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 and lives in the air. A family history built from such documents has always been, in a quiet way, a collection of transcripts — and it seemed increasingly strange that the transcripts had no voice.
They do now. Every article on this site is also an episode of A House Divided: Collver Family History — a limited-run podcast, July through December, in which each week’s essay is read aloud, complete and unabridged. Five episodes are live as I write this:
- A House Divided: The Collvers in the American Revolution
- Echoes from the Frontier: The Petitions of Rev. Jabez Collver
- Set Up the King’s Standard
- Why We’re Collver, Not Culver
- The Family Pamphlet
A sixth arrives tomorrow morning with the new essay — The Judge, the Preacher, and the Log Gaol — and each Friday’s post will follow as that week’s episode. A player now sits at the top of each article, so you can read, listen, or let one check the other’s work.
Where to find it: on Apple Podcasts or Spotify; in any podcast app via the RSS feed (https://podcast.collver.biz/@housedivided/feed.xml); or at the show’s own page, podcast.collver.biz.
Subscribe:Apple PodcastsSpotifyMore apps
A word about the voice, because this site trades on saying such things plainly. The narration is my voice — by way of a voice model trained on my own recordings, reading my own words, under my own control. It is the only use that model is put to. The alternative was several hours a week of studio time that would otherwise go to the research itself, and given the choice between a cloned voice and an unwritten chapter, I chose the chapter. If a pronunciation goes astray now and then, the reader should enjoy it; the author certainly has.
The podcast runs through December, when the project it serves — the family book — is due at the printer. Jabez was a preacher; two centuries on, it seems only right that his story should be told the way he told everything: out loud.
© 2026 Albert B. Collver III · The Collver Family History Project. Original historical documents reproduced here are in the public domain; the research, text, and annotations are the author’s. Please cite or link rather than republish.
