After the Revolutionary War, we lost track of James Callin. We don’t know for certain where he lived or how many children he had, but we are reasonably sure that he had two sons, James and John, who settled on a farm together between 1810 and 1816 in what would soon become Milton Township, Richland County, Ohio.
Between them, James Callin and John Callin had 15 children (that we know of) - cousins who all grew up on that farm near the town of Olivesburg. James died in 1820, after being struck in the head with a rifle by a neighbor; John died in 1835 from tuberculosis. And between 1835 and 1840, those 15 cousins got married and began to move away.
Of John’s nine children, only two sons remained in Ohio. His fifth child, Eliza (1811-1870), married James L Ferguson (1810–1886) about 1832, and after the birth of their tenth child in 1848, they moved to Auburn, Indiana, taking Eliza’s widowed mother with them.
In March of 1847, while still in Ohio, James and Eliza Ferguson named their ninth child Eliza Ferguson. She grew up in De Kalb County, Indiana, and married Welby N. Myers (1842–1931) there on 16 April 1863, two years into the Civil War. Their eldest child of five was born almost exactly one year later on 13 April: Mary Augusta “Mollie” Myers.
(Coincidentally, Eliza’s older sister, Sarah, married Welby’s younger brother, Daniel - just to give you an idea of how close the Myers and Ferguson families in Auburn were.)
Mollie married in Knox County, Indiana, on Valentine’s Day 1884; her new husband, Richard Jefferson Davis Cowan (1863–1948), took her back to his hometown of Greenville in Wayne County, Missouri. They had eleven children, including their fourth child, James Wiley Cowan (1879 - 1973).
James - who went by either “J. Wiley” or just “Wiley” - grew up in Wayne county, surrounded by extended family from his father’s side. The Cowan family was prominent enough to claim at least one elected congressman, and in the 1870s, there was even a small town called Cowan. But they all worked hard to support themselves in Greenville, and several of Wiley’s siblings left Missouri to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Wiley married Beryl Viola Ferguson (1897–1965) on 10 Jan 1919 in her hometown of Paragould, Greene, Arkansas. (I have not been able to find a connection between Viola’s Ferguson ancestors and Wiley’s, but I doubt they were related closely, if at all.) There is no evidence that Wiley served in the war, and his WWI Draft Registration, dated 5 June 1917, stated that he was farming in Mississippi County, Arkansas, to support his parents and siblings.
After Wiley and Viola were married, they moved Wiley’s parents to Hornersville, Dunklin County, Missouri, and Wiley and Viola went to Detroit. There Wiley probably found work in the auto industry. His older brother, Uriel Cleveland Cowan, had also moved to Detroit, but most of the rest of his siblings either remained in Missouri or gravitated to Illinois or Saint Louis.
By 1930, they were established in Detroit with their son and daughter, and Wiley worked as an auto mechanic. They lived in Detroit until after 1942, occasionally returning to Hornersville to visit.
Wiley Cowan family visits, item from Nov 18, 1938, The Twice-A-Week Dunklin Democrat (Kennett, Missouri)
Cowan reunion Article from Aug 7, 1941, Greenville Sun (Greenville, Missouri).
Wiley Davis Cowan was born on 11 Jan 1926 in Hornersville and grew up in Detroit and Muskegon, Michigan. He started school at Muskegon High School in 1941. Then, about 1943, his father moved the family to Arcadia, Los Angeles County, California.
It’s not clear why James Wiley moved his family to California during the war - though wartime opportunities for machinists may have been a factor. His youngest brother, Brewster, and their sister, Thelma, had settled in the L.A. area about 1930. One of his brothers, Everett Austin, had lived there in the early half of the 1930s before returning to Missouri. Another sister, Bessie (Cowan) Krapf, moved there after Wiley’s family did. But even if they were a close-knit family, none of young Wiley’s aunts or uncles had kids his age for him to bond with.
We can only imagine how the disruption of leaving his friends and his home behind in the middle of high school affected Wiley, and we only have hearsay from surviving relatives who had the impression that he didn’t get along with his father. What we do know is that Wiley Davis Cowan enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps as soon as he was 18.
Private Cowan spent the latter half of 1944 and all of 1945 in the First Signal Company, Headquarters Battalion, of the First Marine Division. We don’t have records that tell us exactly where and when he served, but the First Marine Division was heavily involved in the island fighting in the Pacific Theater and it seems unlikely they would have left eager young leathernecks in California during the Okinawa campaign.1
Some city directories place Wiley in California during the 1950s, and there is evidence of an April marriage and August divorce in 1968, but I don’t know much else for sure until he appears in San Francisco in 1989. In 1995, the city directory placed him in his apartment at 2770 Lombard Street and he remained there until 2022.
There’s a remote chance that someone out there who knew Wiley might be reading this. If you’re comfortable saying hello here, then please…
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Thacker, Joel D. Thacker, USMC; The History of the 1st Division Through World War II, from the Leatherneck Archives: October 1945, hosted by the Marine Corps Association, https://www.mca-marines.org/, accessed 14 July 2024.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but a few folks have expressed concerns about finding Wiley's family and.... don't worry!
Everything Will Be Alright In the End!