When I set out to revise the Callin Family History two years ago, I thought I had a pretty good idea what kinds of people I might find in the family tree. I did name the blog "Mightier Acorns," after all, because I knew that few, if any, of our relatives would turn out to be recognizably famous, important figures in World History.
As it happens, a few of our cousins really did have exciting and unique lives. Perhaps the most famous of our cousins has his own Wikipedia entry, due to his record-setting Air Force career and his science fiction novels. A few were missionaries who traveled to Africa or India to build hospitals or schools. One disappeared with Flight 19 in the infamous Bermuda triangle.
But we have largely been ordinary. We have mostly been farmers, and when farming gave way to industrialization, many of us became factory or railroad workers. We also had a few doctors, some lawyers, and in rare cases, successful corporate business leaders. Among our folks, there have always been a prominent number of teachers mixed in, as well.
We have many talented musicians and artists, woodworkers and craftsmen (and women!), some of whom even earned a living or academic honors for their efforts. Most of us have at least enjoyed making a joyful noise, whether literal or metaphorical. Many - including my dad, my grandfather, cousin John, and several others - built furniture as a hobby after retiring.
The legend of our family identity has had a profound influence on us, even though few of us have any idea what the family legend says, and even fewer have done the research necessary to find out what is truth and what is legend. Our common ancestor, James "1st" Callin, was a Revolutionary War hero, so it seems almost inevitable that his descendants take pride in serving the country. And because we have passed down the story that he was from Ireland, we seem to hold a rebellious Irish spirit close to our hearts.
It almost doesn't matter that we haven't definitively proven that the Revolutionary soldier James Callin was the father of James and John Callin of Ashland county, Ohio; our cousins have served in every branch of service and in every American conflict throughout our nation's history. I don't think there was a single post in this two-year project that didn't include at least one World War II or Union Army veteran. Less common, but just as crucial, we have had mighty women from our family serving in the military, in the medical corps, or on the home front.
James may or may not have actually been Irish - he was almost certainly the "orange" variety if he was - but we tend to identify that way when we think about our ethnicity, rather than as English or Scots-Irish. Because we started with an immigrant from the 1750s, I didn't expect to find many immigrant stories in the ranks of Callin descendants, but we certainly married a dazzlingly diverse group.
James 1st's descendants have married into the streams of German and Western European immigrants who washed across Ohio and the Midwest. We have married Eastern Europeans and people of the Slavic and Jewish diaspora; many of us have married into Latino and Hispanic families; and two of our cousins married into Japanese families who were interred in the camps established at the beginning of World War II. At least two of the nearly 5,000 marriages documented in this project have been same-sex couples, though that number might have been larger if such marriages had been accepted in earlier generations.
The religious diversity of people in our family is bewildering, as well. If one was inclined to squint and call the vast majority of them "Christian," that wouldn't be wrong - almost all of them held to some flavor or Christian faith - but the reality is that each family struggled with their faith in their own way, and even when they shared a label, they probably didn't hold to the same set of beliefs for more than a generation or two. There are Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentacostals, Baptists, Southern Baptists, Nazarenes, Universalists, Unitarians, and a few more, not to mention those of us who either openly or quietly hold to no faith at all.
And of course we have many tragic stories of the broken and the fallen among our number. We have had our share of frailty, whether that was due to what we now understand to be genetic in nature, or from the diseases that used to plague the countryside. We've struggled with our share of mental illness, alcoholism, and we have lost our share to crime and to poor, selfish choices. We've lost more than one of our family to suicide, to post-war trauma, or to accidents involving guns. I've tried to tell those stories honestly, and without judgment, but it never stops feeling uncomfortable - especially when reaching out to a distant cousin who may not be happy about digging up that darker past.
As I've done this research, and unearthed your stories, whether through your own words or through newspaper stories about you, or your parents' and grandparents' obituaries, I've been constantly amazed by all of you. I love the names you've given your children; I am proud of your accomplishments; I've felt sympathetic to the disagreements and struggles that have pushed us apart or made us lose touch.
Those of us who are still living run the gamut of American thought and life. We live on both coasts, North and South, in Red and Blue areas; we are on all sides of the political spectrum; and we are in every economic niche. If there is a controversy facing modern America, it seems we have a relative at the heart of it, whether they are a recently married same-sex couple, a struggling blue collar family in the rust belt, students struggling with college debt, or older retirees trying to get by without being a burden to their children.
Between now and the publication of the Callin Family History revision, I will be reaching out, either directly or through another cousin, to as many of you as possible. Partly, I have to admit, I want you to get excited about the book - and maybe convince you to buy a copy for each of your children, grand-children, and local libraries. But mostly, I want you to know that we're all here, and that whatever this family connection does or doesn't mean to you, it exists.
I want you to know what I've learned - because it's a pretty cool feeling to know that even the most ordinary of us can still be so mighty.
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Friday, March 3, 2017
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Behind the Scenes: Pushing Down Field
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| Bowling Green High School football squad, 1911 |
Now I'm about halfway through the "second round".
My original plan was for this book to come about in four phases:
- The Gathering phase - researching any missing facts in the individual records (primarily using Ancestry tools, but also simply Googling for info), and bringing the tree as up to date as legally/ethically possible.
- The Editorial phase - generating the text of the book with Family Tree Maker, and systematically going through that, looking for typographical, layout, and minor factual errors.
- The Marketing phase - where I focus on reaching out to all of the living family members to let them know a book exists.
- The Correction phase - where I gather all of the helpful feedback on the inevitable mistakes I will make in the first two phases, and fix them in future editions for as long as necessary.
I expected to be done with the Gathering phase in April, but here we are. There is a lot more family to gather than I anticipated, and as I get better at finding puzzle pieces to put together, the puzzle gets larger and larger. Just to illustrate how much larger, here is a snapshot from last night, when I synced my Ancestry tree with Family Tree Maker for the first time since the end of May:
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| From 27 May to 8 August 2015 |
(If you're interested in exploring this tree while I build it, you should be able to access the public view on Ancestry: Callin Family History - G.W. Callin 1911. I have the privacy settings enabled so that you shouldn't be able to see records for any living people.)
A lot of this information won't likely end up in the book. As I've stated elsewhere, my goal is to report every descendant of James Callin, every spouse, and every spouse's parents - but in order to prove who the spouses' parents are in many cases, I end up adding parents, grandparents, and siblings to the tree. So where you may have a dozen or more individuals in the tree, only three will end up in the book.
I know that sounds like a lot of extra work, but I've committed to doing it because not maintaining that standard is one of the major ways I've found that women end up getting erased from our histories. It is a lot of extra work, but not doing it means that the women in our genealogies end up having too little documented information in the final works for researchers to connect their birth families to their married families. I see it all the time - I honestly don't know who most of my earliest grandmothers are, simply because I don't have any more than their maiden names (and in some cases, I don't even have that much information).
So, that's why I keep pressing on. And I'm hoping that as I post more stories about the people in this family history, you, dear readers, will help me with the "Correction phase" by asking questions, catching mistakes, and reining in my imagination if I project too much.
Eventually, this is going to get published. But first - I have to finish Gathering.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
On the Moving of Goal Posts
When I began this blog, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to get out of it. I knew I had some stories to tell, and I knew that researching and writing those stories would lead me to others. I knew that doing this would motivate me to try bigger things - and that is what happened!
My plan at the end of last year was to re-publish the original George Callin Family History (that links to the hard cover edition), then to gather the notes and research I had already done over the previous couple of decades and publish a revision - possibly during the summer months. Now, having devoted almost all of my efforts to getting that revision ready since March, I can see that this was too ambitious a goal.
In my head, it seemed pretty straightforward: once the hard research is done, I know I can draft up a narrative story (like the ones posted here) in a few hours. Using Ancestry and Google, I've been able to get most of the hard research done very quickly, so spending six or eight months on the revision seemed like a reasonable time budget. But that only really accounted for the number of families and individuals listed in Great Uncle George's book - which was around 350 families.
Starting just before Christmas 2014, I began "Round 1" of creating a public Ancestry tree: Callin Family History - G.W. Callin 1911. All I did for several months was enter information that I already had from George's book, and review the Ancestry record hints that popped up along the way. I finished Round 1 in March, just before our vacation to Arizona to visit my still-living family, and immediately went back to the "top" of the tree - James 1st - and started Round 2.
At the end of Round 1, I had expanded the known descendants of James to about 1100 families. Remember, I had budgeted time for about 33% of that number. And I knew from the skills I had picked up and tricks I had learned doing Round 1 that there were a lot of people that I simply hadn't found, yet. So I already know that if I'm planning to publish a fully fleshed out narrative for each family, it will take me another year or two - just to write up the families I've already found!
As of this post, I'm only just reaching the final stretch of Round 2 of my research phase, and there are more than 5,000 individuals in the tree. Many of those are NOT direct descendants of James 1, but my best guess is that about 3,500 individuals from that tree will be included in the final report.
There is a good reason for those numbers. One of the standards I decided on at the beginning this project at the beginning was that I would include the names of both parents of each spouse. To find that information, I've often had to look for the spouse's grandparents and siblings in order to figure out mothers' maiden names and piece together the origins of orphans. I'm committed to doing this, partly because it makes the eventual stories I have to tell richer and more complete, and partly to look for relationships between the "allied families" - the family groups that seem to intermarry more than once with my cousins. I also am learning just how badly our culture has mishandled the way we record the lives of our mothers, sisters, and wives, and I am determined to correct that by including as much information about the women in my book as I can find.
Obviously, there are costs involved in the standards I'm choosing to maintain. In order to push through the Round 2 research phase, I made a choice to suspend the writing I was doing in this blog. That clearly isn't enough to make my original vision for this book a reality - certainly not this summer as I had originally hoped. Probably not by the end of 2015.
So I'm moving the goal posts. Here's my new plan:
Finish the Research phase, and publish this as a slim volume - James Callin Descendant Report, 2015. I believe I can get this done by the end of the year, and I plan to put it up on Lulu.com as I did the Callin Family History - 1911 volume.
Starting soon (probably in the early fall), begin posting weekly stories about the families in the Descendant Report here on Mightier Acorns.
This will be useful in two ways. Most obviously, it gives me motivation to draft and edit the stories in a regular and timely manner; but it should also work as an outreach tool - as I work my way forward in time, I expect that I will be finding living relatives who will be able to help me spot errors, fix mistakes, and maybe even collect more of the kinds of stories that can't really be picked out of the records.
Doing this on a weekly schedule should also allow me to budget my time so that I can pay attention to my non-Callin ancestors. Eventually, the weekly Callin descendant posts will be ready to publish - but writing about them all will take years. I don't want to ignore everyone else while I'm doing that!
Once I know how long it is really going to take, I will begin planning a complete re-publication of the Callin Family History. I expect that future volume to include a section that captures Great Uncle George's work, my James Callin Descendant Report, all of the family-focused blog posts, and a few other ideas that I hadn't originally intended to include because I was aiming for an over-ambitious deadline of Summer 2015. (Like a roll-call of all Callin family veterans, and some sections describing the major areas where Callin descendants lived - especially central Ohio and DeKalb County, Indiana.)
If you've been one of the loyal, regular readers of this blog over the past year, I want you to know I appreciate you. I hope you'll be patient with me as I get my feet back under in July and August, and when I really get started posting again, I hope you'll spread the word - especially if we're related!
As always, I welcome questions, corrections, and encourage contributions - if you are a cousin who will turn up in this book, there are a lot of ways you can help me make it better. My Gmail address is "callintad" at gmail.com - that's the best way to get in touch with me.
And even if you aren't an Ancestry member, you should be able to explore the public Callin Family History - G.W. Callin 1911 tree.
Thanks again! We'll be in touch...
My plan at the end of last year was to re-publish the original George Callin Family History (that links to the hard cover edition), then to gather the notes and research I had already done over the previous couple of decades and publish a revision - possibly during the summer months. Now, having devoted almost all of my efforts to getting that revision ready since March, I can see that this was too ambitious a goal.
In my head, it seemed pretty straightforward: once the hard research is done, I know I can draft up a narrative story (like the ones posted here) in a few hours. Using Ancestry and Google, I've been able to get most of the hard research done very quickly, so spending six or eight months on the revision seemed like a reasonable time budget. But that only really accounted for the number of families and individuals listed in Great Uncle George's book - which was around 350 families.
Starting just before Christmas 2014, I began "Round 1" of creating a public Ancestry tree: Callin Family History - G.W. Callin 1911. All I did for several months was enter information that I already had from George's book, and review the Ancestry record hints that popped up along the way. I finished Round 1 in March, just before our vacation to Arizona to visit my still-living family, and immediately went back to the "top" of the tree - James 1st - and started Round 2.
At the end of Round 1, I had expanded the known descendants of James to about 1100 families. Remember, I had budgeted time for about 33% of that number. And I knew from the skills I had picked up and tricks I had learned doing Round 1 that there were a lot of people that I simply hadn't found, yet. So I already know that if I'm planning to publish a fully fleshed out narrative for each family, it will take me another year or two - just to write up the families I've already found!
As of this post, I'm only just reaching the final stretch of Round 2 of my research phase, and there are more than 5,000 individuals in the tree. Many of those are NOT direct descendants of James 1, but my best guess is that about 3,500 individuals from that tree will be included in the final report.
There is a good reason for those numbers. One of the standards I decided on at the beginning this project at the beginning was that I would include the names of both parents of each spouse. To find that information, I've often had to look for the spouse's grandparents and siblings in order to figure out mothers' maiden names and piece together the origins of orphans. I'm committed to doing this, partly because it makes the eventual stories I have to tell richer and more complete, and partly to look for relationships between the "allied families" - the family groups that seem to intermarry more than once with my cousins. I also am learning just how badly our culture has mishandled the way we record the lives of our mothers, sisters, and wives, and I am determined to correct that by including as much information about the women in my book as I can find.
Obviously, there are costs involved in the standards I'm choosing to maintain. In order to push through the Round 2 research phase, I made a choice to suspend the writing I was doing in this blog. That clearly isn't enough to make my original vision for this book a reality - certainly not this summer as I had originally hoped. Probably not by the end of 2015.
So I'm moving the goal posts. Here's my new plan:
Finish the Research phase, and publish this as a slim volume - James Callin Descendant Report, 2015. I believe I can get this done by the end of the year, and I plan to put it up on Lulu.com as I did the Callin Family History - 1911 volume.
Starting soon (probably in the early fall), begin posting weekly stories about the families in the Descendant Report here on Mightier Acorns.
This will be useful in two ways. Most obviously, it gives me motivation to draft and edit the stories in a regular and timely manner; but it should also work as an outreach tool - as I work my way forward in time, I expect that I will be finding living relatives who will be able to help me spot errors, fix mistakes, and maybe even collect more of the kinds of stories that can't really be picked out of the records.
Doing this on a weekly schedule should also allow me to budget my time so that I can pay attention to my non-Callin ancestors. Eventually, the weekly Callin descendant posts will be ready to publish - but writing about them all will take years. I don't want to ignore everyone else while I'm doing that!
Once I know how long it is really going to take, I will begin planning a complete re-publication of the Callin Family History. I expect that future volume to include a section that captures Great Uncle George's work, my James Callin Descendant Report, all of the family-focused blog posts, and a few other ideas that I hadn't originally intended to include because I was aiming for an over-ambitious deadline of Summer 2015. (Like a roll-call of all Callin family veterans, and some sections describing the major areas where Callin descendants lived - especially central Ohio and DeKalb County, Indiana.)
If you've been one of the loyal, regular readers of this blog over the past year, I want you to know I appreciate you. I hope you'll be patient with me as I get my feet back under in July and August, and when I really get started posting again, I hope you'll spread the word - especially if we're related!
As always, I welcome questions, corrections, and encourage contributions - if you are a cousin who will turn up in this book, there are a lot of ways you can help me make it better. My Gmail address is "callintad" at gmail.com - that's the best way to get in touch with me.
And even if you aren't an Ancestry member, you should be able to explore the public Callin Family History - G.W. Callin 1911 tree.
Thanks again! We'll be in touch...
Friday, May 1, 2015
May Day Update
So, I took a slightly longer break than I intended... sorry about that. Things have been a bit busy around here lately, what with Baltimore riots and working to finish our construction project.
Some news of the past month:
In addition to taking about 15 paperback copies home to Arizona to share with the family, I sent a donation of the hardcover edition to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential library. That means that it will eventually end up in the World Cat international library catalog.
You can get your own hardcover edition from my page on Lulu.com, or if you prefer paperback, that is also available through Lulu (at that link), or through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and... Saxo. (I'm not familiar with that last one, as it appears to be of Scandinavian origin, but it came up in my Google search, so there you go!)
We already sold two copies through Amazon, so thank you, mystery shopper! (I think I know who it was, and I owe them a phone call...)
Coming soon - I am hard at work revising the Callin Family History so that we can (hopefully) have a new, updated version published by the end of the year. It promises to make my summer a very busy one. Along the way, I will keep posting updates and previews here, though probably not on the regular, weekly basis that I was trying to maintain before April.
Be safe out there!
Some news of the past month:
In addition to taking about 15 paperback copies home to Arizona to share with the family, I sent a donation of the hardcover edition to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential library. That means that it will eventually end up in the World Cat international library catalog.
You can get your own hardcover edition from my page on Lulu.com, or if you prefer paperback, that is also available through Lulu (at that link), or through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and... Saxo. (I'm not familiar with that last one, as it appears to be of Scandinavian origin, but it came up in my Google search, so there you go!)
We already sold two copies through Amazon, so thank you, mystery shopper! (I think I know who it was, and I owe them a phone call...)
Coming soon - I am hard at work revising the Callin Family History so that we can (hopefully) have a new, updated version published by the end of the year. It promises to make my summer a very busy one. Along the way, I will keep posting updates and previews here, though probably not on the regular, weekly basis that I was trying to maintain before April.
Be safe out there!
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Path to Professionalism
This week, I hope you'll pardon me for taking a break from story-telling so I can give you some updates on what I'm up to behind the scenes.
As I've said elsewhere, I have been interested in genealogy for as long as I can remember, and I started actively trying to learn how to do proper research after my oldest child was born in the mid-1990s. Now that I've been at it for almost 20 years, in earnest, I've been asking myself "what next?"
One option - the one that motivated me to start this blog - is to explore ways to take this hobby and turn it into something more professional. I mean that in both senses of the word - yes, I want to bring a little more rigor to my hobby, but I also want to figure out how to do this for a living.
As far as the rigor goes, I've been taking time away from doing research to read about HOW to do research. A lot of what I'm reading can be summed up by this chart:
As I've said elsewhere, I have been interested in genealogy for as long as I can remember, and I started actively trying to learn how to do proper research after my oldest child was born in the mid-1990s. Now that I've been at it for almost 20 years, in earnest, I've been asking myself "what next?"
One option - the one that motivated me to start this blog - is to explore ways to take this hobby and turn it into something more professional. I mean that in both senses of the word - yes, I want to bring a little more rigor to my hobby, but I also want to figure out how to do this for a living.
As far as the rigor goes, I've been taking time away from doing research to read about HOW to do research. A lot of what I'm reading can be summed up by this chart:
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| Click to see original version - copyright Mark Tucker, www.ThinkGeneaology.com |
Ideally, I'd like to carve out the time this year to start working towards the degree I never finished. I think an actual history degree would be most helpful to me. Doing the work necessary to get a degree would force me to bring that rigor to my research - and I will probably need it if I'm going to make the jump from pushing a mouse for The Man to making a living doing research and writing.
I've also decided to make a concerted effort to publish some of the work I've already done in book form. I'm looking at self-publishing, and I'm learning as I go, so I don't want to make any promises that I might not be able to keep. But so far it looks like I have the means and the material to put a couple of neat little projects together.
While you watch for updates on that, I'll also point you to the Patreon account I've set up. Patreon is a way for artists, writers, and other creative types to reach out and give their fans and followers a way to support them with small, regular donations. I've created a page there, and outlined some goals just to learn my way around. You can see the link in the right column of the blog - look for the section labeled "Become a Sponsor" - and if you feel super-generous, anything you decide to donate will motivate me to keep going.
Most importantly, I want to encourage any of you who are reading this site regularly to join the conversation. I can tell you're a shy bunch, but don't be! Let me know if you have questions or if there is something in particular you would like me to study, research, or write about.
And I will keep you posted - that's why they call these "posts"! - if you only keep reading.
I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am!
Friday, December 26, 2014
Faiths of Our Fathers
Growing up, my immediate family members were all Southern Baptists. I knew, of course, that there were other kinds of churches, but it wasn't until we took a trip to New Jersey to visit my grandma's side of the family and we visited their church on Sunday that it occurred to me that my own family would attend a truly different kind of church.
Back then, I was mildly scandalized by this. I started asking questions, like, "What is the difference between their church and ours?" The answers I got seemed as perplexing for the adults providing them as they were for me to understand.
"Are they going to hell for going to a different church?" (No, of course not.)
"Then does it matter which kind they go to?" (No, I suppose not.)
"Then why don't we go to that kind of church ourselves?" (Um...look at that, it's your bed time!)
"But what does it all mean!?!"
For a 12-year-old theologian in training, trying to figure out the differences between your family's various religious traditions can be scary and disturbing; but for a 42-year-old family historian, it can be a very useful tool for understanding what ancestors you never met might have been like. By studying the types of churches they belonged to, you can develop some guesses about what they believed and how they behaved.
Here's a quick tour of a few of my family's religious traditions, based on what I've been able to learn so far.
The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians
While I don't know yet precisely where the early Callin folk came from, it is probably safe to assume that my ancestors were part of the migration of Scotch-Irish Protestants to Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. Because they were in the midst of the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion, they were frequently in conflict with the tribes who lived along the frontier - especially in Pennsylvania, whose pacifist Quaker leaders had made no provision for a militia.
Most of these people identified as Presbyterian, and their theology typically emphasized the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Scriptures, and the necessity of grace through faith in Christ - all of which sounds familiar to this former Southern Baptist. However, they tended not to hold to some of the more severe notions of "purity" - like refraining from strong drink, fighting, and behaving bawdily - and I suspect their behavior had as much to do with driving a wedge between them and their puritanical neighbors (the ones running the local colonial governments) as any theological differences.
It is interesting to note that I haven't found any ancestors who identified as Catholic, yet. The only actual Irish ancestors I've identified so far - the Greenlee family - came from Armagh, and identified as Unionists and Protestants. So even though they came to the States in 1846, during the Great Potato Famine, they had more in common with the Scots-Irish Callin families who were already here than with the large numbers of Irish Catholics immigrating at the same time.
The Pennsylvania Dutch
My paternal grandmother's families included the Witter, Shriver and Piper families - all of whom seem to have been early German settlers in Pennsylvania - the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Witter and Piper (from "Pfeiffer") families settled in and around the Amberson Valley for several generations before spreading out to settle in Kansas.
The Frey family (on my maternal grandmother's side of the family) were also from an area near the borders of France, Switzerland, and Germany, and they certainly Lutherans - though they came over 100 years after the true "Pennsylvania Dutch" families arrived.
The Pennsylvania Dutch maintained numerous religious affiliations, with the greatest number being Lutheran or Reformed. Many were Anabaptists as well, but I suspect my ancestors were probably Lutheran, based on the churches mentioned in the documents I have found. Lutheranism advocates a doctrine of justification "by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of Scripture alone" - the doctrine that scripture is the final authority on all matters of faith.
Most Reformed churches denied the belief of the Catholic Church defined at the Council of Trent concerning authority coming from both the Scriptures and Tradition. Needless to say, that denial was why the Catholic nations of Europe drove members of these churches out.
Methodists
Back on my paternal grandfather's side, the Hales family seems to have been part of the Methodist-Episcopal church; my 4th great grand uncle, John Hales, was received into the ministry in 1820 in Baltimore, and was located with a church mission in Illinois in 1825. My 2nd great-grandmother, Alice Ava Hales (on of My Sixteen), was buried in the First Methodist Church in Fostoria, Ohio one hundred years later, in 1942.
My paternal grandmother's great-grandparents, Aaron and Hannah (Bender) Murray, were charter members of the Methodist church organized in Stark, Kansas, in 1886. The Benders were Swiss Mennonites and Germans, driven from the Pfaltz by Catholics and settling in Pennsylvania in the pre-Revolutionary days. The Murrays arrived from Scotland just after the American Revolution in the 1800s. It seems clear that whatever faith the families brought with them, once in America, they found the Methodist message to be very compelling.
Most Methodists identify with a conception of free will through God's grace, as opposed to the theological determinism of absolute predestination of the Calvinist traditions prevalent in Reformed or Lutheran churches. (Yes, I cribbed that from the Wikipedia article.) If you think about that, the severe character of Calvinist churches must have seemed as oppressive to the second and third generations raised under that philosophy as the Catholic and Anglican churches seemed to the original Calvinists. I imagine that the refreshing notion of free will and grace caught up a number of my ancestors during the many Revival periods that swept the country over the years.
Baptists
Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island and the first Baptist church in America. He was a questioning theologian who famously ran afoul of the puritan-run colonial government in Boston, and became a champion of the idea of separating church and state. One of the original members of that First Baptist Church that Williams formed in 1638 was an ancestor of my maternal grandmother.
There is a lot of room in 350 years of history for things to change; one of the things that changed was the nature of the Baptist churches - which, partly because of their insistence on not having official, established doctrines, were prone to splits and schisms. One of the most divisive issues in American history was slavery, and in the mid-1800s, many Baptist churches tore themselves apart over the issue of abolition. The Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845 in Atlanta, Georgia, following a split from northern Baptists over the issue of forbidding Southern slave-owners from becoming ordained missionaries.
In the 1940s, around the time my grandfathers were growing up, the SBC had begun to move away from their historical and regional positions, but change takes time, especially in a theology based on individual conscience.
Modern Times
Both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather were ordained Southern Baptist ministers. In the early 1980s, my parents hosted a little Southern Baptist church in our garage, until they raised money for property and a worship building in our neighborhood. My sister's husband has even done mission work, taking my nephew with him on trips to build a church in Latin America.
Just in that narrow group of people, all of whom agree to assume the same religious label, you can see wildly different approaches to life and theology. That individuality is the legacy of those original Baptist churches, which insisted on each individual having to find their own path to salvation. That's a tremendously democratic, American idea.
Looking at the religious history of America, it's easy to point to the oppression and conflict that drove the original groups to flee their homes, and even easier to point out the hypocrisy of the groups that showed the same kind of oppression to those who came here after they did. But after they arrived here and attempted to create their own versions of heaven on earth, you can see how most church-based communities either evolved to be more inclusive, thriving ecumenical groups - or retreated into insular, intolerant backwaters. Even today, there are secluded communities of Amish, Mennonites and Pennsylvania Dutch in Pennsylvania, though many (like my ancestors) eventually struck out to mark their own path - both physically and geographically.
That's why I value the notion shared by the original Baptists - and founders like Thomas Jefferson - of separating church and the state. When it came time to create a government designed to represent the will of the people, they wisely left out the usual religious language of God and Divine Will that could be seen in so many other charters and constitutions of the time. They realized that it was far too easy for religion and government to corrupt each other, so instead, they argued to make government a neutral arena where your religion would neither be held against you nor imposed on anyone else.
Because the United States chose to become a place where anyone with an idea could speak publicly about it without fear they would be arrested, it became a place where many did just that. Revivals swept the land during the so-called "Great Awakenings" - times when new ideas, and even whole new religions, sprang up.
Growing up, my elders spoke about those revivals fondly and wistfully, and the churches I grew up in frequently held week-long "revivals" - but if you go read about some of those early versions, there were some pretty wild and radical ideas being spread along with that "old time religion" that the elders recalled. Without the buffer of neutrality between government and some of the established churches, I wonder how far some of those revivals would have gotten before blasphemy laws and notions of "corrupting the youth" shut them down. And without that buffer of neutrality, I wonder whether all of my ancestors - with their different backgrounds, beliefs, and "bawdy" or beatific behaviors - would have been able to get together at all.
I suppose if they hadn't, I wouldn't be here to wonder.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Where the Women Folk Are
There is an obvious and tragic problem built into the bones of genealogy. Its source is obvious, but its solution is not. It affects everyone, every family, regardless of culture and convention - and sometimes it costs us more than we understand.
Kameron Hurley's 2014 Hugo-award winning blog post, "We Have Always Fought" talks about the ways in which women have been erased from the narrative of our fiction. She talks about the effect the pressures of simplicity and tradition have on the stories we tell, and while she mainly talks about fiction, it is worth remembering that history is one of the stories that we tell. Her essay resonated with me deeply because I have seen the effect in action in my research.
In most Western cultures, surnames developed as a way of tracing heredity which has a tendency to favor the preservation of the paternal line's identity, often at the total expense of the maternal. Scandinavians passed fathers' names to sons, literally - Hans's son took the surname "Hansen" and if his name was Tom, his son would be "Tomsen" (yes, I'm oversimplifying, and not everyone followed that custom). Spanish traditions could be more complicated, passing names of fathers AND mothers to children. There are areas in Germany and other places where the groom assumed the bride's name, but that only reverses the problem. Some families try to solve the problem by using hyphens - but the pressures of simplicity and tradition (and public record-keeping) still have the effect of erasing mothers' surnames from records and memories.
Sometimes, completely.
It isn't just that their names are hard to find - that's part of the fun and challenge that drew me into this hobby in the first place.
The problem is that I see, over and over, generation after generation, in branch after branch of the family tree that women are recorded differently from the men they lived with. It's not just that they pass - are passed - from their father's house bearing their father's name into their husband's bearing his; it's not just that the stories told about them are centered on the home, and bearing children, and being quiet, pious, and lovingly in the background. Many of them insisted on being portrayed that way. The problem I have with that is that they did more, saw more, thought more, and had more influence on our history than they get credit for.
I pore through the census records, and I often see stories between the boring lines of simple tabulation. Sometimes I see that there are clearly recent widows with small children out on the frontier. Sometimes I see odd pairings or May-December marriages after what must have been an epidemic. Yet when I dig through the old books about The Founders, there is almost never a mention of the mother who fed the town or the young wife who rescued the broken-hearted widower and his brood of orphans. Even those kinds of simple, traditional stories are left out in favor of listing the forming of business partnerships, the surveying and clearing of land, and the staunch political affiliations of the local burgesses.
As Hurley says in her essay, women are erased from the stories we tell, because:
Again, I'm not complaining that my family tree is full of wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters - that's a good thing. I'm pointing out that while we have all kinds of stories about brave soldiers, traveling preachers and teachers, builders, and local leaders that tell us what our forefathers were like, we rarely have those kinds of stories about their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters.
Part of the problem lies in the way they are written about. When I find old books about pioneer families, and the founding of towns across 19th century America, the biographical sketches are always about prominent men. Always. Their wives and daughters are rarely mentioned outside the context of who they married or how many children they mothered.
But another part of the problem lies in the way they wrote about themselves. Obviously, they felt the pressure to be seen as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters - not as pioneers, adventurers, trailblazers. Even writing about women of more recent generations, women who I know to be strong, brilliant three-dimensional people, it's easy to cave in to that pressure to stick to the simple, common, traditional narrative. As much as I crave the opportunity to write about the badassed, big-hearted, boisterous, and brilliant women in my family, I have already been told to be careful about it. They do not want to be embarrassed. They do not want to be seen in ways that aren't ... right.
Well, brace yourselves.
This is your warning that I am looking for ways to bring the amazing women of my history to light. I don't plan to make these stories up - that would be a different problem, and still wrong - but sometimes we have to use our imaginations to recreate what life must have been like in days gone by.
I may have to read between the lines to see what my 4th great-grandmother Eleanor was really like. She was widowed, and left to raise her grandson, my great-great grandfather, only to see him die young; and I don't even know her full name. And I need to dig to find out who this author named Frances Adams More is - what did she write, and what happened to her. And what about those adventurous Huff sisters, who seemed to travel abroad so much?
If I have the choice, and if the evidence will support me, I will choose to look beyond the flowery words in obituaries about loving wives and doting mothers to see the pioneers, the engineers, and the adventurers. Many of them will be mothers, and of course, they are all daughters. But I will seek to show you the capable drivers, the financial wizards, the creative writers and artists, and the community organizers when I find them.
So, where are these women? They're right there in the crooks of the trees, hiding in plain sight. They left clues, and when I find them, I will show them to you - because I owe them that. Because if these ordinary men can be Mighty Acorns, it stands to reason their partners were just as amazing. (And they likely did most of the work...if they were anything like my partner.)
Traditional narrative be damned, I intend to tell their stories. Whether they wore silk or satin, whether they raised a family or raised hell, they deserve to be remembered.
Kameron Hurley's 2014 Hugo-award winning blog post, "We Have Always Fought" talks about the ways in which women have been erased from the narrative of our fiction. She talks about the effect the pressures of simplicity and tradition have on the stories we tell, and while she mainly talks about fiction, it is worth remembering that history is one of the stories that we tell. Her essay resonated with me deeply because I have seen the effect in action in my research.
In most Western cultures, surnames developed as a way of tracing heredity which has a tendency to favor the preservation of the paternal line's identity, often at the total expense of the maternal. Scandinavians passed fathers' names to sons, literally - Hans's son took the surname "Hansen" and if his name was Tom, his son would be "Tomsen" (yes, I'm oversimplifying, and not everyone followed that custom). Spanish traditions could be more complicated, passing names of fathers AND mothers to children. There are areas in Germany and other places where the groom assumed the bride's name, but that only reverses the problem. Some families try to solve the problem by using hyphens - but the pressures of simplicity and tradition (and public record-keeping) still have the effect of erasing mothers' surnames from records and memories.
Sometimes, completely.
It isn't just that their names are hard to find - that's part of the fun and challenge that drew me into this hobby in the first place.
The problem is that I see, over and over, generation after generation, in branch after branch of the family tree that women are recorded differently from the men they lived with. It's not just that they pass - are passed - from their father's house bearing their father's name into their husband's bearing his; it's not just that the stories told about them are centered on the home, and bearing children, and being quiet, pious, and lovingly in the background. Many of them insisted on being portrayed that way. The problem I have with that is that they did more, saw more, thought more, and had more influence on our history than they get credit for.
I pore through the census records, and I often see stories between the boring lines of simple tabulation. Sometimes I see that there are clearly recent widows with small children out on the frontier. Sometimes I see odd pairings or May-December marriages after what must have been an epidemic. Yet when I dig through the old books about The Founders, there is almost never a mention of the mother who fed the town or the young wife who rescued the broken-hearted widower and his brood of orphans. Even those kinds of simple, traditional stories are left out in favor of listing the forming of business partnerships, the surveying and clearing of land, and the staunch political affiliations of the local burgesses.
As Hurley says in her essay, women are erased from the stories we tell, because:
"...none of those things fit our narrative. What we want to talk about are women in one capacity: their capacity as wife, mother, sister, daughter to a man. I see this in fiction all the time. I see it in books and TV. I hear it in the way people talk."
Again, I'm not complaining that my family tree is full of wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters - that's a good thing. I'm pointing out that while we have all kinds of stories about brave soldiers, traveling preachers and teachers, builders, and local leaders that tell us what our forefathers were like, we rarely have those kinds of stories about their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters.
Part of the problem lies in the way they are written about. When I find old books about pioneer families, and the founding of towns across 19th century America, the biographical sketches are always about prominent men. Always. Their wives and daughters are rarely mentioned outside the context of who they married or how many children they mothered.
But another part of the problem lies in the way they wrote about themselves. Obviously, they felt the pressure to be seen as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters - not as pioneers, adventurers, trailblazers. Even writing about women of more recent generations, women who I know to be strong, brilliant three-dimensional people, it's easy to cave in to that pressure to stick to the simple, common, traditional narrative. As much as I crave the opportunity to write about the badassed, big-hearted, boisterous, and brilliant women in my family, I have already been told to be careful about it. They do not want to be embarrassed. They do not want to be seen in ways that aren't ... right.
Well, brace yourselves.
This is your warning that I am looking for ways to bring the amazing women of my history to light. I don't plan to make these stories up - that would be a different problem, and still wrong - but sometimes we have to use our imaginations to recreate what life must have been like in days gone by.
I may have to read between the lines to see what my 4th great-grandmother Eleanor was really like. She was widowed, and left to raise her grandson, my great-great grandfather, only to see him die young; and I don't even know her full name. And I need to dig to find out who this author named Frances Adams More is - what did she write, and what happened to her. And what about those adventurous Huff sisters, who seemed to travel abroad so much?
If I have the choice, and if the evidence will support me, I will choose to look beyond the flowery words in obituaries about loving wives and doting mothers to see the pioneers, the engineers, and the adventurers. Many of them will be mothers, and of course, they are all daughters. But I will seek to show you the capable drivers, the financial wizards, the creative writers and artists, and the community organizers when I find them.
So, where are these women? They're right there in the crooks of the trees, hiding in plain sight. They left clues, and when I find them, I will show them to you - because I owe them that. Because if these ordinary men can be Mighty Acorns, it stands to reason their partners were just as amazing. (And they likely did most of the work...if they were anything like my partner.)
Traditional narrative be damned, I intend to tell their stories. Whether they wore silk or satin, whether they raised a family or raised hell, they deserve to be remembered.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
From Little Acorns Grow
You've heard the expression before - like many ideas, it has been with us for a while:
As I started mapping out the mighty oak that would become my family tree, I kept thinking about that phrase in all its variations. I've never been a subscriber to the Great Man theory of history, and I quickly learned that even a so called Great Man has to come from somewhere. Or, to switch metaphors, even a great individual is just a larger pebble in a stream - it's the stream that matters in the long run.
My first attempt at bringing my family history out of my personal notes and files and onto a more collaborative platform was a blog - almost identical to this one - which was only viewable to a select, invited group of contributing cousins. We had looked each other up in that tentative way that distant cousins who have never met tend to do, and for a brief while, we corresponded through blog posts and comments on the "Mighty Acorns" blog - named for all of the ordinary people we knew and loved in our family tree.
While we meant well, life happens, and the original Mighty Acorns sits unattended, now - its last post dated in 2009. I ran across it the other day while tinkering with my other blog, and it seemed to me that there was a lot more in there than I had remembered. A few more pictures; a few more essays; some old Civil War poetry, and a lot more comments!
I was inspired to start it up again - but this time around, I don't want to hide my light under a bushel. I won't share what other people have shared with me without their permission, but I have a lot to say about my own research, questions, discoveries, and mysteries - and I've learned not to wait around for others (or make them wait around for me) before I go forth and do great things.
And so, like an evolving tree in a forest full of stiff competition, I'm forging ahead with Mightier Acorns. I plan to re-post some of my older essays, create some new family portraits, and maybe talk about how I do what I do in a technical sense. I already have a few ideas - historical book reviews, research techniques and technology tips, etc. - and I aim to put out something new each week. (I am including re-posts from the original Mighty Acorns blog in my definition of "new".) For now, I only plan to post my own notes and pictures - and we'll just have to see what happens.
If you're one of my previously mentioned cousins, and you're okay having me re-share any of your Mighty Acorns posts here, I'm happy to do so, but I won't post anything without your say-so. Just drop me a private note.
If we've never met (either virtually or physically) and you think we might be related, definitely drop me a private note! You never know what you can learn about the tree from other branches. Hopefully, together, we can make history together!
You can contact me at: callintad at gmail dot com
"as an ook cometh of a litel spyr" [a spyr, or spire, is a sapling]
-Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 1374
"The greatest Oaks have been little Acorns."
-Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia, 1732
"Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks from little acorns grow."
-D. Everett in The Columbian Orator, 1797
(citations courtesy of The Phrase Finder)
As I started mapping out the mighty oak that would become my family tree, I kept thinking about that phrase in all its variations. I've never been a subscriber to the Great Man theory of history, and I quickly learned that even a so called Great Man has to come from somewhere. Or, to switch metaphors, even a great individual is just a larger pebble in a stream - it's the stream that matters in the long run.
My first attempt at bringing my family history out of my personal notes and files and onto a more collaborative platform was a blog - almost identical to this one - which was only viewable to a select, invited group of contributing cousins. We had looked each other up in that tentative way that distant cousins who have never met tend to do, and for a brief while, we corresponded through blog posts and comments on the "Mighty Acorns" blog - named for all of the ordinary people we knew and loved in our family tree.
While we meant well, life happens, and the original Mighty Acorns sits unattended, now - its last post dated in 2009. I ran across it the other day while tinkering with my other blog, and it seemed to me that there was a lot more in there than I had remembered. A few more pictures; a few more essays; some old Civil War poetry, and a lot more comments!
I was inspired to start it up again - but this time around, I don't want to hide my light under a bushel. I won't share what other people have shared with me without their permission, but I have a lot to say about my own research, questions, discoveries, and mysteries - and I've learned not to wait around for others (or make them wait around for me) before I go forth and do great things.
And so, like an evolving tree in a forest full of stiff competition, I'm forging ahead with Mightier Acorns. I plan to re-post some of my older essays, create some new family portraits, and maybe talk about how I do what I do in a technical sense. I already have a few ideas - historical book reviews, research techniques and technology tips, etc. - and I aim to put out something new each week. (I am including re-posts from the original Mighty Acorns blog in my definition of "new".) For now, I only plan to post my own notes and pictures - and we'll just have to see what happens.
If you're one of my previously mentioned cousins, and you're okay having me re-share any of your Mighty Acorns posts here, I'm happy to do so, but I won't post anything without your say-so. Just drop me a private note.
If we've never met (either virtually or physically) and you think we might be related, definitely drop me a private note! You never know what you can learn about the tree from other branches. Hopefully, together, we can make history together!
"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago Tribune, 1916).
"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do."
- both quotes from Henry Ford
You can contact me at: callintad at gmail dot com
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