|
Introduction One of the questions I hoped to answer when I set out to explore my family's history, was the identity of Alexander, the man who left us his name. Alexander was not the name his family and friends called him, or course. More likely it was Alistair, the Gaelic version of the name. But on the records of the island his descendants' family name was written as Mac Alexander...Son of Alexander...the name historians say was our family name before it was shortened to Callister. The scribes wrote in Latin, or it would have been Mac Alistair or Mac Allister. My search for Alexander led me back more than a thousand years to a time when the Vikings sailed boldly into the Irish sea and made it their dominion. He was probably part Celt and part Viking, and lived in the Western Isles of Scotland, possibly related by blood and marriage to the regions political leaders, a participant or a victim of the power struggles intrigues so common during that period. There are many questions about him that may never be answered. But there are intriguing clues about him and his family scattered across the centuries, and I feel like I have gained some sense of the man and his times. I'm sure he never imagined my day, or the generations that connect us anymore than I can imagine the homes and prizes and values of our distant descendants 1000 years from now. Will they every think of me and wonder what kind of man I was? Will any of them be curious about Alexander? Will they wonder as I do about the world that produced him, and the generations before him who lived and loved and died before there were any written records? The question we can't escape is "Does it really matter anyway?" Each of us has to make our own way through the world, and who we are is more important than our ancestors. The genetic material Alexander bequeathed to future generations has long since dwindled to a few strands of DNA under the onslaught of the Smiths and Jones and Cordons and Coles and Markleys and Phelps and Larsons and Murphys and Cowleys and Cains and all the rest who have diluted the stream that connects me to him. But I can't help wondering why my brother's beard comes out red, and my sisters daughters are all redheads when there haven't been any redheads in the family for centuries. And I can't help wondering if I have anything at all in common with this man who left me his name so many hundreds of years ago. I'm curious about the kind of man he was, and the heritage he left his family. And I can't help wondering if any of it filtered down to me. Families after all have a lot to do with who we are...not just because of the common gene pool, but also because of the values and experiences we share-- the holiday gatherings and summer outings; the laughter and tears we experience together. Eventually the family grows and expands to form new families. New generations are born and grow up to marry and have children of their own, and move away to find their destinies. Our grandparents die, and we lose touch with the cousins, and never really get to know their children. We know longer have anything in common, or live too far away, and there's nothing to make us a family anymore. Instead there are dozens of new families. It's part of life and nature - like the mother cat pushing her grown kittens out into the world But the past is still part of who we are, and knowing where we come from gives meaning to our lives, and helps us understand our place in the world we live in. By the time my Great Grandfather Thomas Callister left the Isle of Man in 1842 to follow his new faith to America there were probably hundreds of families of Callisters (and Collisters) on the Island, all of them distantly related, and as many relatives who carried the names of the men who married the daughters. But most of them probably didn't even know they were related. And by then none of them remembered Alexander. Thomas was a young man, only 21 years old, when he heard the gospel of the Latter Day Saints. He may not have even known that the Missionary who inspired him, a man named John Taylor who later would become President of the church, was married to a distant cousin. Taylor's wife, Leonora Cannon, had been born on the Island but moved to Canada. Her mother's name was Leonora Callister. The young man's parents had both died tragically when he was 15, and over the objections of his brothers and sisters he left his island home behind and traveled to Utah where he was to become a community leader and the patriarch of a large and prosperous family. He had four wives and 32 children. My grandfather Orson Pratt Callister was one of the youngest. He was only 3 when his father died. Thomas was to return to the Island once as a grown man while serving a mission to England, and while he was there he collected the names of some of his ancestors Later members of the family have continued the process. My father's sister, Aunt Francella visited the island several times after her retirement, patiently searching out the stories of our forefathers. My grandfathers's family was close, but now it's grown quite large and is starting to disperse. Francella and Uncle Orson (Jr) put together a book about the family, describing what is known about our ancestors on the Island, describing our pioneer heritage, and listing all the families who have descended from my grandfather. Francella was a pretty good detective. By patiently comparing names on wills and parish records she tracked our line through Thomas's father John, to his father also named Thomas, another Thomas, and then Dollin and Gillbert to a man named, appropriately enough, Adam Calister, who was born about 1575 and died in 1633. Adam and his family lived in the parish of Michael. A family gathering in Southern Utah where so much of the pioneer drama was played out piqued my curiosity, and I began my own study of the family's origins, building on Francella's work. Fortunately for me, there was at one time a Manx community in San Francisco--a group of settlers from Man who found common ground in their new home, and left a number of books which have ended up in the public library. My reading generated more questions as well as answers, and led me to the Sutro Library, a repository for genealogical books and information, and then to the Family Living Center in San Bruno, where I was able to view microfilms of records collected on the Island by the LDS church. My search is far from over. There are books and manuscripts in Salt Lake City I haven't seen, and allusions to others I haven't been able to locate, and vast new resources on the Internet. I want to visit the Island myself, and Scotland and Ireland as well. But I now have some idea where Adam's ancestors came from, where they lived, and what their lives were like. |