S01:E29
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.