The Wheelwright Family Story

This is an illustrated history of the extraordinary Anglo-American Wheelwright family.In 1636 an outspoken Puritan, Reverend John Wheelwright, left his native Lincolnshire and headed for the new Boston Bay Colony. His stay in Massachusetts would be short lived.Persecuted and banished, Reverend John went on to found two New England towns and a dynasty which now spans six continents.The Wheelwrights have produced explorers, engineers, clerics, consuls and a family of cannibals. There are philanthropists, philanderers, psychoanalysts, scientists, soldiers and sailors.A sea captain became a pirate. A lawyer became a gold-digging sportsman and a kidnapped child was transformed from Puritan to Catholic mother superior.The Wheelwright's story, complete with black sheep and skeletons a-plenty, spans four centuries. Hundreds of illustrations and family charts, drawn from years of research, bring 580 pages of this most remarkable family's history to life.

A register report is one of the clearest and most comprehensive ways to record a family tree - and is certainly far easier to handle than acres of family charts! This is a clearly presented register report with a full alphabetical index for the Wheelwright family. A companion volume to 'The Wheelwright Family Story', it follows their history from Lincolnshire, England to The Americas and back to England, Africa, Australasia and beyond. Spanning 400 years, 13 generations and over 2,000 individuals it is an essential resource for anyone researching the history of New England's founding families.

An eye-opening biography of a woman at the intersection of three distinct cultures in colonial America Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order's only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright's life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. This meticulously researched book discovers her life through the communities of girls and women around her: the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates in the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a religious life.

In 1703, a war party of French soldiers and Abenaki warriors raided the Puritan village of seven-year-old Esther Wheelwright, killing several men, women and children and taking twenty-two captives. That Esther managed to survive the 200-mile journey by foot through swamps and forests to a Jesuit mission in New France is astonishing. That she was adopted, quite happily, into a family of her Abenaki captors is equally amazing. But for the Wheelwright family, who waited years before receiving word that Esther had even survived the raid, the abduction was a tragedy. Esther’s release from her Abenaki family was finally negotiated through a French Jesuit who took her to the city of Québec—but it was too late. Esther, by then twelve years old, broke her parents’ hearts by refusing to go home. They never saw her again. Instead, she remained in Québec, the capital of New France, where, against all odds, she went on to become Mother Superior of the Ursulines—and a pivotal figure after the siege of Québec in 1759. Written by Julie Wheelwright, Esther’s descendant, this book is a spiritual and an emotional journey of survival, and an awe-inspiring example of the human capacity for transformation.

Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order’s only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright’s life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. This meticulously researched book discovers her life through the communities of girls and women around her: the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates in the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a religious life.

A brilliant and emotionally resonant exploration of science and family history. A vibrant young Hispano woman, Shonnie Medina, inherits a breast-cancer mutation known as BRCA1.185delAG. It is a genetic variant characteristic of Jews. The Medinas knew they were descended from Native Americans and Spanish Catholics, but they did not know that they had Jewish ancestry as well. The mutation most likely sprang from Sephardic Jews hounded by the Spanish Inquisition. The discovery of the gene leads to a fascinating investigation of cultural history and modern genetics by Dr. Harry Ostrer and other experts on the DNA of Jewish populations. Set in the isolated San Luis Valley of Colorado, this beautiful and harrowing book tells of the Medina family’s five-hundred-year passage from medieval Spain to the American Southwest and of their surprising conversion from Catholicism to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1980s. Rejecting conventional therapies in her struggle against cancer, Shonnie Medina died in 1999. Her life embodies a story that could change the way we think about race and faith.

Wheelwright Family

This collection contains correspondence about the lives and activities of George William and William Bond Wheelwright from the 1800s to the 1950s. They describe family matters and relations, as well as the state of the papermaking and publishing family businesses. Most of the letters are in their original envelopes and others are bound in a book called "Geo. W. Wheelwright, Jr. Private Letters."