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/

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

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

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

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

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