Background
Their eldest son also named Thomas Cornell (Junior) was born October, 1627 in Saffron Walden, Essex, England.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Thomas Cornell
Edit ProfileCareer
He was the ancestor of a number of Americans prominent in business, politics, and education. Cornell born, was christened 24 March 1591/92 in Saffron Walden, Essex, England and died in Portsmouth, Rhode Island 8 February 1654/55. Thomas Cornell was an innkeeper in Boston who was part of the Peripheral Group in the Antinomian Controversy, a religious and political conflict in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638.
Cornell sold his inn in 1643 and left for Rhode Island, where others from the Antinomian Controversy had settled in 1638 after being ordered to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
He returned to Rhode Island in 1644 and obtained a land grant for 100 acres in Portsmouth, Rhode Island on Aquidneck Island that became the Cornell homestead. His neighbor was Edward Hutchison, a son of Anne Hutchison from the Antinomian Controversy.
In 1646, Cornell was granted a patent on an area of about four square miles that later became part of the Bronx. lieutenant was bounded by Westchester Creek, Bronx River, village of Westchester and East River and was called Cornell"s Neck.
The area is now known as Clason Point.
Thomas" son Thomas Cornell (Junior) was accused, tried, convicted and hanged for the alleged murder of his mother, Rebecca Briggs Cornell, in Portsmouth in 1673. He was convicted using circumstantial evidence as well as spectral evidence, where witnesses recounted dreams involving ghosts pointing to his alleged guilt. American jurisprudence was later modernized to exclude the use of apparitions and dreams as evidence in trials.
This case and its history has been chronicled in the book Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (2002) by Elaine Forman Crane.
Achievements
-
Thomas Cornell is an ancestor to a number of prominent and notorious Americans, including Ezra Cornell founder of Cornell University,William Ellery, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Ezekiel Cornell a Revolutionary War general who represented Rhode Island in the United States. Continental Congress from 1780 to 1782, Bill Gates, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, First Lady Elizabeth Monroe, Senators Bob Graham and Daniel Webster, Secretary of State John Kerry, Amelia Earhardt and axe murderer Lizzie Borden by way of Thomas Cornell (Junior)"s daughter, Innocent, born after his death to his second wife Sarah Earle Cornell.
