CFH First Draft: Thomas Callin

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

Thomas Callin is the 5th 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.

CFH First Draft: Elizabeth Callin Montgomery

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

Elizabeth Callin is the 4th 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.

CFH First Draft: John Callin

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

John Callin is the 3rd 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.

CFH First Draft: James "2nd" Callin

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

This James Callin is the 2nd person in a descendant report beginning with the earliest known ancestor of our Callin family, James "1st" 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.

CFH First Draft: James "1st" Callin

This post is first in an ongoing series, sharing the first draft of my Revised Callin Family History. James Callin is the earliest known ancestor of one branch of the Callin (or Callen/Callan) family. 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.

243 Years Ago

 Hello, cousins!

243 years ago, in October 1777, my 5th-great (that's great-great-great-great-great!) grandfather, James Callin, was a private in the 4th Virginia Regiment of Foot, serving under a Capt. James Lucas. The Battle of Brandywine had taken place on 11 September, and while that battle was a loss for the American Continental Army, everyone had been impressed by the performance of a French soldier, the Marquis de Lafayette, who helped prevent the defeat from becoming a total rout. General Washington, realizing that the Continentals had been lucky to avoid complete destruction, decided to take advantage of the winter to regroup, and to train at Valley Forge with Lafayette and a Prussian drillmaster, Baron Friedrich von Steuben.

When we headed into the spring of this year, I had hoped that by this point in the fall, I would have finished the battle of editing the manuscript for the Callin Family History. If you've been following along on our Facebook page, Twitter, or the private Callin Family History group, you've seen me struggling to keep everyone posted on my progress. If you haven't been following along on social media, here's a distillation of my updates:

Timeline of Editing the Rough Draft:

• 27 May: person #93, Lillian May "Lillie" Campbell (1871-1946)
• 7 Jun: person #122, Sarah Elizabeth Scott (1869–1948)
• 14 Jun: person #142, Emma A Reed (1865-1934)
• 23 Jun: person #163, Dorothy Mae Ferguson (1889–1967)
• 28 Jun: person #177, John Ora "Jack" Copp (1881-1972)
• 2 Jul: my great-grandpa's brother, Byron Herbert Callin 
• 9 Jul: I DID IT!!! Generation 5 is done! 
• 21 Aug: person #257, Christina Agnes Urich (1903- 1998)
• 7 Sep: person #284, Fay Eleanor Richards
• 3 Oct: person #314, Raymond Ernest Hodges (1905-1970)
• 11 Oct: person #324, Alva Sylvester Stine 

While the scope of the task was more than I expected, I'm still pleased with the progress. I seem to average about 12 biographies per week. Sadly, that means it will still take several more months to get close enough to "Done" to think about launching our Kickstarter campaign.

So...

While I'm toiling away "off-camera," I don't want to lose you, my audience. I know that when a blog like this one sits idle for too long, it gets harder for possible cousins to find it in a search in the older posts. So I've decided to try something to help keep you all informed and involved.

Starting next week, this blog will put out two posts per week, late on Monday and Thursday nights. The book is structured using the NEHGS Register format, which assigns every descendant of James Callin with a number (thus, the "person #"). Each post will feature one numbered person and their immediate family from the First Draft version of the Callin Family History. 

In some ways, this will duplicate some of the content that you've already seen on this blog before, but it will be a lot more detailed and more deeply researched than the earlier posts. Because I'll be sharing the stories from the First Draft, you'll see a preview of what will end up in the final version of the book - and you'll have a chance to help me make any remaining corrections before it goes to publication.

I don't expect this to take a whole lot of time to do - the "content" of the posts is done, and I can automate things so that you see the posts here and on social media without taking a lot of time away from the main editing task.

If you want to volunteer to help with the editing - fact-checking or just pointing out typos - maybe this will help you zero in on those relatives who are closest to you. Maybe, if you've been wanting to try your hand at editing WikiTree, this will give you some content and sources to add there.

The blog format doesn't easily allow me to include footnotes, so each post will link to the Ancestry profile for the individual cousin featured that day. I believe I've set that tree to "public" so that any of you can view the research I've done - though you may need to create a free Ancestry account to view it. If any of you have trouble seeing the Ancestry profiles or any of the sources I have attached to them, please let me know.

The best way to reach me with any feedback is at my Mightier Acorns Gmail address - you should also see a Contact Form to the right of this post on this page, which sends a message directly to that email address. I look forward to hearing from you!

Here's hoping that if we can get through the winter, we'll be ready to start a winning campaign next spring.

Admin: Creating the Callin Family History

I reached a milestone last night: I finished editing the computer-generated rough draft of Generation 5!

Generation 1 was, of course, James Callin (c. 1750-c. 1816), and Generation 2 included his two sons, James and John - regular readers ought to be familiar with their stories by now. In March and April, I began editing the rough draft produced by my RootsMagic publishing feature into what will be the "first draft" of the revised Callin Family History.

I wanted to give you a better idea of what I'm actually doing, so here is a quick example.

Editing One "Person" or "Family"

Here's the "rough draft" of the first page of Generation 6, starting with person 204. Henry Bushnell. 

Gen 6 - page 1 (unedited)

To the right is a screenshot of the first page and a half on Google Docs. You can see in this block of raw text that Henry and his wife, Livva, each get their own "story" which starts out as a page of computer-generated narrative (full of bad grammar and confusing facts) with sources provided in brackets.

Note the 1910 Census (highlighted in yellow) appears three times - once as a "supporting source" for Henry's birth; again as a source for one of his life facts and a third time to support a fact in Livva's story. (It shows up again on that second page!) I'll combine their two biographies into one narrative paragraph, so I only need to cite the 1910 Census once in the edited version. 

The green highlighter shows you where Henry's obituary is cited; I have the text of that obituary, so I'll quote it at the end of his biography, and condense these four lines into a properly formatted source citation, which will go into a footnote.

The purple highlight shows you that the computer cited Henry's mother's obituary. I will take that line out altogether, because her obituary was quoted in her biography in Generation 5, and it doesn't need to be repeated here. Most of this "raw" version is repetitive information that will just be deleted or condensed. Ideally, each fact will get woven into sentences that tell more of a story.

Editing each numbered "Family" this way, I condense an average of 2.5 pages of computer-generated text into between 1 and 1.5 pages of first draft text. If I don't have other sources to quote (like an obituary or biographical sketch from another book), it's less; if I have other sources or a family has a large number of children, they end up with more. 

Once I am done, the final result looks more like this screenshot:

Gen 6 - page 1 (edited)

Now, instead of 1 to 2 pages of unreadable text, you have some basic facts arranged into paragraphs, with source citations, and an obituary - all on one page. 

This page took me about half an hour to edit. The raw version of Generation 6 has three sections, each with more than 200 more pages like this - and I expect I will find mistakes or gaps along the way that require additional research to complete.

The Way Forward

Now that I have some data, I can do a better estimate of how much longer this project should take.

I do a lousy job of taking notes, but from looking at my earlier blog, Facebook, and Twitter posts, I started on Generation 5 while I finished up my school work in March and mid-April. Here are some stats:

• 15 April - 9 July: just shy of three months
• rough draft: 371 pages (low estimate of 185.5 hours of work)
• first draft: 198 pages (53% of the rough draft size)

At this point, I need to go back to RootsMagic and re-generate Generations 6-11, because I made some pretty significant changes to the Ancestry tree while I edited Generation 5. It will save me a lot of time to re-generate the rough drafts for those Generations instead of re-numbering and manually adding people.

I broke the rough draft of Gen 6 into three sections so Google Docs could handle the larger documents; each section was about 200 pages. Based on that:

• an estimated first draft of Gen 6 (when I'm done) should be about 300 pages.
• My estimated hours of work: 600 rough draft pages = 300 hours
• Working "full time" (40 hours/week) should (optimistically) take about 8 weeks.

I said "optimistically" - I don't know how much of my time I'll get to keep spending on editing. And that estimate doesn't take into account the extra research I'll need to do as I find mistakes or missing people. Ancestry is constantly adding new records databases, and I'm constantly finding living cousins who help me find more information and fill more gaps. (Hi, Dean! Hi, Sara! Hi, Cheryl!) 

I'm not complaining - I'm thrilled to meet everyone, and I want to include your stories the way YOU want them told - but I have to budget for that extra time, too.

How You Can Help

If you've come this far, and you want to help lighten my load, there are a few things you can do that would save me a lot of time:

1. Send me YOUR bio. (mightieracorns@gmail.com) If you are a direct descendant of James Callin (meaning you will be one of the people in the book), writing your story down in a paragraph or two will save me a ton of time. Even if you're not confident in your writing, don't worry - I can help you with wordsmithing and I don't mind tracking down documents that help support your personal story. But it will be so much faster and more accurate if you provide it. 
2. Get your family to tell their stories, too. If you're a direct descendant of James Callin (and this blog should help you determine if you are), I'd love to see a paragraph or two for your parents, siblings, and/or your children. Not only will you save me time, but you'll help me get the word out about the book, and help me make sure I'm not surprising anybody who might not want a stranger writing their life story!
3. Ask me about your Callin-related ancestors. It may sound like that would distract me and take up MORE of my time, but I have found that your questions often make me look at the documents I have in new ways, and answering you makes us both smarter!
4. Can you spare some time to edit? I can send a link to you and give you permission to view and comment on the "first draft" I've done so far - you don't have to worry that you might accidentally delete anything, and your comments or specific questions would be a huge help when I go to do the final draft in a few months.
5. Spread the word! The biggest help of all is just to talk to your family about this project. If they're comfortable with Facebook, invite them to join the private Callin Family History group, or ask them to like and watch the Mightier Acorns Facebook page. If they are Twitter people, @mightieracorns might be for them. My email address is great for one-on-one questions.

What's Next?

Now that I have some idea of when this will be publishable, I plan to start making some Mightier Acorns videos to go along with the eventual Kickstarter campaign. 

If you are interested in contributing to that part of the project, you can send me videos of yourself with a greeting ("Hi, cousins, my name is ____ and I'm descended from James Callin through my grandparents, ____ and ____!") or a question ("I read blog post X, and I was wondering if you knew more about ____.") With your permission, I would like to put several videos together and it would be a lot more fun to have your input that it would be just to watch my big, dumb head talk to a camera for 5 minutes!