Family History
The Jabez Staff
The oldest thing this family owns that you can still pick up is a walking stick, and it corrected me.
Family History
Family History
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
Family History
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.
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
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