19:26

S01 Oct 2, 2026

The Double Culver Quartette (E. A. Owen, 1898)

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.

30:22

S01:E01 Jul 4, 2026

A House Divided: The Collvers in the American Revolution

Two hundred fifty years ago this summer, the American Revolution divided the Culver/Collver family into two houses — one that fought for Congress, one that stood for the King — and both believed they were being loyal, because both were. Who signed what, who marched where, who bled, who fled, and how four weddings stitched the family back together on the far side of the war. A Fourth of July story, told from both sides of it. Read the full illustrated essay, with all the documents and sources: https://history.collver.biz/a-house-divided-the-collvers-in-the-american-revolution/ From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

10:37

S01:E02 Jul 4, 2026

Echoes from the Frontier: The Petitions of Rev. Jabez Collver

Some voices from the past do not fade — they linger in the yellowed pages of old petitions. This episode reads Rev. Jabez Collver’s own petitions to the government of Upper Canada, and the documents that keep his voice audible more than two centuries on. Read the full illustrated essay, with all the documents and sources: https://history.collver.biz/echoes-from-the-frontier-the-petitions-of-rev-jabez-collver/ From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

13:13

S01:E03 Jul 4, 2026

Set Up the King's Standard: The Land, the Treason, and the Flight of Jabez Colver

In the summer of 1774, a Connecticut-born minister named Jabez Colver laid out £545 in proclamation money and bought 163 acres beside the water we now call Culver’s Lake. This episode tells the story of that land, the charge of treason that overtook him when the Revolution came, and his flight north — read through the original documents, in the hands of the men who wrote them. Read the full illustrated essay, with all the documents and sources: https://history.collver.biz/set-up-the-kings-standard-the-land-the-treason-and-the-flight-of-jabez-colver/ From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

49:40

S01:E04 Jul 4, 2026

Why We're Collver, Not Culver

From Old English ‘culfre’ — a dove — to a Loyalist preacher’s land grant on the shore of Lake Erie: this episode follows the 750-year paper trail behind the family’s unusual spelling, and why we are Collver, not Culver. Read the full illustrated essay, with all the documents and sources: https://history.collver.biz/why-were-collver-not-culver/ From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

7:53

S01:E05 Jul 4, 2026

The Family Pamphlet: The Collver-Culver Genealogy, 1630 to 1916

A reader asked where to find the rarest book in the family. Here it is — all eleven pages of the 1916 Collver-Culver genealogy, read aloud, together with the 1976 obituary pasted inside the family’s own copy that tells you exactly whose shelf it came from. Read the full illustrated essay, with the complete scanned pamphlet: https://history.collver.biz/the-family-pamphlet-the-collver-culver-genealogy-1630-to-1916/ From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

25:13

S01:E06 Jul 6, 2026

The Judge, the Preacher, and the Log Gaol

The Pettits of Log Gaol: identifying the John Pettit of Jabez Collver’s 1776 Loyalist enrollment, the judge imprisoned beside his neighbors in the log jail that named a town, and what the record shows about Jabez’s own imprisonment for loyalty. Music: an original theme in the manner of the 18th-century singing-school tunes the Collver family sang. Full text, images, and sources: https://history.collver.biz/the-judge-the-preacher-and-the-log-gaol/

24:33

S01:E07 Jul 10, 2026

The Ship That Never Was

The sentence the family kept for three centuries was that Edward Colver sailed from London in 1635 aboard John Winthrop the Younger’s ship. The ship is the one thing the record cannot give us — no name, no master, no port, no year. This episode walks the vessel plank by plank anyway: the standardized English merchant ship of the Great Migration, the ‘tween-deck world where families lived stooped for ten weeks, the biscuit and the beer, and the wheelwright who was worth his passage. Along the way a name pulls taut — a Reverend Edward Culver, vicar of Harmondsworth on the ground where Heathrow now stands, whom the family’s Maryland branch has long claimed as the immigrant’s grandfather: possible, not provable, and the parish that would settle it lies under the runways. Music: an original theme in the manner of the 18th-century singing-school tunes the Collver family sang. Full text, images, and sources: https://history.collver.biz/the-ship-that-never-was/ From The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

20:16

S01:E08 Jul 13, 2026

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. On the third of August, 1811, the brig Dove came up the Thames to New London under Captain Christopher Colver — sixty-three days out of Liverpool — and Frances Manwaring Caulkins caught the whole story half a century later from the ninety-year-old captain’s own lips, on the wharf, before the tide took it out for good. Plus the strangest Culver of all: Stephen, who built a dredging machine he had forgotten he’d already seen as a prisoner-boy in the harbor of L’Orient. Read the essay: https://history.collver.biz/the-captain-of-the-dove/ More at The Collver Family History Project — https://history.collver.biz

34:49

S01:E09 Jul 17, 2026

Pull Down All Other Persuasions

For words spoken to a neighbor in 1777, the Rev. Jabez Colver of Wantage was convicted of sedition — for warning that if America won the Revolution, “the Presbyterians will pull down all other Persuasions.” This episode reconstructs the courtroom where he said it: who the judges, the prosecutor, and the grand-jury foreman actually were, and why a Congregationalist feared the Presbyterians in particular. The trail runs from the English Civil War and the ghost of Oliver Cromwell to the very structure of church government — and to a fear with a surprisingly long reach. Some of it is proven, some of it is a good guess, and the essay tells you which is which. Read the illustrated version, with the original 1777 indictment and every source: https://history.collver.biz/pull-down-all-other-persuasions/

11:59

S01:E10 Jul 20, 2026

The County's First Deed

On 20 December 1788, the first deed recorded in Tioga County conveyed 150 acres on the Chemung to Jabez Colver — a New Jersey Loyalist who, eleven years earlier, had pleaded guilty to sedition against the American cause. This episode traces the five vanished years the family spent on the Chemung between the Revolution’s New Jersey and their walk to Canada: nearly 700 acres bought in a single season, a wilderness church organized at Wysox, and one winter evening in 1791 when Colonel Thomas Proctor set down — at Wynkoop’s fireside — the only portrait of Jabez Colver ever drawn by an outsider. Read the full post, with the deed and Proctor’s journal: https://history.collver.biz/the-countys-first-deed/ Adapted from the forthcoming book We Are Doves: A Collver Family History.

24:51

S01:E11 Jul 24, 2026

The 68th Name

The Dedham covenant of 1636, the sixty-eighth name on its roll, and the wheelwright grant that set an ancestor up in trade — the family’s American record verified, one counted column at a time. Read the full post, with the original document images, at https://history.collver.biz/the-68th-name/

14:51

S01:E12 Jul 27, 2026

Doves on the Wire

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/

17:48

S01:E13 Jul 31, 2026

The Hundred Rolls

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.

17:16

S01:E14 Aug 3, 2026

The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased

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.

9:12

S01:E15 Aug 5, 2026

Mary Kept the Books

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.

21:04

S01:E16 Aug 7, 2026

Fifteen Stripes

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.

13:14

S01:E17 Aug 10, 2026

The Collvers Go West

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.

15:46

S01:E18 Aug 14, 2026

The Historian Was One of Them

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.

18:39

S01:E19 Aug 17, 2026

The Schoolteacher's Census

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.

29:08

S01:E20 Aug 21, 2026

Twenty Moheags

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.

17:11

S01:E21 Aug 24, 2026

The Jabez Staff

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.

18:42

S01:E22 Aug 28, 2026

The Two Colonies

There is a small lake in Mount Arlington, New Jersey, that the modern map calls Lake Rogerene — the last hard part of a Connecticut dissenting sect that was once alive, once moving, and once in a great deal of trouble with the authorities. My family filled one of its two New Jersey colonies so completely that the neighbors stopped using the name of the sect altogether and coined a word from ours instead: Colverites.Two colonies. That number is the subject of this episode, because nearly every book that has ever touched the family gets it wrong. The received story is one crossing — the patriarch, his wife, and ten children, twenty-one in all, onto Schooley's Mountain in 1734. But the colony's first record is a dying man's will, written at Black River in December of 1732, before the colony is supposed to have existed: "Colver (Colwer), John, of the Blackriver, Hunterdon Co., 'cordwinder, being sick.'" The compilers compressed waves into one motion; the probate record keeps the true time.Then the correction the episode is named for. The county historian of Morris, writing in 1914, describes TWO Rogerene communities in those hills — the larger and earlier at Mountain Pond, which is now Lake Rogerene, and the smaller company of Colvers on Schooley's Mountain — and says flatly that they "had no direct association." Several of the loveliest scenes the later books hang on the Colverites, the temple in the grove among them, he assigns to the other colony.Also: the eleven years at Barnegat, where recollection and parchment shake hands — Robert Collver paying a hundred and eighty pounds proclamation money in one afternoon, and Nathan closing the circle two years later with a same-day exchange. And a sterner passage about Culvers Gap, forty miles north, which this migration never reached: a name on the land is a lead, not a conclusion.Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

16:31

S01:E23 Aug 31, 2026

The Lost Family Register

On the seventh of August, 1832, an old soldier stood in open court in Bedford County, Tennessee, and tried to prove the day he was born. What the clerk wrote down is one of the saddest sentences in this family's whole paper trail: "he has seen it on the family Register of his father's family — but has no recollection of what has become of it at this time."This episode is about that page and the others like it: the register John Culver saw and lost; the discharge he "took very little care of," not believing it would ever matter; the Guilford County marriage bond nobody could find, which cost his widow's estate a pension and left the file stamped REJECTED. The government of 1833 accepted a preacher's word and a letter from James K. Polk in place of one lost page. It would not do it twice.Then the little museum of absence: the Harmondsworth parish registers lost before 1670, which left the family's oldest English claim forever without a verdict; the Rogerene generations whose refusal to register was the confession of their faith; and the register that survived and cannot be trusted — the Groton Culver Bible behind a formally registered 1920 pedigree, a family Bible that may have been reading the printed genealogies over its owner's shoulder.The episode closes where the method register always closes, in the present tense: communities lodge, families carry — and whatever your family's version of the flyleaf is, it is currently being carried, not lodged.Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

17:52

S01:E24 Sep 4, 2026

The Covenant, Signed Twice

On the third of October, 1791, in the house of Captain Jehial Franklin at Wysox, Pennsylvania, fourteen settlers organized themselves into a church — the first church, so far as any record shows, in what became Bradford County, "separated by a distance of at least eighty miles from any organization of Christian people." The man who gathered them was Jabez Culver: sixty years old, a convicted seditionist, a Loyalist exile, and "the very first to blow the gospel trumpet."This episode is about why that founding is better read as a repetition. In 1636 the founders of Dedham, Massachusetts opened their town book with THE COVENANT — everlasting love as a foundation, a fence against the contrary-minded, and a fifth article requiring every man received to subscribe his name, obliging his successors after him for ever. Sixty-eighth on the roll stands Edward Colver, wheelwright: Jabez's great-great-grandfather. One hundred and fifty-five years, five colonies and states, one revolution, and one sedition conviction separate the two documents — and the same family hand signed both. The family had been whipped out of the covenant's churches and never once stopped being covenantal. The reflex is the inheritance.And on the communion roll of the founding day, one name to hold: Rachel Brink, of the Sheshequin family into which Sergeant Timothy Culver — the Patriot cousin, one name, two flags — would later marry. The near-touch is documented. The meeting is not. The difference between those two sentences is the whole method of this project.Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

15:03

S01:E25 Sep 7, 2026

The Germans Next Door

Vanita Johnson Engelbrecht died in the small hours of August 30, 2026. She was the author’s father’s eighth cousin, and this episode is told in her honor: the story of the Germans of northwestern New Jersey, and of the fence line on Schooley’s Mountain where an English dissenting family and a German immigrant family became kin.In December 1748 Robert Collver — son of the Rogerene migration’s patriarch — bought the mountain farm that Chambers, the historian of the New Jersey Germans, situates in five words: “265 acres west of Henn.” Within a few years Robert’s daughter Esther married Jacob Hann, the neighbors’ son — the family’s first German marriage, and the one that ran farthest: down through Pleasant Grove, Newton, and Oneida, New York, into a Lutheran line that has given the church a study-Bible editor, a deaconess, and — in the author’s own congregation at Troy, Illinois — the newest child of Esther’s line, baptized in 2026.Along the way: the Winthrop legend both families inherited, a small discovery in an 1895 genealogy that turns a family-tree link into a printed one, and a sliver of chromosome 13 that survived nine generations on each side of the fence.Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

15:20

S01:E26 Sep 11, 2026

Divided Again

On the twenty-eighth of August, 1813, Captain Nesbitt Collver of Townsend township made his will — two lots, six children, three strips cut crosswise for three boys. A fortnight later he was dead in the King’s service, the family’s only uniformed death of the War of 1812. His will survives because his widow Sarah carried it to the county registry, where it became memorial No. 775 — and the registered copy quietly corrects the family’s own memory, which had dropped one of his sons entirely.The war had already cut the other way: in July 1812 an ensign of the same family rode house to house urging Norfolk’s militia not to march, then deserted to the Americans and forfeited his farm — the captain’s own nephew, as the family record has it. A generation after 1776 divided the house for the Crown, 1812 divided it again at the scale of Sunday dinner: a grave in the King’s service and a farm forfeited for the enemy’s, one township, one regiment, one surname.And what did family memory do with the pair? It misplaced the deserter and promoted the captain into the wrong war — “an officer in the British Army during the Revolutionary War,” which ended when he was nine. Memory is loyal before it is accurate. The register kept both men without comment.Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.

17:03

S01:E27 Sep 18, 2026

The Family Business

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.

17:44

S01:E28 Sep 14, 2026

A Mason's Sign at the Rope

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.

13:42

S01:E29 Sep 21, 2026

Unto My Son Daniel

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.

15:37

S01:E30 Sep 25, 2026

The Preacher Who Crossed Over

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.

22:53

S01:E31 Sep 28, 2026

The Loders

“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.

14:10

S01:E32 Oct 2, 2026

The Quartette

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.

11:31

S01:E33 Oct 5, 2026

The Plate Layer

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.