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S01:E21
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.