McCallister's McAlisters (and some other good families)

The Beaven Family

My earliest known (at least to me) direct Beaven ancestor was Benjamin Beaven, born in 1729 in Charles County Maryland. He married Martha Ann Cook about 1764, and in 1765, their son Joseph John Beaven was born. Joseph John and wife Rebecca migrated from Maryland to middle Kentucky with their family after 1798, when son Benedict Joseph Beaven was born. They were not the first Beavens to make the trek.

According to Webb’s History of the Maryland Catholics on the Kentucky frontier, the first Beavens to come to Kentucky were brothers Edward Beaven and Colonel Charles Beaven who formed the early Pottinger Creek settlement. The Colonel earned his title during the Revolutionary War, but even so, he evidently did not care for rigors of frontier life and returned to Maryland. The exact relationship between these two men and Joseph John Beaven is not known. Nonetheless, the Beaven family was one of the 60 - 65 families that joined in the pact to move to Kentucky after the Revolution.

Benedict Joseph Beaven married Mary Clark on 15 March 1819 in Washington County Kentucky. One of their children, Mary Elizabeth Beaven, born 20 years later, came with her brother to Union County Kentucky. There, she married another “Maryland Catholic”, Mr. Louis P. Mills in 1860. Mary Elizabeth is my great great-grandmother. Louis P. Mills and Mary Elizabeth were the parents of Lucy Ellen Mills, who married Charles Abell McCallister at Uniontown in 1886.

By coincidence, or maybe by Providential design, another descendant of Benedict Joseph Beaven married the grandson of Lucy Mills and Charles McCallister in 1950.

The cabin at the top of the page is from the Berea College collection of Appalachian cabin pictures in its archives. Although larger, It is somewhat similar to the housing the Beaven families would have built for themselves in central Kentucky when they migrated there.