The Story of the Cranstons

Before You Turn the Pages

A Letter to the Cousins

A few words before you look at the old book itself.

June 2026

Dear Cousins,

Below this letter you will find the pages of a book. It is called The Story of the Cranstons, written by Edna Lucille Barnes, and I have put some of it below, page by page, so that you can see it with your own eyes the way I have seen it.

It is bound in brown leather with a gold border and a rose stamped into the corner — that is the first picture you will come to — and it has the feel of a thing made to last.

Edna meant it to last.

On the page she called the Preface she wrote that it is the responsibility of each generation to leave for their children the story of those who have gone before. Scroll down and you can read it in her own words. I have taken it as my instruction too, and that is why these pages are now here for you.

Before you start turning them, let me tell you what you are about to see, so you will know what you are looking at. I want to give you both the romance and the record, because you are grown people and you can hold both at once.

Here is the romance, and it is considerable.

The pages headed “40 Generations” trace us back through the kings. You will see the names march down the column: Charles Martel, who stopped the Moors. Charlemagne. The Counts of Flanders, down to Maude, who married William the Conqueror, the man who built Windsor Castle. King John, who put his seal to the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 — the cornerstone of English liberty, the first time a king was made to bow to law.

When you reach the Preface you will read that Edna stood in the British Museum in 1974 and looked at that very document, believing the man who sealed it was her grandfather many times over. The line then runs, on the page titled “Brief Cranston History,” to the lands of Cranstoun in Midlothian, Scotland, along the River Tyne — lords and knights named Cranston, and a Reverend James Cranston who was chaplain to King Charles the First. From him came a son, John, who crossed the ocean and became Governor of Rhode Island.

Watch for that Governor John Cranston, because he is worth knowing. The pages will tell you he was Captain of all the colony’s forces in King Philip’s War, Attorney General, and Governor — and the first man in the English colonies ever recorded as a Doctor of Medicine.

His son Samuel was Governor too, and here is the part the children will like: you will see the photograph of Samuel Cranston with the caption beneath it. He was elected Governor of Rhode Island thirty times, more than any man before or since, and Ripley put him in Believe It or Not for it in 1920.

Samuel married Mary Hart, granddaughter of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and one of the first true voices for religious freedom on this continent. Father and son lie under one double tombstone in Newport.

From there the line walks west the way America walked west. You will read of Thomas, lost at sea in command of his vessel. Then Peleg. Then John Cranston, born in Rhode Island in 1755, who died in Woodstock, Ohio — the family had come over the mountains. His son Christopher. And Christopher’s son Charles Edward Cranston, born at Woodstock in 1833, who married Keturah Taylor Parke and took the family one more state west, to Galesburg, Illinois. When you get to their page, stop and look at the two portraits — Charles Edward and Keturah, face to face — and the little painting of their farm beneath. They had nine children, and the last page lists every one of them in order. Look there for the names some of you may carry: Victoria Ann, called Anna; Christopher Charles; and Edna May. You will see a few words written in ink in the margins of that page. Those are notes a careful hand added over the years — a birth year here, a correction there. That is what a living family record looks like.

That is the romance. Now let me be the keeper and not just the storyteller, because I owe you that, and I would rather you hear it from me than wonder later.

Those forty generations back to Charlemagne rest on what Edna herself names on the page — “Governor Samuel Cranston’s patent of Arms.” A patent of arms is a coat of arms, and in colonial times a prominent family claiming one often reached for the grandest pedigree it could, kings and all. Charts like these were made to dignify a name as much as to record a fact. I am not telling you it is false. I am telling you it is a family tradition built on a heraldic claim, not on a chain of birth and marriage records — and an honest keeper marks it that way before he hands it to you.

The Scottish beginning has a real puzzle in it. The pages say our Governor John was born in Scotland in 1625 and came to America as a boy in 1637. But we hold another voice in our archive — a letter from a George Cranston, written from Edinburgh in 1873, a Cranston in Scotland searching Scottish records — and George could find no emigrant Cranston who left Scotland for America. Both can be partly right. A boy who sailed at twelve leaves almost no trace behind him. But when a man on the ground in Scotland, a hundred years closer to it than Edna, cannot find the door, I have to tell you the Scottish-laird beginning is a beautiful possibility and not yet a proven fact.

And one more thing, which some of you have asked me about directly. On the page about Charles Edward, Edna writes that his mother was a Park and his wife was a Parke, and that the two were “not related.” I wanted that to settle the old Park/Parke question for us. Read the pages closely and you will see why it cannot. Edna spells the name both ways throughout — sometimes for the same person on two different pages, and once for two sisters in the same list. Her note tells us what the family believed, that these were two separate families, but it cannot prove it, because she did not hold the spelling steady long enough to prove anything by it. What it did give me was a thread worth pulling: Charles named one of his daughters Lora Park, after his own mother, Lora Parke. A grandmother’s name handed down. That sort of thing sometimes untangles a knot like this one, and I mean to keep pulling on it.

So now you know what you are looking at. We have an old book full of kings and governors and a coat of arms, and we have the plain American record of farmers and mothers walking their family from Rhode Island to Ohio to Illinois. The first part I will keep and treasure and not quite vouch for. The second part I will stand behind. Both belong to us.

Go ahead and check out the book. Edna did her part in 1974.

I am doing mine by setting it all in front of you.

One of you will do yours.

With affection to all, and with the files safely kept,

Charlie Jett

June 2026

Chicago, Illinois

What follows are the pages of The Story of the Cranstons, by Edna Lucille Barnes, in order. A faithful word-for-word transcription of these pages is also held in the Cranston Family Letters Archive.

Note: Samuel Cranston (Governor of Rhode Island) married Mary Clarke – daughter of Freeborn Williams who was the daughter of Roger Williams.