A House Divided: Collver Family History

Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver III · collver.biz

A House Divided: Collver Family History is a limited-run narrative history podcast tracing the Collver/Culver family through the American Revolution, Loyalist exile, Upper Canada, and the generations that followed. Told by Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver III, each episode combines genealogy, original records, family memory, and historical storytelling to recover the lives of Jabez Collver, his descendants, and the divided world they inhabited.

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Episodes 22

A House Divided: The Collvers in the American Revolution
1mo ago · 30:22
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
Echoes from the Frontier: The Petitions of Rev. Jabez Collver
1mo ago · 10:37
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
Set Up the King's Standard: The Land, the Treason, and the Flight of Jabez Colver
1mo ago · 13:13
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 — ht
Why We're Collver, Not Culver
1mo ago · 49:41
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
The Family Pamphlet: The Collver-Culver Genealogy, 1630 to 1916
1mo ago · 7:54
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
The Judge, the Preacher, and the Log Gaol
1mo ago · 25:13
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/
The Ship That Never Was
1mo ago · 24:34
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 n
The Captain of the Dove
1mo ago · 20:16
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://h
Pull Down All Other Persuasions
1mo ago · 34:49
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
The County's First Deed
1mo ago · 11:59
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. Re
The 68th Name
1mo ago · 24:51
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/
Doves on the Wire
1mo ago · 14:52
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/
The Hundred Rolls
1mo ago · 17:48
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 als
The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased
27d ago · 17:16
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
Mary Kept the Books
25d ago · 9:12
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
Fifteen Stripes
23d ago · 21:04
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 Revere
The Collvers Go West
20d ago · 13:15
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 fl
The Historian Was One of Them
16d ago · 15:47
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 Ro
The Schoolteacher's Census
13d ago · 18:39
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
Twenty Moheags
9d ago · 29:09
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
The Jabez Staff
6d ago · 17:12
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
The Two Colonies
2d ago · 18:42
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 patriar

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A House Divided: Collver Family History

Episodes 22

A House Divided: The Collvers in the American Revolution

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

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

Why We're Collver, Not Culver

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

The Judge, the Preacher, and the Log Gaol

The Ship That Never Was

The Captain of the Dove

Pull Down All Other Persuasions

The County's First Deed

The 68th Name

Doves on the Wire

The Hundred Rolls

The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased

Mary Kept the Books

Fifteen Stripes

The Collvers Go West

The Historian Was One of Them

The Schoolteacher's Census

Twenty Moheags

The Jabez Staff

The Two Colonies

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Episodes 22

A House Divided: The Collvers in the American Revolution

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

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

Why We're Collver, Not Culver

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

The Judge, the Preacher, and the Log Gaol

The Ship That Never Was

The Captain of the Dove

Pull Down All Other Persuasions

The County's First Deed

The 68th Name

Doves on the Wire

The Hundred Rolls

The Names We Kept and the Ancestors We Chased

Mary Kept the Books

Fifteen Stripes

The Collvers Go West

The Historian Was One of Them

The Schoolteacher's Census

Twenty Moheags

The Jabez Staff

The Two Colonies