CFH First Draft: Mary Ann Callin Day

 This post is part of an ongoing series, sharing the first draft of my Revised Callin Family History. 

Mary Ann Callin is the 59th person in a descendant report beginning with the earliest known ancestor of our Callin family, (1.) James Callin. This descendant report uses the Register Style of the New England Historic and Genealogical Society. 

Please use the Contact Form (at right) to send questions or corrections.

Stout of Heart

There are some stories that get told over and over again; that's how they become legend.

You've read the beginning of this story before. You've read how James Callin may have been a Revolutionary War soldier who fought at Brandywine and Monmouth. You've read how his sons, James and John, took their families from Pennsylvania and moved to settle in Ohio.

James Callin was the seventh of John Callin's children. He was born in 1815 in Pennsylvania, just before the 1816 journey to Richland county, Ohio. He grew up on that Callin family farm, and he was twenty years old when his father died of tuberculosis in 1835.

Susanna Stout

James married Susanna Stout (1807–1899) in Richland county, Ohio, on 17 December 1839. We know very little about her for certain; the Census pegs her birth in about 1812, in Pennsylvania. She may have been from one of the German families that migrated from Pennsylvania Dutch country after the Ohio territory opened up to settlers.

James and Susanna raised their daughters and farmed in Huron county, near New London. James retired from farming in the 1860s, and he moved with his wife and daughter, Sabra, to Rochester in Lorain county, where they remained after James's death 2 November 1873. Susanna died on 5 June 1899, and was buried near her husband in the Day Cemetery.

Which brings us to the Day family of Huron county:

Moses Ransom Day was born on 8 April 1806 in Vermont; his grandfather was a Samuel Day born in Massachusetts in 1748. Moses and his brother Oliver settled in Ohio; they had other brothers who went further west to Iowa. Moses married Sarah Jane Booth (1815-1877), daughter of John Booth. Moses went to Huron County in 1837, where he lived with his cousin Ephraim Day and Upton Clark. He left his wife and young son behind in Underhill, Vermont, until he moved to New London, Huron county, around 1853. Once he settled there, Sarah and  Elliot Glyde Day, now 19 years old, to Ohio.

 If you recall the story we told in the post The Distance of Close Connections, you might remember that the Callin Family History told us this about the son of James Callin's younger sister, Margaret:

"William Callin [born 1845] was left an orphan in childhood about the age of 3. Was adopted by and raised by a family named Day near New London, O."

At this writing, I have not been able to identify which Day family adopted him; I have not located him in the 1850 Census at all. But I did find a "William Collin, age 15" in the 1860 Census; he appears in the household of Ambrose Ames - as does a Lucretia Day, age 29, who is listed as a servant. She is most likely the daughter of Josiah Day, another of Moses Ransom Day's cousins. Lucretia appears in the 1850 Census in Josiah's household, but William does not.

It's still something of a mystery, but I think the 1860 record is enough to confirm what the original CFH had to say on the matter.

     I. Mary Ann Callin (1838–1900) married Elliot Glyde Day (1834–1907) on 3 May 1860 in Huron county. Glyde farmed and traded in horses; the Norwalk Daily Reflector referred to him as "a noted horseman and real estate owner." He was described as a thrifty farmer and was liked and respected by his neighbors.

After the arrival of their first child in 1862, the couple did not have another until 1876, when they had a son Clarence C Day (1876–1877), who died in infancy. Just three years after Clarence's death, they had Thor in 1880. Glyde's obituary claimed they had four children altogether, but I have not found any records of a fourth.

The turn of the century was not kind to this family. Mary Ann's mother died in 1899. Her sister, Sabra, came to live with her and Glyde, but Mary Ann was found dead in her bed on the morning of 20 November 1900; and a year later, in December 1902, Sabra died. Mary Ann and Glyde's son, Thor, died in 1904.  Then, in 1907, Glyde suffered a stroke, and died after lingering for three days without waking.  They were all buried in the Day Cemetery.

       A. Estella Lillian Day (1862–1912) also suffered from poor health, though it is not clear whether that was true from childhood, or if she became ill or suffered an accident later. Her father's obituaries in 1907 described her as "an invalid daughter," and as being "frail in health."

Lillian was married to the same man, twice. She first married William Benson King (1857-1940) on 17 December 1885; they divorced at some point before 1900, when she was listed in her parents' home as "widowed." They remarried in 1911, just before Lillian's death. They did not have any children.

Thor Day (1880-1904)

       B. Thor Glyde Day (1880–1904) has one of my favorite names in the whole family history. He might be what we would today call a "miracle baby," as is parents had been married for twenty years when he came along. I assume his father must have been grooming him to follow in his field as a horseman (all puns intended).

Thor married Donna Belle Carl (1880–1947) on 12 November 1901 — barely a year after his mother's death. Donna was the daughter of Arthur Winfield Carl (1846–1930) and Delilah M. "Lila" Morris (1848–1903), and she grew up in New London, where her family and the Day families would have been well acquainted. They had a daughter the following year, after the usual waiting period. Sadly, as mentioned above, Thor died unexpectedly in 1904.

Donna raised her daughter on her own for several years, but eventually remarried in 1913. Her new husband was the recently widowed William Benson King (1857–1940), Thor's brother-in-law. They had a son, Richard M King (1915–1990), and lived out their days in New London.

       1. Marian Estelle Day (1902–1953) was the only child of Thor and Donna Day; and the only grandchild of Glyde and Mary Ann Day. She married Leonard Harold Fletcher (1902–1950) on 2 September 1922. He was an insurance agent, and they lived in Cleveland, where they raised two daughters and a son.

       a. Suzanne A Fletcher (1924–1959)  was born in 1924 in Ohio. She was a 1941 graduate of Lakewood High School and received her B.A. degree from Kent State University in 1948. When she was an art student at Cleveland Institute of Art, won the annual Gund Scholarship in 1944. She was a portrait painter and frequent contributor to the May Show in Cleveland.

Suzanne married Glenn H. Andrews (1922-1995), a US Navy veteran and an English teacher at Madison High School, Madison, Ohio. He served in the Navy during World War II, from 22 June 1943 to 25 May 1946; they were married in 1949, after she graduated from Kent State. They lived at 1194 Hall Avenue, Lakewood, Ohio until 1957. Glenn was born 19 December 1922 in Painesville, Ohio, and died March 4, 1995 in a Cleveland nursing home at age 72.

Suzanne died 20 May 1959 of cancer in Memorial Hospital of Geneva, Ohio, at age 35. Her funeral was 22 May 1959 in the Kennedy Funeral Home, Geneva. They left behind four children, all still living.

       b. Marian Estelle "Stella" Fletcher (1926–2000) lived her early years in the Cleveland area, moving to Toledo after her marriage to Robert Armand Lareau (1919-1988). She was a violinist, playing for the Toledo Symphony in her younger years. He was a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who served from 26 September 1938 to 19 February 1946.

Bob was President & General Manager of White Products Corporation in Middleville, Michigan, then succeeded to the Presidency of Air-Way Industries of Toledo, Ohio, the parent company. After that firm closed, he became affiliated with Tassie & Bock, a Toledo CPA firm. After some time in Toledo, the family moved to Apopka, Florida. In 1982, he and his son founded Lareau & Associates Accounting & Tax Service in Apopka.

Stella was a devout Catholic, a loving mother and a lover of music. She and Robert left behind two sons, a daughter, 7 surviving grandchildren, two grandsons deceased, and 5 great-grandchildren with one on the way.

George Elliott Dean (1978-1984) was a grandson of Stella and Robert Lareau. He was diagnosed with an incurable cancer in 1982, and died in April 1984, just three months after the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Northwest Ohio arranged for a week-long visit for him and his family to Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

       c. Leonard Howard Fletcher (1929–1995) married his Lakewood High School sweetheart at age 19, and they lived in Lakewood, which is in the Cleveland area, where Leonard worked for his father's insurance company.

Sabra A. Callin (1841-1902)

     II. Sabra Ann Callin (1841–1902) was born in November 1841 in Huron county. She shared her name with her 1st cousin - the Sabra Ann Callin born to George Callin and Polly Lewis in 1837. Her cousin Sabra died in Monroeville in 1849, sadly (see A Tragic Beauty).

Our Sabra lived to adulthood, but she was blind as a child; it isn't clear whether she was born blind or suffered from one of the ubiquitous diseases that often struck small children on the frontier. In 1870 we see that she is a pupil at the Ohio Institute for the Blind  where she learned to read braille, bead baskets and to sew. It does not seem that she was institutionalized, as she also appeared in Rochester, Lorain county, with her mother and father on that year's census.

There is also an 1880 "Schedules of Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes" which lists Sabra as the sole Blind resident of Rochester. Unfortunately, the only information included about her there is her name, which seems to defeat the stated purpose of the Schedule, to "furnish material not only for the complete enumeration of the blind, but for an account of their condition." Just the name of that list seems bizarre and unnecessarily cruel to modern sensibilities; but at least they seem to have been trying to take care of their most vulnerable members.

Sabra stayed with her mother until Susannah's death in 1899, and in 1900, she lived with her sister and her family in New London. She died 1 December 1902 and was buried in the Day Cemetery near her parents.

- -- --- -- -

We are almost done, everyone!

Next week we will take a look at the last family descended from James Callin! But don't think that means I'm totally done, here. The next phase of this project will be editing these posts into a proper Family History - a task that I suspect will be very time consuming. And along the way, I am firmly convinced there will be more discoveries.

Ancestry is constantly adding new databases to their service - like their recent addition of some major Marriage certificates databases; and their incredible U.S. Social Security Applications database came online during the making of this blog, which means a lot of the early posts will probably have some previously un-seen clues.

I've also been getting better at using Newspapers.com, which I did not have when I started this project. If I find anything interesting, I will definitely post it here.

Meanwhile, I have some other ideas for the next project - so don't expect this blog to go idle. Focusing on the Callin Family as I have since 2015 means I've got a backlog of the other 15 great-great-grandparents hints and records to look at.

As always, if you belong to the family in today's post, please get in touch. You have the comments section below, you have my "callintad" address on Gmail, and you have the Callin Family History Facebook group. I hope you'll send me your praise and corrections.

Update: Hattie Hess

Along with the Photo Feature from this morning, I have a special treat this week:

If you recall what I said back in August about the eldest daughter of Jessie Alverda Mohn Hess, you can skip down past this quote; otherwise, just to refresh your memory:

Hattie Helen Hess is a mystery to me. Though she appears in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 Census records in her parents' home in Jackson township, Richland county, I have not been able to scratch out any other records that match her. There is another Helen Hess of precisely the same age living in Richland county at the same time....
(Any further information about Hattie Helen's fate would be greatly appreciated.)

Well, there is more information, now - thanks in part to the recent availability of the U.S. Social Security Applications database on Ancestry.com - so here is an update on her family:

Hattie Helen Hess (1898–1961) grew up in Jackson township, Richland county, Ohio, and married Wilbur Albert Kirkendall (1900–1963) on 23 March 1922.

Albert was born and raised in Plymouth, Richland county. His parents were William A Kirkendall (1854–1941), also a native of Plymouth and a farmer of that post-Civil War generation, and Jennie Amanda Adams Stine (1871–1948). Jennie was not related to Franklin Pierce Stine (from last week's post, A Real Hoot), as far as I can tell. His father's name was Leonard, and I could not find any record tying his father to her father, Henry D Stine.

Albert had four younger siblings, and two older half-siblings from Jennie's first marriage. Albert and Helen had two children, a daughter and a son about eleven years apart, in age. In the 1940 Census, Albert's occupation is listed as "ferryman." Their son is still living.

Their daughter was Kennagene Lucille Kirkendall (1924–2001), and she married Harold Raymond Day (1919–2010) on 10 August 1943 in Cumberland, North Carolina. Harold does not appear to be related to the Day family mentioned in two earlier posts (The Distance of Close Connections or It's a Glyde Day), but I know there is another link to that family still ahead of us, so I'm sure we'll come back and take another look.

The son of  Gabriel Day (1881–1949) and Beatrice "Bessie" Holycross (1898–1978), Harold graduated from Shelby High School, class of 1940.

He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, fighting in both the Battle of the Bulge and the Invasion of Normandy. He received the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star medal, along with the Normandy Invasion and Service Medals with four Bronze Stars and one Bronze Arrowhead.

After his military service, he worked at the Wilkins Air Force Depot and Shelby Cycle. He and Kennagene raised one son together, and they left behind a large number of great- and great-great grandchildren.

The Distance of Close Connections

For the last couple of months, we've explored the descendants of the man I called Tragic Thomas. Thomas was the son of James, elder of the two Brothers Callin of Ohio, and grandson of the man referred to in the Callin Family History (or CFH) as "James 1st".

I told you what little I know about Thomas's brother, Alec Callin, who felt The Pull of the West and moved further, from Ohio to Iowa. Just to refresh you on the details, the CFH says this of Alec:

"Married and moved with his family and mother to Iowa about the year of 1840. The mother referred to was 'Aunt Mary', wife of James 2nd who was killed with a gun. She sold the farm and went with Alec to Iowa where she died some years later. Nothing has been heard from that branch of the family since 1845."

There are several records of land grants to an Alexander Callin, one identifying him as a resident of Muscatine, Iowa in July 1854, and showing that he purchased a plots of land in the young state. There is also a Mary Callin buried in a Muscatine county cemetery, having died in 1846 at age 77.

Following behind Alec by a year or two, his younger brother, James (3rd), also moved to Iowa. Per the CFH, again:

"James Callin with his wife and baby moved to Iowa where he died in 1844. William Callin, brother of Margret, went to Iowa and brought her and the two above named children home to Ashland Co. after her husband's death." 

The "above named children" are William and Warren on the following chart, which shows the lineage of their parents:

Because it's such a taboo, I hesitate to come out and say plainly that James and Margret were 1st cousins, but clearly, they were. James was the youngest son of James, the brother of John, whose youngest daughter was Margret. 

I don't have any way of knowing what the family might have thought about this arrangement, either. Both fathers were long dead by the time the couple was wed in 1841. Alec had already moved west by this point, taking his and James's mother, Mary, with him; and if Margret's mother, Elizabeth, disapproved of their wedding, it may explain why they decided to make the journey described here. Even today, traveling 435 miles (by modern route estimates) from the frontier of Ohio to the even newer frontier of Muscatine, Iowa with an infant wouldn't be ideal!

But the truth is that we can't know the Truth(tm) - the best we can do is look at what we do know, and try to fill in the blank spots as best we can. We can't know what the people were thinking or what motivated their choices, but we can at least hazard a guess as to what those choices were.

We already know from reading about Tragic Thomas's life that James and Margret were two of at least 13 cousins (including Thomas himself) who grew up together on the farm that their fathers had settled in Milton township. 

We know that when James died (1844), Margret was left with Warren, about age 2, and she was almost certainly pregnant with little William (b. 1845). Since Margret's brother - my own 3rd great grandfather, William - is the one who made the ~870 mile round trip to Iowa to bring Margret back to Ohio, we can assume that Margret either did not want to remain in Iowa or could not, for some reason. Alec had only purchased the first of three recorded properties that we know of, and we have no idea who his wife was or how many children they had; clearing a farm and providing for a large family would have been daunting.

Since "Aunt Mary" (James and Alec's mother) died a year later, perhaps we can guess that she was in poor health. It could be that with her husband dead, Margret simply wanted to return to where she grew up.

Once back in Ohio, Margret herself died in 1847. It is telling that her two small sons - 5 and 3 by that time - were not taken in by any of her siblings' or cousin's families on the 1850 Census. As we will see, at least one of the boys was fostered with a family in New London, Huron county. Of course, for the size of her extended family, Margret's options for finding someone to raise her sons were more limited than you might think.

Consider that Thomas, her cousin/brother-in-law had likely died in 1843, just before she came back from Iowa. His widow, Nancy, had several small ones of her own, two of whom she would lose after 1850; her household may have been stricken with any number of disease outbreaks common at the time, and possibly couldn't have handled the two boys.

Margret's own siblings all had their hands full. The oldest brother, John, died young (23 years old) in 1825, but of the rest:

• Her oldest brother, George, had six children under 12 in his home; 2 boys, and 4 girls. (The youngest of those, Sabra Ann, was born in 1843 and died in 1849.)
• Her sister Ann Campbell also had 5 who were 10 and under; 2 boys and 3 girls.
• Her sister Sarah married John Scott in 1835 and they had moved to Illinois around 1840.
• Sister Eliza Ferguson and family lived in Auburn, Indiana.
• Her brother William's third child, a son name James, was born in 1844, and his fourth, George (who grew up to compile the Callin Family History) was born in 1846. The births of these boys bookended his trip to Iowa to fetch Margret, Warren, and little William.
• Her next eldest brother, James, had two daughters - the younger of whom (born in 1841, and called Sabra Ann) was blind, and likely needed special attention that her parents couldn't spare.
• And lastly, Hugh had just married Barbara Matthews, and they had a newborn in 1846.

Certainly, each of these families had their own hardships to face, so it wouldn't be charitable to draw any conclusions about them or their sister from the fact that none of them seemed to have room for Warren or William - even William's likely namesake, his uncle.

Wherever he ended up going to live as a boy, we know what eventually happened to Warren:

"Warren enlisted in the spring of 1861 in 25th Regiment O.V.I., and died on Cheat Mt., West Va. Had been on a scout; only sick one hour. It is supposed he died from drinking poisoned milk. He was a musician, and wherever he went his violin went, and when in camp he drew crowds to hear him play. It is said no man in the regiment equaled him in strength, his soldierly qualities won the confidence of his colonel and he was made Scout. His kind heart and sweet disposition endeared him to all his comrades. The whole regiment mourned his death." (CFH - record of Margret, his mother)

As for young William, his first cousin, George, happened to be the author of the CFH, and had this to say:

"Andersonville Prison" by John L. Ransom 

"William Callin was left an orphan in childhood about the age of 3. Was adopted by and raised by a family named Day near New London, O. At eighteen he enlisted in Co. E, 55th Regt. O.V.V.I., was in all of the battles of his Reg't. till captured on Sherman's Atlanta Campaign and remained in Andersonville prison till close of war. He escaped from prison three times but was each time traced by bloodhounds, captured and returned. His prison life resulted in curvature of the spine and he was badly crippled during later life, enduring much suffering and finally death, for the services he rendered his country, to which he gave the full measure of his devotion." (CFH)

I still don't know for certain who the "family named Day" was, though I have a hunch; I will continue that hunt and keep you updated.

After the war, William married Theodocia Johnson (1843 – 1899) 9 August 1868 at age 23, and they had one daughter, Edith May Callin (1872 – 1967). It isn't clear what William did for a living; by the 1900 Census, he was 55 and listed as a "pentioner" (I assume that's just a spelling mistake by the enumerator). Theodocia died in May 1899, and Edith appeared with William on the Census, which says she worked as a seamstress, probably supporting her father.

Just over a year after the death of her mother, Edith married Oley Ray Hanley (1876 – 1953) on 16 August 1900; they had one son: Lyle Elliott Hanley (1902 – 1935). William likely lived with them, until his death in 1907. His brief death notice in the newspaper simply mourns the passing of an "old resident and soldier," and he was buried on a Friday.

Edith divorced Ray around 1912, and moved with 10-year-old Lyle to Toledo. Lyle lived with his mother through the 1920s, and was employed as a clerk, and as a time-keeper by the American Can Co. Lyle died on May 10 1935 in Toledo. He was survived by his young widow, Marie, whom he married around 1930. His obituary did not mention any children.

Edith outlived her son by 32 years. She seems to have made a living taking in boarders, as she did in 1940, judging by the Census, and she died in May 1967 at the age of 94. It's impossible to know whether she ever knew her Callin cousins who also lived in Toledo; Ben Frank and Daisy would have been living there at least until his death in 1953. But it may be that after three somewhat tragic and lonely generations, Edith may not have been interested in her family connections. 

And with that, unless we discover something new, I believe we have officially covered everyone on the "James 2nd" side of the family - from here on, we will look at the descendants of his brother (my 4th great grandfather), John.