The Scalps That Never Were
My grandparents came home from Simcoe with a story that the Collvers had once scalped people. The story is real. It began in a Vermont newspaper in July 1794, and it was never about us.
What the National Histories Said
Between 1905 and 1914 three of Canada's national reference works made room for the Reverend Jabez Collver. Each paid him an honor, and each made a small mistake. The documents had already answered every one of them.
The Visionary
About 1790 a young man who doubted heaven and hell asked God to show him whether they were there. His father wrote down what he said he saw, and the family kept it in print for more than fifty years. Also: the first printed proofs of We Are Doves have arrived.
The Bride's Own Loyalists
The family remembered Jane Cregar's great-great-grandmother only as Rebecca. The Crown's own paper gives her surname back: a Loyalist's daughter's petition of 1819, the patent of her lot, and the 1838 sale by William Shingler and Rebecca his wife.
The Bride Goes Home
In 1958 a Michigan widow sailed home to England on the Queen Elizabeth. The records give her back a Yorkshire village, two forgotten weddings (father and son to mother and daughter), a grandmother who signed her name in 1818, and an English cousin found by DNA.
Lost at Sea, Twice
A Hartlepool gravestone remembers Henry Anderson, master mariner, who died at sea in 1839; his son and namesake died at sea in 1865. The records a seaman's death leaves behind give the father a ship and a birthplace: Lerwick, in Shetland.
The Noted Hunter of Sheshequin
Sergeant Timothy Culver of the Connecticut Line, the Patriot cousin, read from his own pension file: four enlistments, a leg hurt hauling timber in 1781, and the 1820 schedule that lists every one of his six chairs.
Why Michigan? The Gilbert Brothers of Bay City
The direct line left Norfolk for the Saginaw Bay country in 1887. Why that county and not Dakota or Oregon? A wedding in 1858, four brothers in Bay City, and a grave the printed genealogy put in the wrong country.
The Family on the Map, 1877
In 1877 a county atlas lettered forty-one of us across Norfolk. Read beside the land registry, it shows what three generations made of a thousand acres, and why one son left.
The Plate Layer
On 23 October 1844 a railway plate layer named John King was run over on the Hartlepool line. The family had forgotten him; a coroner's inquest, two death registrations that disagree, and one word in a burial register brought him back.
The Quartette
Four brothers married four sisters, all of the same name. The land office of Upper Canada paid the dowries.
The Loders
An 1831 will, a 1940 typescript, and a reader's letter find the daughter the family register lost.