This blog post is for my mother who has been suffering a twinge of inferiority complex since the discovery of my father's illustrious Nantucket Island origins. We are all familiar with family stories, supposedly connecting us to famous people, which turn out to be false. But sometimes a connection can be discredited as improbable and turn out to be true. Such is the case with my Cronkhite ancestors. When Walter Cronkite rose to broadcast fame, some of my relatives wondered i

Often just identifying ancestors back to the 1600s or earlier is a major achievement. Understanding something about the time period and culture in which they lived provides context for the bare genealogical facts. To actually discover specific details of their lives, to have a window on their relationships, thoughts, feelings, and the detail of their daily lives is exceptional. In the case of my Cornell ancestors, a tragic set of circumstances left a record preserved by the R

For the month of November I had thought it would be fun to revisit the Puritan origins of my family. But the process of reviewing the information I have on this part of the family led me in an entirely new direction and necessitated considerably more research than I had anticipated. I started my investigation by revisiting Bessie Eunice Packard's The Edson and Eunice Cornell Packards, a manuscript distributed to family members for Christmas, December 1945. While family histo