The Mule Driver and the Physicist

A little more on the family of great grandmother Annie Calderwood. Right after publishing yesterday’s article, I rediscovered this clipping from 1958, copied last summer from the files of the Model Colony History Room at the Ontario Public Library.

The article was surely saved by our grandparents Joe and Margaret. In addition to sharing a family name with Lee, they knew the climb up Mount Baldy very well. There was no Lee Calderwood in the family tree I had constructed thus far–he was not an immediate family member or close cousin. I tried to trace him back to some known part of the family.

Similar to the problems tracing Annie’s ancestry, Lee’s ancestry gets trickier the farther back you go–that same established Calderwood family reluctance to get involved with government activities that might have left a paper trail. But relying on family trees constructed by others, I was able fill some gaps and trace Lee back to Hugh and Margaret Calderwood of Ayrshire, Scotland. I recognized Hugh and Margaret as our tentative 4th great grandparents because they had shown up in previous theories in tracing Annie’s ancestors. If the traces on both sides are correct, then Lee is our third cousin.

One generation below Hugh and Margaret, I also recognized the names David and Jane Calderwood from my attempts to trace back physicist Margaret Calderwood Shields. This would place Margaret Shields as another third cousin. Lee Calderwood and Margaret Shields would be each others’ second cousins.

These relationships are not rock solid and there is nothing to be done about records that don’t exist, but there is a strong circumstantial case to be made for this being the correct tree linking Annie/Joe, Lee, and Margaret. The locations where people were born, lived, and died line up with what we know about the Calderwood history and migration patterns from Scotland to New York to Vermont, to California. There is a high degree of agreement between the family trees constructed by other in the Ancestry database (although sometimes this can be because people copy each others’ mistakes). And because Annie’s branch is known to have come directly to Vermont, skipping NY, we can say that Annie’s branch must have diverged from the other two in Scotland, not America. Having Hugh and Margaret Calderwood as our common ancestors is the only consistent explanation.

The circumstantial case is made stronger by the existence of the three consistent, parallel branches in the tree. When I was first trying to link Margaret Shields to Annie, there did not seem to be enough evidence to make probable conclusions. But introduction of Lee’s third branch, which would never have come up if not for the newspaper clipping, put new data into the mix that strengthened the conclusions for all three branches. This seems to happen frequently in genealogical research–problems that can’t be solved directly can be solved by following a different, roundabout path.

In 1958 when our grandparents saved the clipping of Lee Calderwood, it is interesting to wonder how much they knew about him. Third cousins are a long way apart, especially when the two sides left Scotland at different times to go to different locations. Did they know the specific path that made him a third cousin or did they just have general awareness that he was a distant cousin?