the genealogy book,

, the Cornells of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Portsmouth, with a sidebar of Bordens (Sir Robert and Lizzie, even,

Moving across further threads of genealogical patterns along my birth father’s matrilineal line, from my fourth great grandfather Benjamin Barber III (1819-1909) to six generations beyond his mother, Diana Maria Smith (1792-1851) of Leeds and Grenville, Ontario, I chance upon Thomas Cornell II (October 21, 1627-May 23, 1673), a man born in Saffron Walden, Essex, England to Ensign Thomas Cornell Sr. (abt. 1595-1655) and Rebecca Briggs Cornell (abt. 1600-1673), all of whom were part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Migration. It is curious to realize I’ve threads from both biological sides that run through there, something nothing of my parents’ family histories go anywhere near. Wikipedia offers that Thomas Sr. and Rebecca emigrated to Boston with their two sons when Thomas the younger would have been eleven years old.

Thomas Cornell II, my eleventh great grandfather: a man tried and convicted for killing his mother. According to WikiTree, he was “executed for the murder of his mother, concerning the injustice of this, and the lack of any proper evidence to convict him. Records found bear out that he was innocent of the murder of his mother. She died of a fall and hit her head on an iron on the fireplace.” His death meant that he left behind his pregnant second wife, Sarah, along with an indeterminate amount of children (various online sources seem to disagree), including my tenth great-grandfather, Stephen, who would have been around seventeen years old at the time. To make certain the point of her husband’s inculpability, Sarah even named their daughter, born two months after Thomas was hanged, Innocent.

Innocent Cornell (1673 - 1720), who married Richard Borden (1671-1732), who was, at the time of his death, one of the largest landowners in Portsmouth, making him one of the wealthiest men in the area. From Innocent and Richard one can move down the line to their son Thomas Borden (1697-1740) who married Mary Gifford (1695-1762), to Richard Borden (1722-1795) and Hope Cook (1726-1791), to Richard Borden Jr. (1769-1824) and Patty Martha Bowen (1777-1827), to Abraham Bowen Borden (1798-1882) and Phebe Davenport (1789-1853), to Andrew Jackson Borden (1822-1892) and Sarah Anthony Jane Morse (1823-1863), and then, to their infamous daughter, Massachusetts Sunday School teacher Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860-1927). Um, what? Lizzie Bordon, my sixth cousin, six times removed. Although, if I emerge from Thomas Cornell II’s first wife, Elizabeth (last name unknown; 1636-1668), and Lizzie Bordon emerged from his second wife Sarah Earle (c. 1647-aft. 1690), would that make us sixth half-cousins, six times removed, or, more properly, seventh cousins (moving back one generation), six times removed?

Lizzie Borden took an axe
She gave her mother forty whacks

Innocent and Richard, also, who can trace down five further generations to Sir Robert Laird Borden (1854-1937), Canada’s eighth Prime Minister. Sir Robert and Lizzie, fourth cousins, once removed. Sir Robert Borden, my sixth half-cousin (or seventh cousin, depending), seven times removed. Christine has her own Prime Minister, first cousin six times removed to Sir Charles Tupper (1821-1915), and now I’ve mine. Is my Prime Minister better than your Prime Minister? Borden may have originated the War Measures Act, but he also acknowledged the Suffragette movement, so at least there’s that. Sir Robert Borden, who succeeded Sir Charles Tupper as Federal Conservative Leader in 1901, but lost two elections to Liberal Leader Sir Wilfrid Laurier, eventually sitting as Prime Minister from 1911 to 1920, running the length and breadth of the First World War. As well, Borden was the last Prime Minister to be knighted, in case anyone keeps track of such things.

When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

One might wonder if these connections are distant enough to render them arbitrary. Christine suggests that if one’s family goes back far enough across New England, one could trace connections to enormous amounts of potential descendants throughout the United States and Canada, if not even further afield, the percentages of which would certainly allow for the occasionally well-known individual. Further descendants of Thomas Cornell Sr., for example, also include American Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, Senator John Kerry, stage actress and producer Katharine Cornell (1893-1974), Founding Father William Ellery (1727-1820), Revolutionary War General and Congressman Ezekiel Cornell (1732/33-1800), and Ezra Cornell (1807-1874), who founded Western Union, co-founded Cornell University, and established the Cornell Library in Ithica, New York. Quaker-born Ezra Cornell, who was famously expelled from The Society of Friends for marrying a woman outside of the faith. On February 24, 1832, he wrote, in response:

I have always considered that choosing a companion for life was a very important affair and that my happiness or misery in this life depended on the choice.

I would agree with him, there. Returning to those original Cornells, it would seem that Thomas the younger, my eleventh great grandfather, followed his parents, as well as his eventual wife and her parents, to Portsmouth as religious exiles from Boston, aligning themselves with Anne Hutchinson, who was in 1638 banished by the Puritan leadership from the colony. Not unrelated to their decision to relocate, I’m sure, is the fact that Thomas Sr. was also charged and fined that same year for operating an illegal tavern at his house on Washington Street (between Summer and Milk Streets, in what is now Boston’s shopping district). Either way, the family followed the Hutchinsons and their supporters to Portsmouth, although even that move prompted nervousness among the settlers, seeking protection from further persecution. As Wikitree offers:

The more fearful among the settlers decided to move to New Amsterdam until the new colony was granted. There can be no question that Thomas was loyal to Anne Hutchinson, since after the death of Anne’s husband William Hutchinson in 1642 he and his family went with her to Manhattan and there again attempted to start a settlement. It was in the autumn of 1642 that Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Cornell, John Throckmorton, and others with their families, removed to Manhattan ‘neare a place called by seamen Hell Gate.’ Massachusetts Governor Winthrop was evidently interested in following their fortunes since in 1642 he notes, ‘Mr. Throckmorton and Mr. Cornell, established with buildings, etc., in neighboring plantations under the Dutch.’

On July 6, 1642 Gov. Kieft of the Dutch colony granted permission for Throckmorton and about 35 English families to settle about 11 miles from New Amsterdam. The area became known as Throgg’s Neck, an abbreviation of Throckmorton’s name and later became Westchester, New York.

Eight months later, Governor Kieft’s unwise attack upon two neighboring camps of Indians on the night between 25 and 26 February 1643 precipitated a war with the Lenape Indians. More than a hundred Indians, men, women, and children were slain. This caused the Mohegan Indians to retaliate against the white settlers outside New Amsterdam. Governor Winthrop’s Journal records in June 1643: ‘The Indians set upon the English who dwelt under the Dutch. They came to Mrs. Hutchinson in a way of friendly neighborhood as they had been accustomed, and taking their opportunity, killed her and Mr. Collins, her son in law, and all of her family and such of Mr. Throckmorton’s and Mr. Cornell’s families as were at home, in all sixteen, and put their cattle into their barns and burned them.

The terrible experience of this Indian massacre, and the death of Mrs. Hutchinson very naturally caused some of her co-settlers to return to Rhode Island. Thomas Cornell was one of these. He went back to Portsmouth.

Fair enough, I suppose. Portsmouth, a colony that had been founded as a colony separate from the Massachusetts Bay Colony that was “Christian in character but non-sectarian in governance.” I’m curious about how many genealogical lines I have affected by those foolhardy Lenape Wars (thinking back to those Rose and Roosa ancestors). What trouble we make. And that particular crime that Anne Hutchinson was truly guilty of, again, according to Wikitree:

The Puritan ministers in the colony had labeled Hutchinson a modern “Jezebel” who was infecting women with perverse and “abominable” ideas regarding their dignity and rights. Her particular “heresy” was to maintain that it was a blessing and not a curse to be a woman.

Now that’s a heresy I can get behind. Well done, ancestors who followed along with Anne Hutchinson. Well done, Anne Hutchingson, for arguing for the basic dignity of rights of women so early on in American history. What might you think of American politics and policy now, I wonder. At least from what I’ve seen, the Cornell family remained in Portsmouth, Newport, Rhode Island for multiple generations after this. Some might even remain.

On her part, Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted for the murders of her father and stepmother, and remained in town, despite being ostracized by the locals. She spent the whole of her life in Fall River, Massachusetts, and died of pneumonia at home following gallbladder surgery, some twenty-seven years after her arrest. Theories still run rampant, although at the time no other suspects were considered. As American historian and scholar Ann Schofield has offered: “Borden’s story has tended to take one or the other of two fictional forms: the tragic romance and the feminist quest [.]” In the end, Borden’s story has taken on whatever the author or the time might require of it.

A few months ago, Toronto poet John Oughton posted to his Facebook profile a vintage photograph of a toddler holding a saw, which I facetiously responded to by quickly composing this odd little scrap, well before I was aware of any potential connection (although I’m not convinced the final rhyme works as effectively as I might have hoped):

Lizzie Borden, prequel

(for John Oughton

Young Lizzie Bordon took a saw
and made for Father’s pointed jaw
Once he realized daughter’s grudge
he sent her to an orphanage