Tracing Our Family To The 1600’s In New England, Part 3

Tribal_Territories_Southern_New_England

Updated 12/22/14 to fix spelling of Indian tribe names

Updated 1/1/15 for corrections to Iyanough/Hyanno generations plus other editorial clean ups

In this post I hope to provide context with respect to the New England Indians during the period 1630-1640. This is the window in which William Cornell comes to Roxbury, MA, joins the Roxbury militia, at some point loses his first wife, fights the Pequots and then moves to Hartford, CT by 1639 where he is recorded having property. It is inside this window of time a nexus must be shown between Mary Hyanno and William Cornwell for the claim of Hyanno Indian lineage to be true.

To set an end state for this post, it must be noted that the first child of William and Mary Cornwell (i.e,  Sgt. John Cornwell) was born in 1840 in Middletown, CT (reference: White, Lorraine Cook, ed. The Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records. Vol. 1-55. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1994-2002; via Ancestry.com and Family Research  Connecticut Town Birth Records, pre-1870 (Barbour Collection) [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA).

Therefore if Mary Cornwell is actually Mary Hyanno, then William Cornwell must meet her sometime in this period. Since no record exists of this meeting, it can only be inferred by events in the region that could tie the Hyanno and Cornwell families together.

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