The oldest thing this family is known to own that you can still pick up is a walking stick: a dark head worn smooth by hands, and below it a collar of bone pricked, dot by dot, with COLLVER names. The family calls it the Jabez staff. It is in Michigan, in my cousin Jeff Collver's keeping.

This episode is about that object and about a mistake of my own. E. A. Owen described Timothy Culver's staff in 1898, brass-headed and steel-tipped, the companion of a thousand-mile walk; I had decided the family had quietly renamed it for its brightest ancestor, the way it renamed a Bible, a chaplaincy, and a monument. Then I set the two descriptions side by side, and they are two staffs, not one. The family did not drift. I did. And the staff had already signed itself: among the pricked names on the collar is Jabez.

Also: a Free Methodist minister in Arenac County; his son Wendell photographed with the staff outside the cobblestone school he attended; a marble cenotaph in Norfolk County that says the same thing in stone; and what a staff is for.

Text, sources, and the photographs at history.collver.biz.

In March of 1676 — the darkest weeks of King Philip's War — the Council of Connecticut sent for one particular old man: "that Edward Culver, w'th about 20 Moheags and Pequots, com up to Hartford forthwith." Not a captain. A wheelwright, baker, and brewer, past sixty, whom twenty Mohegan and Pequot fighting men would apparently ride to Hartford with because he asked them to.

This episode is the argument, in the open: which Edward the clerk meant, and why the answer matters; the receipts of an unglamorous life — bread, beer, and lodging "for the publicke good"; the farm that kept its Pequot name, Chepadaso, for a generation of English record-keeping; the family war story I had to give up, withdrawn in print rather than quietly deleted; the plunder declaration entered at the same day's sitting, "both of persons and corn or other estate," which an honest history cannot skip; and the Voluntown roll, where a Winthrop and a wronged neighbor stand a few names from the family's own unplaced puzzle, Ephraim.

The nations in that minute did not go anywhere: the Mohegan Tribe and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation are still the neighbors, on their own ground in the same river country.

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

In 1857 a common school teacher named John Earl published a pamphlet at the Norfolk Messenger office in Simcoe that undertook to list, lot by lot, the name of every landholder in Norfolk County, Canada West — the statistics all speaking from 1855, the assessment year he worked from.

Go through his lists with a pencil and the family appears forty-three times, in six of the seven townships. This episode walks the lots: the homestead in its third generation, with the Old Windham Church and Jabez's grave inside one fence line; Michael Culver on the lot granted in right of his mother Miriam in 1796; a Culver still on the Pettit half-lot, keeping an eighty-year New Jersey entanglement; and the entry where the enumerator gave up — "Culver Family and others" — the undivided estate that is the closest thing we have to William Valentine's address in 1855.

There is also a cheese manufacturer we cannot yet place, and an open invitation to any reader who descends from him.

And there is the ending Earl himself wrote: seven stanzas of recruiting verse — "Would you be wealthy, come away" — that the next generation obeyed in the opposite direction, to Bay City, Michigan.

The midpoint snapshot between the grants of 1794 and the Michigan exodus, from the schoolteacher who counted everybody.

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

Frances Manwaring Caulkins is the historian every family in southeastern Connecticut stands on — and the only reason we can put a name to the woman the New London court sentenced to fifteen stripes in 1719.

A reader's passing remark sent us looking for whether her family and the Collvers ever touched. What turned up instead was this: writing in 1904, John Bolles answered a minister who had sneered that the Rogerenes' descendants were "almost unknown" by naming the town's most distinguished people of Rogers blood — and he began with Caulkins.

The records bear him out at every link. Elizabeth Rogers, daughter of James, born at New London in 1749 and living at Hog Neck when she married Robert Manwaring in October of 1772; their children Christopher and Fanny, baptized together in September of 1787; Fanny married to Joshua Caulkins in 1792; and Frances born in 1795, the year her father died.

The historian was of the sect's own stock — and she leaned the other way while she wrote about them. Bolles calls her gifted and honored and the first to search that ground seriously, and in the same breath notes she was "inclined to favor the ecclesiastical side."

Two things are left open on purpose: which James Rogers, and whether the descent runs on her father's side too.

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

A message arrived from Oregon this week, and it began the way the oldest family documents begin — with a recitation: five generations named in a single breath, from A. B. Collver down to a great-grandson. Setting that recitation beside the records took about a day, and the records gave back more than was asked of them.

This episode follows the branch of the family this project’s readers have not yet met. Gabriel Collver, carried to Upper Canada in his mother’s arms in the 1790s, did what no one else of his generation did: he turned around, walking back into the republic his grandparents had fled — Ohio in 1819, Iowa in 1839. He died near Tipton in 1849 and never saw Oregon. Nearly everyone he raised did. The 1850 census catches the whole family on a single enumerator’s page in the year between the death and the departure; in the spring of 1851 about forty-one of them left for the Willamette, wintering among the Latter-day Saints at Provo.

Then the part the branch’s own historians did not have. Gabriel’s estate was still open in Iowa while the wagons were rolling, and the court file answers a question nobody had thought to ask: how do you pay an heir who has gone to Oregon? Folded among the guardianship papers is a letter from Hiram Collver, written in 1857 from the Long Tom country, routing his inheritance through a Wall Street house to the order of the territory’s former provisional governor, and closing with a mailing address on the Coos River.

And one letter home, 8 May 1890, in which an aging homesteader tells his daughter that Arthur Howard has a boy and calls him Ellis Roy — a sentence that, one hundred and thirty-six years later, let a correspondent’s message be proven in a day.

Text, images and full notes at history.collver.biz.

November 1719, the county court at New London. The verdicts against the Rogerenes were all in and there was nothing left to do but rise. A woman of about forty-six, from across the river at Groton, spoke instead: “You are an adulterous generation, and I hope God will find you out.” For those seventeen words the court sentenced her to receive fifteen stripes upon the naked body — the court’s own formula — and to pay the charges for the same.

Her name was Sarah Culver. She is my eighth-great-grandmother.

This episode walks the whole of her record: the September morning she interrupted the Reverend Eliphalet Adams in the meeting-house, alongside the founder’s wife and her own daughter; the two months in prison; the midnights of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of November, when her husband and son staved down part of the prison yard to carry a dying woman into the air, and were fined ten shillings for it; and the possibility — the sect’s own historians’ guess, and it stays a guess — that the same raid carried Sarah beyond the reach of her stripes. Then 1725, when she rode past fifty to Lebanon to baptize converts, and the country around Norwich knew her as the singing sister.

And the sting: for a century the family’s published genealogies chased a Winthrop marriage that never happened. It already had somebody in that courtroom — standing on the other side of the bar.

Text, images and full notes at history.collver.biz.

Four days after this blog published two thousand words on three generations of Collvers in the telephone trade, one sentence in it needed answering for. Mary kept the books. John climbed the poles. Four words for her; eleven paragraphs for the men.

It was not wrong the way a date is wrong. It was a failure of proportion — and the Climax Crescent of 5 April 1996 had done far better by her than her own family’s historian. They gave her the front page.

Mary Rebecca Collver was the company’s secretary and treasurer for the better part of thirty years. For the first six years the switchboard stood in the front room of her own house, which is to say she did not go to work at the telephone company; the telephone company lived with Mary. She sat in at the state conventions where the independents argued their case, and belonged to the Telephone Association of Michigan in her own right. And it was Mary, her son recalls, who pressed the family to give up the old magneto board for the dial system.

The episode ends on the method, because the mechanism is general: the records that describe work name men; the records that describe lives name everyone.

Text, images and full notes at history.collver.biz.

In the late summer of 1997 a form letter arrived at a house in Climax, Michigan, addressed to Mary Collver. It called her a proud bearer of the name and told her she was listed. She had been dead eighteen months. Printed in the corner was the merge number: 669083.

This episode takes that letter as a specimen, and asks what separates the name a family keeps from the ancestors it chases. Part one reads the Collver given names generation by generation, out of the register at the back of the book: John, Joshua, Samuel, Gershom; then Jabez, a name built on the Hebrew word for pain; then Darius and Calista out of the schoolbook; then the mother’s maiden surname carried forward as a monument; then John Milton, for the poet; and at last Albert Bernard, three times over. Sacred, then national, then personal.

Part two follows the other half — the waves of American genealogy, from the hereditary societies of 1889 to 1897, through the post-war silence, to the inversion that Roots and the Bicentennial worked on the whole enterprise. And it makes a confession: the 1912 Colonial Dames catalog and the DAR record copies in this project’s own footnotes are artifacts of the first impulse, put to the service of the second.

Text, images and full notes at history.collver.biz.

In 1279 Edward I sent commissioners into every county of England to ask a question no one enjoys being asked: by what warrant do you hold this? On page 794 of the Oxford returns, a man of our name is written down twice — John Culverd, burgess, holding a messuage and a cellar with a solar, and paying rent to the Prior of St Frideswide’s, the Knights Templar, the parish of St Peter’s, and a University of Oxford that had been a corporation for less than fifty years.

He is an early bearer of the name. He is not an ancestor — and this episode is largely about why that distinction matters. It is also about the three times the sworn jury of Oxford men, under a royal audit, answered nescit: they did not know.

A note on the audio: the two entries are printed in a Latin so heavily abbreviated that reading it aloud would tell you nothing, so this episode gives their sense in English. The facsimile of the page is reproduced with the written version.

Full text, the document plate, and notes at history.collver.biz.

A departure from the eighteenth century: a farmer’s son before the Michigan Public Utilities Commission in 1937, an ice storm two weeks into a newly bought exchange in 1949, and three generations of Collvers carrying the human voice from Munger to Climax.

Read the full post, with the original document images, at https://history.collver.biz/doves-on-the-wire/