Lida Brooks (Toomer) Calhoun wrote in her journals about both major and minor events of life in St. Cloud, MN. On February 14th, 1891, she wrote about one of the major events, a fire that destroyed “Mr. Calhoun’s” law office. She wrote of him in the third person, (like John Prine’s grandma, she called her husband “Mister”), but there was always affection in her words. That morning she woke to the distant ringing of a fire alarm. “I called to Mr. Calhoun to get up, saying it looked as if the whole town was afire, and when he stood beside me, he too thought the fire was spreading, but a…

The paper trail goes only as far back as John Calhoon; our first ancestor in this line to arrive in America. His wife’s name is given as Janet in his will. There is weak evidence for her maiden name being Walker, and stronger genetic evidence that there is Walker ancestry in the family. In relation to Rev. Thomas Calhoon it is noted that “The grandfather and grandmother of Mr. Calhoon emigrated from Ireland, and settled in Pennsylvania.” It follows that his great grandparents were also among the Scots-Irish seeking respite from the struggles of British controlled Northern Ireland in the early 1700s. William Henry Egle, State Librarian of Pennsylvania, records…

My grandparents, Robert Lowry Calhoun and Ella Clay Wakeman, married on Christmas Eve in 1923. On their 50th wedding anniversary many friends and family came to celebrate. The Christmas tree was hung with photos of several generations. As on the original day we had an iced fruitcake. Years later there was still a piece left in the freezer. I suppose, eventually, someone ate it. 45 years later we also hung the tree with those decorations. When asked to recount the history of our Calhoun line, my grandfather put together a patchwork of notes on his own memories of his family and some conjectures about more distant ancestry. I keep finding…

The home of my family in Connecticut has come to be the resting place for many bits and pieces of historical flotsam and jetsam. The archive seems to have assembled itself. I can conjecture why some specific material is present, artifacts passed from one generation to the next, but the origins of much of it is a mystery. Past owners left no record of who is pictured in this daguerreotype or owned these moccasins. One of my favorite items is A Greek and English dictionary, comprising all the words in the writings of the most popular Greek authors; with the difficult inflections in them and in the Septuagint and New…