The Family Business
Run a finger down the records asking what they did for a living: bread, beer, wheels, shoes, land, flour, cheese, shirts, and the telephone — three centuries of the licensed trade a town cannot do without.
Latest
A Mason's Sign at the Rope
In the first days of November, 1814, on a hilltop above Waterford in Norfolk County, Upper Canada, two middle-aged millers stood under a great oak with a rope over its limb. The rope was already around the neck of one of them. Around them sat a column of mounted
Divided Again
On the twenty-eighth of August, 1813, in the second summer of the war, Captain Nesbitt Collver of Townsend township sat down and made his will. Listen to this post 0:0015:20 ▶ Listen to this post read aloud (MP3, 15 min) Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicMore apps He was thirty-
The Germans Next Door
Vanita Johnson Engelbrecht died in the small hours between Saturday and Sunday, the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of August. She was my father's eighth cousin — the two of them the same number of generations down from a couple who lie in unmarked ground on a New Jersey mountainside
The Covenant, Signed Twice
In 1636 a wheelwright signed a covenant at Dedham, sixty-eighth on the roll. In 1791 his great-great-grandson organized a covenanted church in the Pennsylvania wilderness. One hundred fifty-five years, one revolution, one sedition conviction — and the same instrument, signed twice.
The Lost Family Register
In 1832 an old soldier swore he had seen his birth on the family register of his father's family — and could not say what had become of it. On the registers this family lost, refused, and should not have trusted.
The Two Colonies
There is a small lake in Mount Arlington, New Jersey, that the modern map calls Lake Rogerene. Listen to this post 0:0018:42 ▶ Listen to this post read aloud (MP3, 19 min) ▶ Listen to this episode Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicMore apps Almost nobody who drives past it could tell
The Jabez Staff
The oldest thing this family owns that you can still pick up is a walking stick, and it corrected me.
Twenty Moheags
In March of 1676 — March 1675/6 by the reckoning then in use, when the year turned in late March and a winter month carried two dates — the Council of Connecticut sat at Hartford answering letters from a colony on fire. King Philip's War had burned through the
The Schoolteacher's Census
In 1857 the office of the Norfolk Messenger, the newspaper at Simcoe, printed a slim pamphlet with an immodest scope and a modest author. The scope was everything: A Sketch of the County of Norfolk, Canada West — Canada West being what Ontario was called between 1841 and Confederation — undertook to
The Historian Was One of Them
Last week I told the story of Sarah Culver, who stood up in the county court at New London in November of 1719 and told four magistrates that they were an adulterous generation and that God would find them out, and was sentenced to fifteen stripes upon the naked body
The Collvers Go West
A message from Oregon began with a recitation of five generations. Setting it beside the records took a day — and turned up Gabriel Collver's probate file, a letter from the Coos River folded inside it, and an inheritance routed through Wall Street to a young man with no permanent address.
Family History
Fifteen Stripes
Seventeen words to four magistrates of Connecticut, and a sentence of fifteen stripes on the naked body — the woman the family forgot while it chased a governor.
Family History
Mary Kept the Books
Four words for her, eleven paragraphs for the men — and what her own hometown newspaper knew that her family’s historian did not.
Family History
The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased
A form letter, a mail-merge number, and a woman eighteen months dead — and what four hundred years of this family's given names say about where Americans decided they lived.
Surname Origins
The Hundred Rolls
John Culverd of Oxford held a cellar with a solar in 1279, and the jury that recorded it admitted three times over that it did not know how. An early bearer of the family name, honestly unconnected - and why that distinction is the whole method.
Family History
Doves on the Wire
A departure this week from the eighteenth century: a family story that surfaced in the last few days, from correspondence with cousins of the Climax, Michigan branch and a week in the newspaper and census records. It reaches from Munger, in Bay County, to the village of Climax in Kalamazoo
Great Migration
The 68th Name
The Dedham covenant of 1636, the sixty-eighth name on its roll, and the wheelwright grant that capitalized an ancestor - a family's American record verified, one counted column at a time.
genealogy
The County's First Deed
Tioga County's land records open with a deed to Jabez Colver — a convicted Loyalist. The five vanished Chemung years, and one evening at Wynkoop's fireside.
Jabez Collver
Pull Down All Other Persuasions
At his 1777 sedition trial, Rev. Jabez Colver warned that a victorious America would let the Presbyterians “pull down all other Persuasions.” Who was in the room that day, what he meant, and why the fear still echoes.
Surname Origins
The Captain of the Dove
A dove-named man, a ship called Dove, and the historian who caught them both before the tide went out.
Edward Colver
The Ship That Never Was
Edward Colver's crossing, the ships he was not on, and what an honest family history does with an empty sea Listen to this post 0:0024:34 Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicMore apps Every American family story wants to begin with a ship. It is the oldest scene in
Jabez Collver
The Judge, the Preacher, and the Log Gaol
Nathaniel Pettit, Jabez Collver, and the price of a signature For Kathy Hall UE Listen to this post 0:0025:12 Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicMore apps There is a village in New Jersey that was named for its jail. Not for a founder, not for a church, not for some
News
The Archive Now Speaks
The Collver Family History Project is now a podcast Nearly everything on this site was written to be heard. Jabez Collver’s petitions were read aloud to a council; his sedition case turned on words spoken in a neighbor’s hearing; his trade was the sermon, which dies on paper