Betty McCullough

The Archivist

Betty Mae Stout was the great-granddaughter of George Overpack — the Civil War soldier who survived the war and lived to 87. The line runs through George's son Charles Overpack, whose daughter Gladys Mae Overpack married into the Stout family and had Betty.

Betty typewritten both letter collections from the original handwritten pages. She sat with 41 Civil War letters and 62 McCollough family letters — over a hundred fragile documents — and reproduced them faithfully, preserving every misspelling, every run-on sentence, every phonetic spelling the soldiers and families used. Without her, these letters would be fading ink on crumbling paper.

She preserved the voice. "Nomore at present but remane yours un till death" reads the same today as it did when George Overpack wrote it from the field in 1863 — because Betty typed it exactly that way.

The Researcher

Beyond the transcriptions, Betty spent decades doing genealogy research — from the 1970s through the 1990s and beyond. She wrote letters to strangers across the country, corresponded with county clerks and historical societies, dug through census records and deeds and family Bibles, and painstakingly assembled the family histories that connected these letters to real people and real places.

She and her husband Roger McCullough worked closely together on the research. Roger connected with other McCullough descendants, tracked down records, and traded findings by letter and later by email. But Betty was the engine — the one who kept the threads organized, who cross-referenced the census data with the family sheets, who wouldn't let a lead go cold.

What She Found

Betty traced the Naylor line back to Yorkshire, England, 1685 — through correspondence with Anna Beryl Miller in 1979, who connected the Naylors to Richard Naylor's Bible and 18th-century immigration records. She assembled family group sheets for Richard Naylor (1786–1852) and Rachel Butler (1790–1858), documenting their seven children and tracing the line forward through Ohio.

Through the Ruble, Naylor, Stout, and Butler lines, she pieced together a web of connections from handwritten notes passed down from Albertine Louderback and other family researchers. These typewritten genealogy notes became the foundation for understanding how the families intersected across generations.

Roger connected with other McCollough descendants in Springfield, Ohio — tracking down records that revealed Anna Belle McCollough was born out of wedlock and that John McColloch possibly came from Ireland, settling in West Liberty, Ohio around 1819. They discovered that the name "McCollough" was spelled many ways across the records — McCuller, McCulah, McCollough, McCalough — each clerk and census taker hearing it differently.

The Stout family research connected Edna Stout as the granddaughter of George W. Overpack — closing the loop between the Civil War letters and Betty's own family. She wasn't just researching history. She was reconstructing the path that led to her.

The Documents

Betty's genealogy research generated a paper trail of its own — correspondence, family group sheets, typewritten notes, and later, printouts of AOL emails. These are some of the documents from her collection.