Lately I’ve been thinking about my father’s direct paternal line. I soon hit a brick wall… My father’s G-G-G-Grandfather was John Burl Cornwell. Near the start of my genealogy blogging journey I talked about John and his interesting life. (https://wbcornwellgenealogy.blogspot.com/2016/06/john-b-cornwell-man-of-mystery.html) This post is a little bit of an update on my search for John’s past.
 |
| John B Cornwell |
Using ancestry.com's DNA I have found scores of cousins, most distant, others pretty close, even a 2nd cousin (but more on that later). I found a member with something that really caught my attention. From the 1840 census I knew that John’s mother was Lucinda Cornwell, and when I looked at this DNA match I saw that they had one Cornwell in their tree, a Lucinda Cornwell that married Alfred Denham. In the 1850 census we find Alfred, Lucinda and a handful of children including a son named John, listed as a Denahm which was common practice in the day. So the dilemma at hand is I need to find if John was the son of a Mr. Cornwell that left a widow to remarry or if John was born to a Miss Cornwell that didn’t marry until Mr. Denham came along. I need to do a sweep of the county in which they lived to see if I can find any man by the name of Cornwell that married a woman named Lucinda to help unlock this mystery…
One thing that did surprise me was that Mr. Denham was black, and Lucinda was white. I wonder what all this mix-raced couple had to endure in their marriage. I am not Denham but I do have Lucinda’s blood in my vines and I’m proud to come from a woman who married the man she loved despite the time.
The last census in which I find Lucinda in the 1870 census, she is 62 and indexed as Lucy, a widow with her children and other young children whom I believe to be her grandchildren. There is still many mysteries about John and his family that I have to unlock, but I'm thrilled to have discovered what I have.
