From Galesburg to Newport
The Direct Line of Charles Edward Cranston, Eight Generations Back to Mary Clarke — with One Important Correction
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For years our family papers have included a handwritten genealogy page — the “40 Generations” chart — tracing the Cranston line from Charles Edward Cranston of Galesburg, Illinois, back to colonial Newport, Rhode Island. In August 2026 we put that chart through a full review, checking it against the Roger Williams Family Association genealogy, Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, the Carr Family Records, town and county marriage records, probate files, Find a Grave, and our own family letters and documents. The verdict: the father-to-son chain is right. Every link holds. But several dates need correcting, and one note on the chart — the one connecting us to Roger Williams — attaches a true story to the wrong woman. This post sets out the corrected line, one ancestor at a time, and ends with the correction that matters most.
The Direct Paternal Line
Charles Edward Cranston (1833–1905)
Our starting point. Charles Edward Cranston was born April 19, 1833, at Woodstock, Champaign County, Ohio, the son of Christopher Cranston and his first wife, Lora Howard Parks. On March 15, 1860, at Milford Center, Ohio, he married Keturah Taylor Parke (1835–1902), daughter of David and Matilda (Taliaferro) Park. He served as Second Corporal in the Ohio Volunteer Militia during the Civil War, then moved his family west to Knox County, Illinois, where Governor John M. Palmer appointed him Justice of the Peace for Chestnut Township in 1869. A contemporary Kansas biography of a nephew remembered him as “a farmer and dealer in and breeder of fine horses.” About 1892, after some thirty years on the farm near Hermon, Charles and Keturah retired into Galesburg and took up residence at 730 Pine Street. Keturah died there of apoplexy on September 18, 1902. Charles followed three years later: on the night of August 3–4, 1905, he retired as usual and was found lifeless in the morning by a member of the family. His Knox County death certificate records the death at 730 Pine Street on August 4, 1905, at about 3:30 a.m., of cardiac paralysis, and the Daily Republican Register of that same day confirms it: “expired very suddenly last evening at his home, No. 730 Pine street.” He was buried beside Keturah at Hermon Christian Church Cemetery on August 6. His obituary remembered him as “an ideal citizen” whose loss would be felt across the county.
His Father: Christopher Cranston (1803–1858)
Christopher Cranston was born November 14, 1803, at Foster, Rhode Island, and came to Ohio as a boy in his father’s 1815 migration. He married Lora Howard Parks on November 24, 1830, in Champaign County, Ohio — not 1832, as the old chart has it. Lora died in 1835 (not 1837; Christopher’s own letter of that year records her death), leaving three young children: Charles Edward, Mary, and Josephine. Christopher then married Irene Ward Nott, said in period sources to be a granddaughter of Ethan Allen, and had eight more children — among them William Wallace Cranston, a Union captain and Medal of Honor recipient, and a son Christopher who fell at Shiloh. Christopher died November 8, 1858, in Champaign County; his estate, probated at Urbana with Charles Edward as administrator, totaled $8,470 — roughly $200,000 in today’s money.
His Grandfather: John Cranston (1755–1825)
John Cranston, the pioneer of the family, was born November 3, 1755, in Rhode Island, the son of Peleg and Sarah (Carr) Cranston. The Foster marriage record — which names him “John Cranston, of Peleg, of Foster” — shows he married Phebe Ann Edwards, “of Ephraim, of Scituate,” on April 4, 1790, a year earlier than the chart’s 1791. In the autumn of 1815, at age sixty, he led a party of some thirty New Englanders — a daughter, five sons, and two dozen neighbors — out of Rice City, Rhode Island, to new land in Champaign County, Ohio. His 1823 will, made “in an advanced age but of a Sound mind and memory,” divided his acreage among his sons, including 200 acres jointly to Christopher and Edwards. He died at Woodstock, Ohio, in August 1825, and is buried at Martin Cemetery. (One Find a Grave entry gives him the middle name “Douglass”; no record supports it.)
His Great-Grandfather: Peleg Cranston (1717/18–1805)
Peleg Cranston was born March 16, 1717/18, at Swansea, Massachusetts — the double year is simply the old colonial calendar, not a conflict in the records. On September 7, 1749 (not 1747, as the chart says), he married Sarah Carr, daughter of Thomas and Hannah (Weeden) Carr, per the Carr Family Records and the Jamestown marriage record. (One online tree names her father as Francis Carr instead — a discrepancy still to be settled against original Jamestown records.) Peleg and Sarah raised ten children at Foster, Rhode Island, including John, born 1755. Peleg died at Foster on March 29, 1805, having lived through the entire colonial endgame — born a British subject under Queen Anne’s successors, dead an American citizen in Jefferson’s second term.
His Second Great-Grandfather: Thomas Cranston (1692–by 1721)
Thomas Cranston was born August 2, 1692, at Newport, son of Governor Samuel Cranston and Mary Hart. He married Patience Gardiner (1687–1763), daughter of Samuel Gardiner and Elizabeth Carr, at Swansea, Massachusetts. Thomas was lost at sea and was dead by 1721, not yet thirty — the “1727” on the old chart is wrong, an apparent copying slip from his father’s death year. His known children were Peleg (above) and Patience. He should not be confused with a later Thomas Cranston (1710–1785) who sat on the Rhode Island Supreme Court.
His Third Great-Grandfather: Governor Samuel Cranston (1659–1727)
Here the line reaches its most remarkable figure. Samuel Cranston was born August 16, 1659, at Newport. A goldsmith and merchant as a young man, he married Mary Hart around 1680–82 — and it is Mary Hart, as we shall see, who carries our descent from Roger Williams. Family tradition holds that Samuel went to sea, was captured by pirates, and was given up for dead; he escaped and reached Newport just in time to halt his wife’s wedding to another man, the disappointed groom surrendering his bride with good grace. In 1698 Samuel was elected Governor of Rhode Island, and the freemen never let him go: elected thirty consecutive times, he served until his death on April 26, 1727 — the longest tenure of any governor in Rhode Island history, and by most reckonings in all American history. He steered the colony’s charter safely through decades of Crown pressure. He is buried at the Common Burying Ground, Newport, sharing a great marker with his father.
His Fourth Great-Grandfather: Governor John Cranston (c. 1625–1680)
The immigrant ancestor. John Cranston was born about 1625, by tradition in Scotland or England, the son of the Rev. James Cranston, a London clergyman said to have been a chaplain to King Charles I and descended from the Scottish Lords Cranston. (That noble descent is carved on his son’s Newport tombstone and repeated in many compilations, but modern genealogists — notably Andrew B. MacEwen — have questioned it, and no English parish record has yet confirmed it. We record it here as family tradition, not established fact.) Brought to New England around 1637 as a boy, John was placed under the guardianship of Jeremiah Clarke of Newport — and on June 3, 1658, he married his guardian’s daughter, Mary Clarke. He became the first licensed physician and surgeon in the colony (“Doctor of Physic and Chirurgery,” 1663/64), served as Attorney General and Deputy Governor, commanded all Rhode Island forces as Major during King Philip’s War, and was elected Governor in 1678, dying in office March 12, 1679/80. John and Mary had ten children; the eldest, Samuel, followed him to the governorship.
His Fourth Great-Grandmother: Mary Clarke (1641–1711)
The destination of this journey. Mary Clarke was born in 1641 at Newport, in the colony’s very first years. At seventeen she married John Cranston, the physician who had grown up in her father’s household, and she bore ten children, raising a governor and burying another — her husband — while her brother Walter Clarke held the same office. After John’s death in 1680 she married Captain John Stanton of Newport. She died April 7, 1711, at Newport, about seventy years old, and lies in the Common Burying Ground among three generations of the family she made.
Mary Clarke’s Parents
Her Father: Captain Jeremiah “Jeremy” Clarke (1605–1651/52)
Jeremiah Clarke was baptized December 1, 1605, at East Farleigh, Kent, England, the son of William Clarke and Mary Weston. He emigrated about 1637–38 and was one of the founders of Newport — a signer of the April 1639 compact that established the town. He rose through every office the young colony had: Constable, Lieutenant and then Captain of the militia (then the highest military rank in the colony), Treasurer of Newport and of the whole colony, Assistant to the Governor, and finally, in 1648–49, elected President of the colony — the era’s title for governor — during which term he granted Providence its town charter. He was also the guardian who raised the orphaned boy John Cranston, the future son-in-law who would follow him into the colony’s highest office. He died at Newport in January 1651/52 and was buried “in the tomb that stands by the street by the water side.”
Her Mother: Frances Latham (1609/10–1677), “The Mother of Governors”
Frances Latham was baptized February 15, 1609/10, at Kempston, Bedfordshire, England, eldest of the nine children of Lewis Latham, Sergeant Falconer to King Charles I. She married three times: first William Dungan, a London merchant, at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in 1629; second, about 1637, Jeremiah Clarke, with whom she crossed to Rhode Island and had seven children, Mary among them; and third, about 1654, the Rev. William Vaughan, first minister of Newport’s Second Baptist Church. (A 19th-century claim of an earlier marriage to a “Lord Weston” was disproved by Louise Tracy in 1908.) Rhode Island history remembers her as “the Mother of Governors”: at least ten governors and three deputy governors descend from her directly, including her sons Walter Clarke and Jeremiah Clarke Jr., her son-in-law John Cranston, and her grandson Samuel Cranston. She died at Newport in the first week of September 1677, weeks after her last husband, and her stone still stands in the Common Burying Ground.
The Correction: Roger Williams Comes Through Mary Hart, Not Mary Clarke
The old chart carries this handwritten note: “Samuel Cranston (Governor of Rhode Island) married Mary Clarke — daughter of Freeborn Williams who was the daughter of Roger Williams.” The note contains two errors, made by conflating two women one generation apart:
First, Samuel Cranston did not marry Mary Clarke. Mary Clarke was his mother. It was Samuel’s father, Governor John Cranston, who married Mary Clarke — a generation earlier.
Second, Mary Clarke was not the daughter of Freeborn Williams. Her parents were Jeremiah Clarke and Frances Latham, as set out above. She has no Roger Williams ancestry at all.
But here is the good news: the family really does descend from Roger Williams. The connection the note reached for is real — it simply runs through the other Mary. Governor Samuel Cranston’s wife was Mary Hart, daughter of Thomas Hart and Freeborn Williams; and Freeborn Williams was the daughter of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, and his wife Mary Barnard. The Roger Williams Family Association’s own genealogy confirms every link. The true line of descent is:
Roger Williams and Mary Barnard → Freeborn Williams (m. Thomas Hart) → Mary Hart (m. Gov. Samuel Cranston) → Thomas Cranston → Peleg Cranston → John Cranston → Christopher Cranston → Charles Edward Cranston.
So whoever penned that note grabbed the right ancestry and pinned it on the wrong Mary. The family holds two distinguished colonial descents, not one: from Roger Williams through Mary Hart, and from President Jeremy Clarke and Frances Latham, the Mother of Governors, through Mary Clarke.
Summary of Corrections to the Family Chart
Reviewed against published genealogies, town and county records, and family documents, the chart stands corrected as follows:
- The generational sequence is correct. Charles Edward → Christopher → John → Peleg → Thomas → Gov. Samuel → Gov. John → Mary Clarke, every link verified.
- Thomas Cranston died by 1721, lost at sea — not 1727, which was his father’s death year.
- Peleg Cranston married Sarah Carr in 1749, not 1747, per the Carr Family Records and the Jamestown record.
- John Cranston married Phebe Ann Edwards in 1790, not 1791, per the Foster marriage record.
- Christopher Cranston married Lora Howard Parks in 1830, not 1832, and Lora died in 1835, not 1837.
- Charles Edward Cranston died in August 1905 (August 4 per the gravestone and a family letter; August 5 per the family book). Park/Parke and Keturah/Kitura are spelling variants, not errors.
- The Freeborn Williams note is wrong as written — but the Roger Williams descent is genuine, through Samuel Cranston’s wife Mary Hart.
- Still open: Sarah Carr’s father (Thomas vs. Francis Carr), Charles Edward’s exact death day, and the claimed Scottish noble ancestry above Governor John Cranston, which remains unverified tradition.
Eight generations, two governors, a colony president, a falconer’s daughter who mothered ten governors, and the founder of Rhode Island himself. The old chart had the bones right. Now the record does too.