Family History
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
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
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
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
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
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 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.
Surname Origins
A dove-named man, a ship called Dove, and the historian who caught them both before the tide went out.
Edward Colver
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
News
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
American Revolution
Two hundred fifty years ago, the Revolution split this family into two houses — one for Congress, one for the King, both loyal to their cause. The story of the divide, and of the four weddings that mended it.
genealogy
A reader asked where to find the rarest book in the family. Here it is — all eleven pages — together with the 1976 obituary pasted inside that tells you exactly whose shelf it came from.