the earlier generations, we should learn a thing or two about a thing or two – and maybe if you follow along with your own Ahnentafel, we might even find some overlap…

    Because we’re all cousins if you go back far enough!

    Not Just My Idea

    Lest you think I might be stealing ideas from others without giving them credit, I’ve seen other genealogy bloggers do some form of this for years:

    Feel free to link to your own Ahnentafel or “52 Ancestors” series, or that of someone you follow, in the comments!

    Bonus Internet points if your list and mine have the same people on them!

    1. See “Counting Cousins” for example ↩︎

  • Taking a Brief Pause

    I realize that everyone is busy this time of year, so nobody would be likely to notice if I just skipped a couple of posts, but I didn’t want to leave you wondering if I plan to come back – I do!

    But my house is very full, and my attention will be on the living this week. Our weird traditions this year will include goofy “winter olympics” games, and a fire in the back yard while watching the grand-dogs gambol and frolic.

    Here’s hoping that you and yours are well, and braced for the New Year.

    Until Boxing Day…

  • The Last of the Milton Township Diaspora

    The Last of the Milton Township Diaspora

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

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

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

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

    The Last to Leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Meet the Fergusons

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Patterns and Dynasties

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

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

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

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

    Counting Cousins: An Open Question

    How many cousins do you have?

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

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

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

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

    There are Eight of Us, But…

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

    How many cousins do each of my First Cousins have?

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

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

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

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

    Expanding the Circle

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

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

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

    Who’s Got a Number?

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

  • Placeholder for an Untellable Story

    Placeholder for an Untellable Story

    A sexual predator has died.

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

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

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

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

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

    Facts and Feelings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Nomanisan Island

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

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

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

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

    Or

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

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

    Leading to

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

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

    No Closure For Abusers

    There is more than one kind of abuse.

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

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

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

    The End of the Story

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

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

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

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

    The truth is, most of our stories are Untellable.

  • Two Girls Called Sabra Ann

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

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

    So Many Namesakes

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

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

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

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

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

    Remembering through Mothers

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

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

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

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

    Sabra Ann and Sabra Ann

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

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

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

    Sabry died just a month before Amelia was born.

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

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

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

  • The Giving Season

    The Giving Season

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

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

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

    Use Your Library, Boost Your Budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What to Do With Your Bigger Budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Support Your Local Genealogical Society and/or Library

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

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

    1. Belanger, Ashley, Ars Technica, “Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost”, 3 Nov 2025. ↩︎