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.