A House Divided: Collver Family History

In 1889 a Michigan county clerk entered a farmer's son and wrote "Canada" twice in the birthplace column. It is the first American record of the direct line in nearly a century.

This episode answers the question the family never did: why Michigan? A wedding at Simcoe in 1858 brought Samantha Gilbert into the family, and a county history of 1905 lists her brothers: a state senator at Sterling, a physician, an attorney, and a dentist at Bay City. When her son crossed in 1887 he went to his uncles. The episode follows the chain from the Queen's Rangers to a rural mail route at Munger, and corrects the family's best genealogy about where the emigrant is buried.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

In 1877 the firm of H. R. Page and Company published an illustrated atlas of Norfolk County, Ontario, with every farmer's name lettered across his land. Forty-one of those names are Collver, Colver, or Culver, eighty-three years after the Reverend Jabez Collver was granted a thousand acres there.

This episode reads the atlas lot by lot and then follows one name through the land registry: William Valentine Collver, who bought half of a half-lot beside his brother in 1865, sold it in two pieces, and began again in the next township. It shows what partible inheritance did to a thousand acres, and why his son crossed to Michigan.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

On the morning of Wednesday, 23 October 1844, on an incline of the Hartlepool railway near Castle Eden, a plate layer named John King was run over by an engine, its tender, and three or four waggons. He was fifty-three, and he was my fourth-great-grandfather. The family had forgotten him.

This episode follows the search that brought him back: a civil death index that offered the wrong John King, a burial at Norton two days after the death, two registrations in the Easington district that disagree, a coroner's inquest reported in the Durham Chronicle, and one word written in the margin of a burial register. It ends with what the railway and the sea did to a family that crossed to Michigan in 1910.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

A bonus reading: Sketch XII of E. A. Owen’s Pioneer Sketches of Long Point Settlement (Toronto, 1898), the chapter Norfolk County’s old historian gave to the four Collver brothers who married four Collver sisters, read as he printed it. It includes the first night in Townsend, on pine boughs, with the wolves in hearing.

Owen wrote from inside the family; his wife was a great-granddaughter of the eldest brother. His dates and traditions are his own; the companion episode, “The Quartette,” gives what the records add.

Full text at history.collver.biz.

Four sons of the Reverend Jabez Collver married four daughters of his cousin Timothy, in order, eldest to eldest. E. A. Owen called them “The Double Culver Quartette.”

In March 1790 Jabez counted the weddings in a letter to his son at Niagara: “so that we have three out of their family.” The fourth was made in Canada in 1797, “by J. Collver Sr.” Then the land office of Upper Canada paid the dowries: two hundred acres to each of the four brides, in her own name, as a Loyalist’s daughter.

Owen’s own account is read in full in this week’s bonus episode.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

“my Daughter Anna having had her portion in Land in Upper Canada.” One clause in an 1831 New Jersey will ties a daughter the family register had lost back to her father’s people in Canada.

The Reverend Jabez Collver’s daughter Anna, born in 1758, has one line in the family register: “no further record found.” A reader’s letter, a 1940 typescript surviving in one of its three carbons, John Loder’s will, and her own gravestone at Urbana, New York, give her back her husband, her children, and her dates. There were Loders in Norfolk County too, with a tavern, a mill, and a store, and the two families each named a child for the other.

One question remains open: where was the younger Anna’s land in Upper Canada, and what was her married name?

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

In July of 1747 a sixteen-year-old orphan stood in the probate office at New London and did the one legal thing the law left in his hands: being “a minor, over 14,” he chose his own guardian. Laid in a row, the records of his childhood tell the story of a boy who had been starting over since he was two.

Jabez Collver was raised among the Rogerenes, the sect that went to jail and the whipping post rather than pay a “hireling” minister. He grew up to be one. Ordained about 1761 “according to the Cambridge Presbyterian order, which was a congregational platform,” he served nearly thirty years at the Beemer Meeting-House in Sussex County, New Jersey. That phrase is not a muddle but an exact description of the Cambridge Platform of 1648, and it explains why the man who took the orders and the wage never took a presbytery.

A historian of 1907 called him “an uneducated man.” He never saw the thirty-eight pages of divinity Jabez wrote out and stitched together himself.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

In early September a reader’s comment posed a familiar question: can a Louisiana Culver line be traced to Edward Colver of New London? The family had a name — Solan Kiser Culver — a tombstone dated 1840, and a memory of a father called “Heziah.” Seventy-two hours later the line stood eleven generations deep, documented most of the way to the immigrant.

The wall’s strangest stone was the door: Solan lived for years under an alias, “C. H. Culver” — his father’s initials — and the persona had its own age, twelve years older than the man; his family carved the borrowed year on his stone. One record cuts through: the 1881 pension application he filed under his true name.

Up the ladder — a blacksmith grandfather at Oneida, an old Berkshire farmer who died in the blacksmith’s own town, a father and son of Woodbury on one 1762 deed — to the top rung: a Litchfield deed of gift, 1720/21, in which Edward Culver of Lebanon conveys land “for and in Consideration of my hearty Love and Respect unto my son Daniell Culver of Lebanon.” Four words — unto my son Daniell — and a question two centuries old is shut. The episode ends with what remains conjecture, and why a Y-DNA test would settle it.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

On the twenty-eighth of November, 1637, the town of Dedham voted Edward Colver, wheelwright, two acres “for imploym’t in his trade” and free liberty of taking timber — the earliest dated record of the immigrant ancestor, and nearly every word of it about his usefulness. Run a finger down the family’s records asking not what they believed but what they did for a living, and a quieter story assembles itself: bread, beer, beds, wheels, shoes, land, flour, cheese, shirts, a dredging machine, and the telephone.

The shape repeats for three hundred and ninety years: the licensed, necessary trade — the shop a settlement needs next. Edward brewed “for the publicke good” at New London; a Culver kept the only house between Riverhead and Southampton; Jabez, the family’s quiet speculator, assembled and liquidated seven hundred acres on the Chemung; Aaron’s mill fed the Long Point settlement until an American raid burned it; a cousin made cheese in Townsend, another made shirts in Lansing, and the Collvers of Bay County ran the telephone exchanges at Munger, East Tawas, and Climax — with Mary Rebecca Collver keeping the books.

And the oldest line of business never closed: three and a half centuries after the town chose its brewer, a tenth-great-grandson of that brewer keeps a brewery and taproom in a Michigan town. Some businesses are family businesses by teaching; this one, like the doves on the name, seems to be one by homing.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

In the first days of November, 1814, on a hilltop above Waterford in Upper Canada, two millers stood under an oak with a rope over its limb — seized by McArthur’s raiders for twice putting out the fire set in Sovereen’s mill. The rope was already around William Schuyler’s neck when Morris Sovereen rushed to the American general, made a Masonic sign, and shouted “Spare our lives and burn all I have.” “Let them down, boys — I’ll spare their lives.”

Behind the rescue stands a warrant: Lodge No. 26, Townsend, issued at Niagara on 24 June 1812 — six days after the United States declared war — with John Collver its founding Junior Warden and the lodge meeting through the war in Sovereen’s upper room, the door tyled at the stairhead. The sign the little lodge taught in that room proved negotiable currency between enemies at rope’s length.

The episode follows the story’s honest pedigree — Robertson took it down in 1899 from Sovereen’s own circle, with old Schuyler’s habitual conclusion: “My God, if Morris Sovereen hadn’t been a Mason we would have stretched hemp” — and ends at the county registry, where the burned mill’s seat sold in 1816 for £1,005, memorial No. 892.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.