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!
Good hunting, Cousins!
“Hello, world,” is so 2003…
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:
Kick the tires, drop a note if you see something wrong, and (of course) – Subscribe!
A couple of weeks ago,
David Shaw of Serengenity made a salient comment (emphasis added) on my post about great-great uncle George’s 1911 Callin Family History:
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.
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.
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:
Theoretical: James Callin’s Military Career – June 14, 2024
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.
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.
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.
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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Finding Your LGBT Ancestors at the MyHeritage Knowledge Base.
The Hidden – LGBT Family Members and Genealogy on his Destination: Austin Family blog.
Mary McKee, writing for FindMyPast, recently (2022) provided tips in posts like How to trace LGBT ancestors.
And Stewart Traiman’s Six Generations website has a helpful roundup of posts focusing on LGBT genealogy issues.
I posted this list of my other projects last May, so I thought it was time for an update. These are all ways to support what I’m doing, if you would like to do so. And, of course, you can become a paid subscriber here:
I first encountered the term “hoardings” in England, where I took it to mean the same thing as a billboard. But “advertising hoardings” refers to the large boards erected around a construction site, which can prominently feature printed graphics and designs. And that seems an appropriate description for today’s post.
Last year, I discussed the importance of writing consistently, mentioning that I like to schedule several weeks’ worth of posts in advance so I don’t feel like I’m rushing to meet a deadline. But as of this post, I’m only scheduled for the next two weeks … and while I do have several things in draft, it feels a little bit like a construction site in my draft folder.
So why not use this dusty space to advertise? And what should I advertise? How about me?
Around my 45th birthday, I realized there were several things I wanted to accomplish before turning 50 – first on the list was to take my favorite stories from the blogs I posted in the early 2000s and publish them as a book. My friend Johanna offered to be my editor, and in 2016, we published “Tad’s Happy Funtime” – named for my early blog.
My first (and so far, only) fiction sale was a story called “Silver,” published on the Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine podcast in 2008.
At the time, I was inspired to write by Escape Pod, the weekly science fiction podcast, which launched in 2005. The company has expanded to five podcasts – science fiction, fantasy, horror, Young Adult speculative fiction, and Catscast…which is cat-based speculative fiction. As you would expect.
Escape Artists, Inc. became the Escape Artists Foundation in 2023, a non-profit organization dedicated to producing free, listener-supported stories every week and paying the creators who make it all possible. If you like fiction, it will cost you nothing to visit their company website, EscapeArtists.net, and look around!
Since 2016, I’ve been an associate editor for their Pseudopod Horror Fiction podcast, where, in addition to reading submissions (an adventure in itself), I’ve hosted and narrated several episodes. You can find links to the episodes I’ve been on at this link.
In September 2021, I narrated Escape Pod 802: Sentient Being Blues, a story about a Russian mining robot that gains sentience and starts singing the blues. I had a ball doing it, and now I get to claim (factually) that I’ve appeared on the same podcasts as Anson Mount and Linda Hamilton!
Long-time readers will know that in March 2022, I published my updated Callin Family History on Lulu.com:
This is the one I worked on for seven years – it has a BLUE cover with a portrait of the family of George W. Callin (restored and colorized by Claudia D’Souza, the Photo Alchemist).
I was inspired to start that project by the original 1911 Callin Family History:
This is a replica of the original Callin Family History published by George W. Callin in 1911. It has a RED cover and is much smaller than my Big Blue update. If you’d like a copy of this one, you can get it in either paperback or hardcover:
link to the Paperback version
link to the Hardcover version
And then we have:
This was my secret side-project for much of 2021. My aunt Vicki inherited a book of poetry written by her great-grandfather, John Henry Callin, and she and I collaborated on transcribing it and editing it for publication.
(The link to War Poems will ask you to verify your age due to “explicit content”; that’s because there are grisly descriptions of John’s wartime experiences in some of the poems.)
Last year, I launched another Substack, All Kinds Musick, where I try to connect with the “why” of the broad range of musicks that I love. Occasionally, I manage to write something there that has to do with family stories, so you might have seen a couple of cross-posts.
Are you still with me? That’s very kind. I guess the only thing left to promote is my SoundCloud… which I recently learned still exists!
I only posted a few recordings to try out the service, but I was pretty proud of these two.
“Birthday Disco” is a song I wrote for my girlfriend in 1991 and recorded in the then-new electronic music studio at Glendale (Arizona) Community College.
“Beyond Belief” is probably still my favorite Elvis Costello song, recorded at home in Maryland around 2010.
Got any projects you’re proud of? This seems like a good place to mention them!
Next time, we can go back to talking about family history.
George William Callin (1846-1921) was one of us: a genealogist.
He was active during a time when Americans enjoyed a newfound sense of optimism and possibility about their place in the world and when average men, like those in his family, were documenting their own lives as if they were the Great Men of history.
He published his research in a book called “The Callin Family History” in 1911, paying for the printing of an unknown number of copies bound in red leather. My grandfather received one of those copies, which found its way to me. In 2015, I published a replica of it on Lulu.com so any interested researchers could inspect it for themselves:
I have written before about some of the flaws in this book. George did not cite any of his sources, and he framed several claims about the origins of the Callin family as received wisdom from “our fathers,” who may or may not have had first- or even secondhand knowledge of the “facts” they passed on.
My early research grew out of George’s book. I used the facts he documented to hunt for census records using free Ancestry and FamilySearch records, and eventually expanded to a full Ancestry subscription that allowed me to fill in a lot of gaps using Newspapers.com and Fold3.
I re-published George’s book in 2015 as part of my project to update his work and provide source citations to support (or refute) his claims. Seven years later, I published my own imperfect document: an 800-page behemoth capturing up to seven generations of descendants of the man George referred to as “James 1st,” a Revolutionary War soldier who may or may not have been born in Ireland.
As I built my Callin Family History, it became clear that George didn’t use many official records. More likely, he got his information by speaking to his older relatives and relying on their memories. The closest he comes to referring to records is this statement early on:
Making deductions from the earliest known marriage record, that of Thomas
Callin, grandson of James 1 st , the order of descent would be like this…
Some hints suggest George corresponded with relatives who lived outside of Ohio, but I think he gathered most of the information for his book from relatives who returned to Ohio for annual family reunions, the first of which he hosted in 1906 at his home on “the corner of Pearl and Buttonwood avenue, Bowling Green, Ohio.”1 That article, and those documenting later reunions held in Akron in 19102 and in Bowling Green (again) in 1914, list the attendees, which I can compare with the contents of George’s book to see if I can tell who he met, and who got left out of his book.
(I was going to try to talk about that in this post, but it is turning out to be a deep, time-consuming rabbit hole involving a spreadsheet and multiple lists of 50-75 attendees… some of whom I also missed!)
The upshot is that George was acquainted with many of his cousins and their children who lived in Ohio.
You might recall that I wrote about Dr. Fred Callin a while back, in The Angry Doctor. Dr. Fred was another family historian, and he was listed among the attendees of the 1906 Callin Family reunion, where, according to The Daily Sentinel Tribune:
Away off in Ireland one of the members of the Callin family and written and sent an interesting letter which was read aloud.
I speculate that the writer of this letter might be the person Dr. Fred visited the following year:
I have been skeptical over the years of the family’s claims to Irish heritage, but these tantalizing clues suggest that they had something more solid than a vague legend of the Old Country. I just wish they had recorded their relationship.
While I can puzzle out who George met during his later years, I have to make some educated guesses about who he knew as a child. George knew his parents, William Callin and the former Elizabeth Berlin. He probably only received oral history from them. I know from the essay written by George’s daughter, Rosemary, in 1973, that Elizabeth was illiterate until her sons enlisted to fight in the Civil War. I assume that William was also illiterate, based on this description, which may have been written by his grandson, Byron H. Callin, in 18953:
“He was an industrious, hardy, persevering man, possessing great physical strength, but had only a limited knowledge of books. He had a mind of keen perception and sound judgment, and was well fitted for pioneer life.”
George did not know his grandfather, John Callin, who died of tuberculosis in 1835. He might not have met his grandmother, John’s widow, the former Elizabeth Simon. She lived with her daughter, Eliza (Callin) Ferguson, in Auburn, Indiana, in 1860, and may have moved to Auburn when the Ferguson family moved between 1840 and 1850. George was born in 1846, so depending on how long Elizabeth remained in Ohio, he may have known her at a time when he was old enough to have memories about her. George’s book is the only source I have found that tells us Elizabeth Simon’s maiden name.
George did include descendants of his aunt Eliza Ferguson in his book, so it is possible he met some of them at a reunion, or perhaps traveled to Auburn to visit them. He also included some limited information about his aunt Ann (Callin) Campbell and her surviving children.
His father’s oldest sister, Sarah (Callin) Scott (1801-1872), married and moved to Illinois with her husband before George was born, and no one in Ohio seems to have maintained contact with them. Finding them in Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois, was one of my proudest accomplishments for the revised Callin Family History.
William had six cousins, some of whom are documented in George’s book. Only Thomas Callin remained in Milton Township, and he died three years before George was born. Thomas and his wife, Nancy (Burget) Callin, had ten children, but five of them survived childhood. Most died before George was born, and only the family of Thomas Jefferson (Jeff) Callin was well documented in George’s book. Jeff’s brother, Marquis, was believed to be dead by the time George compiled the book.
Three of Thomas’s siblings married Montgomerys, and we have been discussing them in our “Milton Township Diaspora” posts recently. But George did not seem to know about them at all. George only documented Thomas, Alec, and James; he did not mention Elizabeth, Sarah, or Hugh.
And that makes sense when you think about who would have still been around central Ohio after the Civil War. The Montgomery families (Elizabeth’s and Sarah’s children) were long gone by the time George began researching. And when we talk about the Iowa group (Alec, Hugh, James, and William’s sister, Margaret), they all moved in the decade before George’s birth and probably (mostly) died off.
I breezed past a ton of material in the last five paragraphs, and I do plan on giving more time to each of the families I mentioned. I learn more each time I revisit them, and it has been a while since I re-investigated the folks who moved to Iowa and then (mostly) died out. I have yet to find Alec’s descendants, and I know they ought to exist!
So, with all due gratitude to George for leaving his record in print, we will continue seeking to fill in the gaps.
Newspapers.com, The Daily Sentinel-Tribune, Bowling Green, Ohio, Thursday, August 16, 1906, “Callin Reunion” : accessed 26 May 2025.
Newspapers.com, The Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, Thu, Aug 18, 1910, Page 2, Callins In Reunion : accessed 26 May 2025.
Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County, Ohio , J.H. Beers, Chicago, 1897, pg 923-924.
Born on 11 March 1870, James Henry Opp grew up in the small town of Dansville in Livingston County, New York. His father, Jacob Edward Opp, was a veteran of the Civil War, and his mother was Mary Elizabeth Palmer, descended from a family of New Jersey shipbuilders.
Jacob and Mary had three children: Lillie May, James, and my great-great-grandmother, Emily Amelia Opp. Lillie May was born in 1868 and died in 1881 when she was 13. I don’t know what caused her death, but she was born in Brooklyn, New York, died in Paterson, New Jersey, and was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Dansville.
The Opp family had moved to Paterson by 1880, and Jacob was working as a fireman on the railroad. Paterson was about a 270-mile journey from Dansville, but since Jacob worked for the railroad, and his roots were in Dansville, I imagine they made the trip back to visit family as often as they could.
James married his first wife, Evelene Darcy Stevens (1870-1940), on 14 Jul 1889 in Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey. Evelene was the daughter of Charles H Stevens (1840–1921) and Margaret “Maggie” Ferguson, and she was born on 20 Sep 1870 in Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey.
Evelene’s mother, Maggie, died when Evelene was young. Evelene grew up in the home of her father and stepmother, Carrie W (Palmer) Stevens (1856–1931). As it happens, Carrie Palmer was the youngest sister of James Opp’s mother, Mary Elizabeth (1837-1889).
James and Evelene had a son and a daughter in Jersey City, Richard Dana Opp (1890–1944) and Lillian Elisabeth (Opp) Johnson (1893–1943). Since there are no surviving records from the 1890 Census, we don’t know for sure where they lived, but in 1896, James resided on Pacific Avenue in Jersey City. We know this because The Jersey City News reported on their divorce. The article1 described James as “a commercial traveler” and alleged that Mrs. Opp spent the previous summer in Monroe, New York, where she and the “Fascinating Mr. Rogers” spent enough time together to create a scandal, which prompted James to sue her for a divorce.
James appears to have gained custody of the two children, and Evelene lived in her father’s home until she married George W Gifford (1868–1926) in Manhattan on 11 Aug 1900. The Giffords lived in Brooklyn until after 1915, when they moved to Newark, New Jersey. George died in 1926, and Evelyn (using that spelling of her name) resided in Essex County, New Jersey, until she died on 5 June 1940.
The timing of James’s second marriage seems unusual, but I can only tell you what the records say. According to the records, he married Lillian Jones (1871–1915) on 20 January 1896 in Newark, Essex, New Jersey. You will notice that the report from The Jersey City News about the hearing of his divorce suit was dated 10 June 1896. I don’t know how to account for that, but they remained together for nearly twenty years.
It’s hard to know what sort of business James was in, but in 1900, he and his company went bankrupt. According to the official notice published in the Brooklyn Eagle,2 his partner, Arthur Grundy of Cape Town, South Africa, seems to have disappeared and left his partners, James Opp and Mortimer Clark, to the mercy of the U.S. bankruptcy court.
Meanwhile, James and Lillian had three children in Brooklyn, New York. Only their son, Julian Thayer Opp (1899–1978), survived to adulthood. Lucine J Opp was born in 1901, but died on 12 July 1902 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York. They had another daughter named Emily Amelia, after James’s sister, on 23 February 1904. Emily was baptized in the United Methodist Church at ten years old, and she was only 12 when she died on 15 January 1917. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow, near her sister.
Sadly, Emily Amelia had outlived her mother, Lillian, who died in 1915. The records don’t tell us what kind of person Lillian was, but it is easy to imagine that James relied on her through these difficult events. And to lose their daughter so soon after losing his wife, we can only imagine how he felt in 1917.
So, as we discussed last time, James found himself a 45-year-old widower in October 1915. His family lived in Newark, and James ran an export business in New York. I don’t know what circumstances put a middle-aged widower in the orbit of a 20-year-old mother of two who was living in the Bronx, married to a machinist, but we surmise that he married Jessica Viola (Owens) Slaker and adopted her two children before moving to Elmira, Chemung County, New York, where their blended family included Jesse’s parents and sister.
We don’t have all the records we would expect to tell us this part of the story, but we do know that James and Jessica had a son, James Henry Opp, Jr., who was born on 13 October 1917. We also know that Jessica’s first husband, Stanley Slaker (aka Slicinski), had been listed as “married with two children” in June of that year on his World War I draft registration, and that he enlisted in the U.S. Army on 11 October, two days before his wife delivered her son to her new husband.
Whatever happened in 1917, early 1918 saw a big business opportunity for James. The Elmira Star-Gazette reported on 30 January 19183 that a newly incorporated “Aluminum War Manufacturing Company, Inc.” was founded in Albany, and would absorb the National Aluminum Works of Elmira, as well as the Aluminum Distributing Company and Toyphone Company, both of New York City. James H. Opp was named as a vice president in the new company, under the president, John E. Potter.
In March 1919, the same paper reported that James H. Opp had purchased the home of Myer Friendly at 510 West Church Street and moved there from Newark. Presumably, that is the home we see the Opp family living in on the 1920 Census. In May, it was reported that James had purchased the interests of Mr. Potter and that the company would undergo an expansion. His son, Richard, was reportedly “in charge of the operations at the plant.”
Things took a turn in April 1921, when stockholders began to question the inventory and whereabouts of Richard D. Opp.4 Within a few days, James was ousted and his family left Elmira, deeding the Friendly house to the Aluminum Ware Company and returning the home’s furniture to creditors to satisfy their debts.5
The extended family relocated to Elizabeth in Union County, New Jersey, where James’s occupation was listed as “Salesman; Electrical.” He and Jessica had a daughter there in 1926. Not long after his father-in-law, Walter Owens, died in 1933, the family moved into Newark, where they remained until James died in 1941.
James died on 1 August 1941 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. Jessica stayed in New Jersey until around 1962, and she spent her later years in California.
For all of the information we do have about the life of James Henry Opp and his family, there is so much left unsaid. Was he the villain or the victim in these stories of businesses and marriages gone wrong? How well did all of these people living in his blended family get along? Were they supportive of each other, or were there tensions and dramas that were left out of the story?
As I said several times, the timing of the records suggests that James and his wives did not have conventional courtships. He married Lillian before it is clear he was divorced from Evelene, and one interpretation of his marriage to Jessica is that he stole her from her first husband. His various business ventures imply that he could be aggressive and took risks, but there isn’t necessarily any evidence that he did anything wrong.
All we can do sometimes is keep digging and assume the best.
Newspapers.com, The Jersey City News, Jersey City, New Jersey, Wed, Jun 10, 1896, Page 2, Divorce Suit Heard Before a Special Master Today.
Newspapers.com, Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn, New York, Thu, May 24, 1900, Page 17, Opp & Grundy bankruptcy notice.
Newspapers.com, Elmira Star-Gazette, Elmira, New York, Wed, Jan 30, 1918, Page 13, “Aluminum War Co., Million Dollar Firm To Be Located Here.“
Newspapers.com, Elmira Star-Gazette, Elmira, New York, Tue, Apr 19, 1921, Page 9, “Sockholders’ Representative Takes Charge of The Affairs At Aluminum Company Factory.“
Newspapers.com, Elmira Star-Gazette, Elmira, New York, Fri, Apr 22, 1921, Page 7, “James H. Opp Turns Over Property To Aluminum Company As Protection.”
When we last talked about Sarah (Montgomery) Davidson and her family, they set out from Fulton County, Indiana, and took to the Oregon Trail in 1852:
Sarah and Henry Davidson took their four children and their adopted niece, Sarah Farrell, on the trip; we have only talked about Sarah Farrell’s life in Oregon.
But the Davidsons established themselves in what is now Halsey, Linn County, Oregon, and had two more children after arriving there. Sadly, Frances Mary Davidson (1850-1855), the youngest Davidson to make the trip from Indiana to Oregon, died soon after her two youngest siblings were born.
There are a lot of stories to explore, but here is a brief introduction to the Davidson children:
The eldest of their children, Rebecca Lucretia (Davidson) Murphy (1842-1917), married Henderson Warren Murphy (1835-1918), the son of John Eccles Murphy, the captain of the wagon train that brought the Davidsons to Oregon. Henderson and Lucretia farmed and raised livestock in Oregon and Washington Territory, and raised seven children. They eventually settled back in South Lebanon, Linn County, Oregon.
William Montgomery Davidson (1845-1939) married Sarah Rosetta “Rose” Morris (1848–1928), another Linn County neighbor whose family came to Oregon in 1853. They had seven children, six of whom survived to adulthood.
Theodore Bruce Davidson (1848-1932) had eight children with his first wife, Margaret Ann Work (1855-1915), two of whom grew up to become doctors. He married his second wife, Margaret Ellen (Waggoner) Kizer, in 1917. Theodore was a dairy farmer, but he retired from his dairy farm after his parents died and he inherited the family homestead.
Records say that Samuel Thurston Davidson (1853-1889) was born on the Oregon Trail, in the Idaho Territory, possibly in what is now Utah. He married Susanna Elizabeth Briggs (1850–1910) about 1878. They had a son and a daughter before his unexpected death at age 35.
Named for her aunt and her grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Davidson (1854-1929) was the only Davidson child born on the family farm after arriving in Oregon. She married her first husband, Charles W Malson (b. 1845), around 1874. Little is known about Charles, and they divorced in 1894. They had five children, but two of them may have died around 1880.
Mary’s second husband was Richard Ross Cunningham (1849–1926), a widower who had lost his wife and two children in 1891.
Sometimes it feels like great Historical Events overwhelm the small human events that make up our family histories. The Oregon Trail story is cemented into the American Experience, in part thanks to the old Oregon Trail computer game.
As evidence that this was the largest event in the lives of this particular family, almost every one of their obituaries mentions the journey to Oregon, and most refer to them as “pioneers” with some reference to the famous Trail, by date if not by name.
Most of the Davidsons’ descendants remained in Oregon, though a few exceptions spread out across the neighboring states, into Washington, or down into California. One of Sarah Murphy’s sons, Elbert George Wells (1890–1961), suffered from lung trouble and moved to the drier environment of Imperial Valley in California. There he married Loreto Villa-Escusa (1895–2000). Three generations of their family spent time in both Calexico and Mexicali, straddling the U.S.-Mexican border.
One of the most adventurous descendants was Elbert’s sister, Goldie Ruth Wells (1893–1979). She became a missionary to the Belgian Congo, where she assisted in establishing the mission station at Mondombe in 1919. She was decorated by the King of Belgium with the Order of Leopold II in 1937 for her long and outstanding service in the Congo. When she was in America, she was a popular guest speaker in churches throughout the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest.1
I think it’s unlikely that any of the grandchildren of Henry and Sarah Davidson had any memory of Indiana, let alone of Milton Township, Ohio. Sarah was only ten years old when her father, Caleb Montgomery, left Milton Township. She probably carried vague memories of some of her cousins, but almost certainly had no memory of the Callin family. And yet, six or seven generations later, her descendants are just as related to James Callin as I am.
Henry died on 19 February 1894 at age 75 and was buried in the Pugh Cemetery in Shedd, Linn County. Sarah remained in Halsey until moving to South Lebanon, Linn County, before 1910. She died there on 8 May 1918 at age 93 and was buried near her husband.
And in all likelihood, little memory of their lives before the Oregon Trail survived them.
Yocum, Edith Eberle, (1899-1966), They went to Africa: biographies of missionaries of the Disciples of Christ, United Christian Missionary Society, Missionary Education Department, Indianapolis, IN, 1945; biography on page 40.
Mightier Acorns 