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

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

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/