Born ‎25 Oct 1600 at London, Clerkenwell Parish., England, died ‎8 Feb 1673 at Portsmouth, Newport County, RI‎, 72 years
1673, Feb. 8: Friend's Records state "Rebecca Cornell, widow, was killed strangely at Portsmouth in her own dwelling house, was twice viewed by the Coroner's Inquest, digged up and buried again by her husband's grave on their land."

May 23, 1673, her son Thomas was charged with murder, and after a trial that now reads like a farce, was convicted and executed. Among witnesses of this trial were John BRIGGS (brother of Rebeca). Mary, wife fo John CORNELL, her son, Thomas; Stephen, Edward and John, sons of Thomas; Rebecca Woolsey (her daughter), etc. It appears that the old lady had been sitting by the fire, smoking her pipe, and that she was burned to death. But on the strength of a vision which her brother, John BRIGGS, had, in which she was set fire to, and that her son, who was last with her, did it, and principally on this evidence Thomas CORNELL was tried, convicted and hung for her murder. Durfee, in his "Legal Tracts of Rhode Island" comments on the lawyer of Newport (who knew much of the history of Rhode Island) that there seemed little evidencce to convict this Thomas CORNELL. The lawyer's answer was simply, "There was no evidence". )For further particulars concerning him, see Austin's "Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island", Bolton's "Westchester County; History of the Mott Family, etc".

Rebecca's fiery death is bad enough. What happened to her son seems even worse, but perhaps it was typical of 17th century justice, not too different from the famous witch trials of the 1690's. Hindsight tells us that John Briggs had a lot to answer for in the death of his nephew. However, he undoubtedly believed sincerely in the testimony that he gave.

On 25 May 1655, her brother, John was on a committee to build a cage and stocks. (When were the infamous "Witch trials" of New England?

The following information was copied from BRIGGS-L@Rootsweb, sent by Jeff BRIGGS.


Here is some more information on Rebecca Cornell to help you figure out
what is going on with Rebecca. It has a lot of good information but you
will need to draw your own conclusions. Have fun!

Jeff>

>From "The American Genealogist" Vol. 36, dated ??, page16-18
photocopy contributed by Nelson Warner, transcribed by Frank Mitchell, 1997

WHO WAS REBECCA CORNELL?

George E. McCracken, Ph.D., F.A.S.G. VD
Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa

Mr. G. Andrews Moriarty has lately put us all greatly in in debt by publishing [supra, 35:107] certain discoveries made by Mr. Waldo C. Sprague in the parish registers of Saffron Waldon, co. Essex. There can be no doubt
that Mr. Sprague located eight baptisms and two burials of children of Thomas and Rebecca Cornell, later of Boston, Portsmouth, R.I., and Westchester Co., N.Y. Three children, Samuel, Joshua, and Mary, all presumably born in America, are naturally missing, as are also Ann, the second daughter living 1664, and therefore born in either 1624 or 1626, and Richard, the second son in 1664 (actually the third, counting the William who died in England, born, it would seem, therefore, between July 1628 and April 1629. Perhaps Ann and Richard were baptized in a neighboring parish. But apart from these omissions, the evidence from Saffron Walden is completely in harmony with that presented by the will of Rebecca Cornell, dated 2 Sept. 1664, probated 1673, of which an abstract appears, supra 19:132, a facsimile (not very legible) and a complete transcript in John Rose Delafield, Delafield the Family History (privately printed 1945), 2:648 f. The testatrix listed her sons in order and her daughters in order, and also numbered each list so that we are not left to assume merely from the order that it is chronological. It is to be hoped that we shall soon have the additional material discovered by Mr. Sprague.

Unfortunately, however, in this article reference in made to a "Briggs Genealogy" without making clear that the claims made in that work, and partly cited, are far from being sound. It is true that on the occasion of the trial
in 1673 of Thomas2 Cornell for the alleged murder of his mother, when he was convicted an flimsy evidence and subsequently hanged, one John Briggs of Portsmouth deposed that he had seen the deceased Rebecca in some sort of apparition and that she had asserted to him, "I am your sister Cornell."
This is for me satisfactory evidence that Rebecca Cornell and John Briggs bore the relationship of brother and sister to each other, but I do not regard it an sufficient proof that they were the children of the same parents. The
terminology of the seventeenth century was such that this relationship could have been established in at least three ways:
(a) Thomas Cornell could have married John Briggs' sister;
(b) John Briggs could have married Thomas Cornell's sister; and
(c) The sister of Rebecca could have married John Briggs.

In addition, we have also the possibility that the relationship was either half or step. The first alternative has been widely supposed to be the only one. It was accepted by the Rev. John Cornell, M.A., in his Genealogy of the Cornell Family, being an account of the Desendants of Thomas Cornell of Portsmouth, R.I. (New York, 1902), p.17, and by Mrs. Bertha Bortie Beal Aldridge in her book, The Briggs Genealogy, Including The Ancestors and
Descendants of Ichabod White Briggs (1609-1953) Also Other line descendants of his immigrant ancestor John Briggs, b. 1609, York England, and Some of the Descendants of Ichabod White (Victor, N.Y., 1953), p.11, where Mrs.
Aldridge makes John Briggs marry Sarah, sister of Thomas Cornell. On p. 7, in the preface, she puts the birth of John Briggs in Kent, England, inconsistently with her title-page which makes him born in York. But this latter work is not the "Briggs Genealogy" to which reference was made. That, as I learn from Mr. Sprague, is a typed manuscript which he saw at Providence, "New York Descendants of John Briggs of R. I. and County Essex, England, with 16 Allied Families," by Pearl Leona Heck of Washington, D.C. (1933).
So far as I am aware, no proof has been offered to support the belief that John Briggs' sister Rebecca Cornell was born a Briggs, and in view of the fact that Mr. Sprague has now found evidence that Thomas and Rebecca had a son buried in England on 19 Oct. 1632 with the name, as shown in the register of Kelame, it would be well to investigate the possibility that this child bore the maiden name of Rebecca.
In any case, I have myself investigated the Briggs family as shown in the registers of the parish of St, James, Clerkenwell, London, in which, it is true, there is recorded the baptism of a child named Rebecca, daughter of
Henry Briggs, on 25 Oct. 1600, and it is also true that this date is satisfactory for our Rebecca Cornell, so far as we can tell. There are in these registers more entries of the Briggs family than Mr. Moriarty cites, and for the benefit of those to whom the printed registers are not available, I now transcribe all of them:

Burials
5 Dec. 1575 Eliza Brigges, widow
22 Feb. 1572/3 George Brigges
7 Sept. 1608 John Brigges' stillborn child
23 May 1600 Thoomas, son of Richard Brigges
3 Sept. 1593 Margaret, daughter of Will'm Brigges
27 Aug. 1593 Will'm Brigges, householder
16 May 1620 Henry Briggs' son William
3 Dec 1620 Joyce, daughter of Henry Briggs
14 Aug. 1625 Henry Briggs
Baptisms
25 Oct. 1600 Rebecca, daughter of Henry Briggs
8 Apr. 1618 John & Joyce, children of Henry Briggs
Weddings
27 Feb. 1616/17 Henry Brigges & Hellen Taylor
21 Nov. 1621 Henry Brigges & Joane Wilkinson

I have also made inquiries for wills of the Briggs family of Clarkenwell but received no report of any extant. The children of Thomas and Rebecca Cornell were named Sarah, Ann, William, Thomas, Richard, Rebecca,
Elizabeth, Kelame, William, John, Elizabeth, Samuel, Joshua, and Mary, this list being a combination of the evidence from the parish registers and the mother's will. The children of John Briggs of Portsmouth are shown in
Austin's Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (pp. 25 .) as John, Thomas,
William, Susanna, Job and Enoch, and the same list appears In Mrs. Aldridge's book--I have myself not done any research on the second generation of the Briggs family of Portsmouth. It would seem clear that there is at least no striking correspondence between the names of the Briggs family of Clerkenwell and the Cornell and Briggs families of Portsmouth. Particularly significant is the absence of the name Henry. Moreover, if Rebecca Cornell was, indeed, the Rebecca Briggs baptized in 1600 at St. James, then the John Briggs baptized there in 1618 is about 10 years too young to have been the Portsmouth settler, since his age was given when he testified in 1673, showing that he was born in 1608 or 1609. I conclude that if Rebecca Cornell was really a Briggs, then she was not the one baptized in Clerkenwell.

Jeff

Born ‎24 Mar 1594 at Saffron Walden, County Essex, England, died ‎8 Feb 1656 at Portsmouth, Newport County, RI‎, 61 years
Immigrated to the colonies in 1634. Info on Thomas and Rebecca's children from Marvin Knotts, 156 Stornoway Drive East, Columbus, Ohio 43213-2159. Telephone (614)986-0527. E-mail: MKnotts1@aol.com
Thoomas dropped the "w" from the spelling of his name; thomas came to America 1633 with wife and most of the nine children. Bought property in Boston on Washington Street . Moved to Portsmouth, RI in 1640. To New Amsterdam in 1642 with Roger Williams and John Throckmorton. "The Indians seet upon the English who settled under Dutch rule and killed sixteen of Mr. Throckmorton's and Mr. Cornell;s families, burned cattle and barns" says Governor Winthrop. Thomas Cornell returned to Portsmouth, secured a grant of land there in 1644 of 10o0 acres, next to land of Edward Hutchinson, son of Anne Hutchinson. this is the Original homestead. This land on which house and burial plot are situated has never been out of the family. A house in colonial style was built in 1894 by the Rev. John Cornell (writer of Cornell Genealogy) on the site of the one destroyed by fire i 1889 and somewhat on the old plan. In 1646, Thomas Cornell returned to the Dutch Colony, not to restore what had been destroyed of his property, but to acquire the third private grant in Westchester Co. It is still known as Cornell's Neck. It was within the limits of greater New York. Some nine years later, he was driven from his property in New Netherlands by Indians and returned to his homestead in Portsmouth where he lived, died, and was buried.

On 06 Sep 1638 he was licensed to keep an Inn.
Was admitted as a freeman in 1740, and received a grant for 100 acres within the settlement of Portsmouth