Some General Announcements

Hello, cousins!

This week, I wanted to make some announcements about things to come, progress on The Book, and some tidying I've done around the blog.

Upcoming Posts:

I have posts planned out through October, starting with the descendants of Great Uncle George's daughter, Minerva, which will take us through the next three weeks. After that, I realized I had skipped two significant branches of the descendants of Elizabeth Callin Montgomery, which we'll cover over the course of the following seven weeks. (Yeah! There's quite a few of them!)

For those new to the blog, or trying to figure out what's going on, I tidied up the page "Revising the CFH" so it's a little more organized and a little more consistent. As I'm drafting future posts, I've been adding them to that "table of contents" so if you hit some dead links, rest assured that they'll all be live by mid-October!

I'm kicking around ideas for more kinds of content (podcast? videos?) and I'm trying to invest more time into contacting local genealogical and historical societies and reaching out to the living descendants of the folks I'm blogging about so they know we're here. (Any help you might offer to contact living cousins would be much appreciated - even if it's just to send me their contact info.)

The Book

I have devoted some time to compiling the first draft, and I think I have some choices to make. If you have an opinion on these choices, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm using RootsMagic's publishing feature to import the rather massive Ancestry tree and push out a (very, very large) Word document. Then, I've organized the book by Generation, using the NEHGS standard (it's similar to the outline format I've started using on the blog).

This means I have some rather short chapters up front - "Generation 1" is James, "Generation 2" is his two sons, "Generation 3" is their children, etc.  Generations 1 through 4 run to about 100 pages, altogether; but then Generation 5 runs to over 360.

Generation 6 is where we begin to see living people - I count three of you in Gen 6 who are still with us! (For whatever it's worth, I'm in Generation 8, and my kids are Gen 9.) I have not begun editing that section, so I don't know what the page count might turn out to be.

Because I have at least 1,281 living people documented on my spreadsheet (which means there are closer to 1,500 living people descended from James Callin) I'm debating whether I should confine the Book to Generations 1-6, with selected biographies from those of you who have already given me permission to include your names in print.

I've also been trying to find the right way to document the sources I have used in my research. Let's just say that the Bibliography promises to be a couple hundred pages... and the footnotes number in the thousands within each chapter. (I estimate there are 10-20 footnotes per page, on average.)

So, to get this thing done and into libraries, where it might have a chance at preserving our family's story, I'm considering different ideas. I think the best plan might be to publish Volume One with Generations 1-5, and plan to follow up with the next three-to-five generations in a few years' time, so I can have a chance to make contact with more cousins and get their help telling the stories of more recent generations.

I haven't made any final decisions, yet, and I need to find out how long the finished product will be before I can determine "how big is too big" with the different available publishing services.

So if you have an opinion, or want to help make this happen faster, please do let me know!

Outside the Blog

I do hope you'll reach out if you have questions or suggestions - I've worked hard to expand my presence on social media, and make this work more "findable" for distant cousins.

You can email "mightieracorns" at Gmail.com.

And we have:
a Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/MightierAcorns/
a Twitter feed - https://twitter.com/MightierAcorns
a Ko-Fi cup - https://ko-fi.com/mightieracorns


...and we still have the private/cousins only Callin Family History group.

Most of my work is on Ancestry, where I've tried to make my trees publicly available. If you're looking for more information, you should be able to view these with a free Ancestry.com account (let me know if you can't):

Callin Family History - G.W. Callin 1911 - this is where I collect the research behind these posts

The Robert Callin project - my paternal grandpa Bob is the "Home person" of this tree, and while there's a bit of overlap with the CFH - 1911 tree, this is where I will be working on his maternal side in the future.
Surnames include:

• Simon
• Berlin (multiple spelling possibilities)
• Baughman
• Hale/Hales
• Greenlee
• Bollman
• Waters
• Walker
• Bowen
• Spitler

The Nancy Witter project - my paternal grandma Nancy comes from a couple of interesting and large Pennsylvania Dutch (or at least Protestant German) families, and has at least one line of Scottish ancestry.
Surnames include:

• Witter
• Shriver
• Huff
• Stroud
• Murray
• Bender

The Russell Clark project - centers on my maternal grandpa Russ, with some brick walls I may only be able to bust through if I visit Kentucky.
Surnames include:

• Clark
• Bellamy
• Reynolds
• West (possibly twice!)

The Alberta Tuttle project - is my maternal grandmother's family; I've been able to find a lot of material, and will need to take some time to make sense of a lot of it!
Surnames include:

• Tuttle
• Zindle
• Plumsted
• Hart
• Wells
• Frey
• Opp
• Karcher
• Welch
• Palmer
• Peterson
• Hoffman

And ALL of the above are documented to some extent on WikiTree. I am "Callin-50" there, and you should be able to see a tree with all of these ancestors here: https://www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Callin-50/5

I hope to hear from you!