The Cranberry Family

A Family History

Chester Hammond Cranberry (1789–1832) built Cranberry Farm in Cranberry, Connecticut, and left behind a family that the novels follow across three generations and thirty years.

Chester first married Jessica Hammond, who died on Christmas Eve, 1813, giving birth to their only son, Garfield Cranberry. Sent as a child to his mother’s family in New York, Garfield returned a grown man and a pastor. He married Penelope Townsend, daughter of Colonel Daniel Townsend, and they had one daughter, Mildred — “Millie.”

Chester then married Elcira, the woman the town would one day call the Widow Murderess. Together they had seven children: Felix, Susie, Marty, Sally, Tubby, Wally, and Tootsie. Felix, the eldest, took over the farm. He married Lorraine Peters of Virginia, and they had three children: August “Auggie,” Chester James “C.J.,” and Julie.

Chester also fathered a son, Henry, with Deborah Townsend, the family’s nanny and Elcira’s closest ally. Henry took the Townsend name and grew into a free man, a militia lieutenant, and a conductor on the Underground Railroad — a branch of the family that surfaces again, generations later, with its own claim to Chester’s land.

The two branches of Chester’s blood rejoin when Auggie, Felix’s son, marries his cousin Millie, Garfield’s daughter. From them the line runs down the years:

Auggie & Millie  →  Daniel  (m. Mamie Simmons)  →  Joseph  (m. Daniella Hochstedt)  →  Mildred  (m. Alfred Smith)  →  Audrey Smith  (m. Thomas Payton)  →  Maggie

— who walks into Book One to find the whole story waiting for her.

So here the story begins. Or does it?