THE CRANBROOK BOOTH FAMILY OF AMERICA or the descendants of Henry Gough Booth and Harriot Wood (Booth), his wife, of the English Cranbrook in Kent, compiled impatiently by a great grandson, Henry Scripps Booth, at Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred fifty-five Published by The Cranbrook Foundation and :printed on handmade, Cranbrook water­ :marked paper by the Cranbrook Press, at Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, U.S.A., as an his­ torical frame for the Cranbrook institutions. Library of COilgress Catalog Card No. 55-8780 Out of limitless time and space we come To spend a tiny moment On this speck we call the Earth, And in that fieeting, mortal life we strive For better or for worse. Then, leaving seeded fields and a monument or two, We take another unfamiliar path in confidence That as there is no end to space or time, There is no ending to the Love Which waves a fond farewell And holds our hand to guide us once again To the unknown from the known. Published by The Cranbrook Foundation and printed on handmade, Cranbrook water­ marked paper by the Cranbrook Press, at Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, U.S.A., as an his­ torical frame for the Cranbrook institutions. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 55-8780 FLETCHElfS COPPEH SHOP [IICH STHEET, CIL-\'\HROOK as Henry Cough Booth saw it when walking there to work trom the houses where Henrv. George ,rnd .\lllw were born, and past which \\'l'llt the funeral procession of Harriot \Vood (Booth), co-founder. ROOTS, TRUNK, BRANCHES AND FRUIT . His sisters and his cousins Whom he recons up by dozens, And his aunts." H. M. S. Pinafore HE CRANBROOK BooTH FAMILY of America was founded by T Henry Gough Booth and Harriot Wood (Booth) when they were married in the parish church of East Grinstead, Sussex, Eng­ land, on Friday, March 18, 1836, and "The bells rang very prettily" according to a letter from the bride. The bridegroom being a Close-Communion Baptist ( although brought up as a Unitarian) and his wife being a member of the Free Church of England even though her family attended St. Dun­ stan's Church, apparently shied away from a wedding in their home town of Cranbrook, Kent, and journeyed a few miles to a place where, without stirring up criticism from their even less "orthodox" friends, the Prayer Book rite of marriage was performed. , They returned to Cranbrook immediately and took up residence on the hill on Kent Road, not far from the town's great windmill. Here their first child, Henry Wood Booth was born. Soon afterward they moved in town to a house on High Street near what was known as "The Studios." It was here George, their second son, and their only daughter Anne Booth (Langley) were born, and Harriot died a year and four months after the birth of the latter. Thus the co-founder of the family had no inkling that her descend­ ants would leave the picturesque village where her father, Thomas Wood (familiarly known as "Old MaE:ter Wood") was the town brewer and her father-in-law and husband were coppersmiths work­ ing in the shop still operating as "Hutchinson Roe" under the great copper kettle sign which hangs over the narrow sidewalk of High Street. She alone lies buried in Cranbrook's churchyard, her grave­ stone standing opposite the west door of St. Dunstan's. Her children and numerous descendants, both living and dead, have found their place in North America as her beloved husband did after taking Harriet Harman ( no issue) as his second wife. They sailed from St. Catherine's Docks in London on May 7, 1844 with Henry, George and Anne, preparing themselves for hardships ahead by traveling steerage and cooking the food on deck which they had brought with them. Well over a month later they landed in New York where they were swindled over railroad tickets as they had been swindled in London through the purchase of worthless pro­ visions for the sea voyage. It was a hard beginning to their lives in the New World-lives lived in Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Buffalo, St. Catharines, Toronto, St. Thomas and Detroit; lives which lived up to the name of Booth. What's in a name anyway? Booth in any form ( whether Latin, French, English, or Dutch) means nothing more than "temporary dwelling." It suggests restlessness more than security; even that the sheriff may be in hot pursuit! The custom of carrying on a family name is a relatively ancient fact which probably has some unfathomable merit. The women, how­ ever, while changing their nam~s in marriage, help carry the blood­ sb·eam on and are consequently of far more importance than ad­ mitted by the College of Heralds. They are integral parts of the family tree. While the Founders set the Cranbrook Booth Family of America in motion ( the pioneering spirit of Harriet Harman (Booth) nursing it along) their blood is a small part of what is found giving life and vitality ( and we hope added mentality) to the fourth and fifth gen­ erations. Each of today's crop of their descendants has thirty other great-great-great grandparents who passed on physical, mental and spiritual qualities which they had acquired from well over two mil­ lion ancestors of twenty-one generations and some four hundred years before. Boast not of your blue blood; it may lack red corpuscles! Never-the-less we have a passing interest in our Booth forebears which somehow outweighs interest in others. vVe know relatively little about the Cranbrook Booths but assume they were descended from those of the name who possessed the "lordship of Boothes" in Lancashire, one of the three original palatines of England. Old volumes in Cranbrook Church record the marriage there of William Boo!h_ ( cantor of the parish choir) and Elizabeth Goldsmith on June 12, 1739 and that they had five children, a son Thomas (b. Cranbrook, August 23, 1749) being the fourth. Further records unearthed by Ralph Harman Booth and Henry Wood Booth follow. Thomas Booth married Elizabeth Kingswood (b. Cranbrook, August 23, 1749) in St. Dunstan's Church July 9, 1776; he being killed in action while serving in Admiral Rodney's Fleet in the West Indies when their only son George was five years of age. She received a sizeable pension because of his death. George Booth (b. Cranbrook, March 24, 1777; d. London, Febru­ ary 12, 1845) learned and worked at coppersmithing with Mr. Paul­ son in Cranbrook. He first married Susan Smallfield ( no issue) and then after her death, married in August 1803 Elizabeth Dan Gough who was the daughter of a preacher named George Gough. She bore 2 him eleven children, all but the first being born in Cranbrook. Henry Gough Booth, co-founder of the family, their fifth child and fourth son, was born September 26, 1811. Apparently neither he nor his father, nor any of their relatives, laid claim to the large unclaimed estate of a Sir Charles Booth who died April 26, 1795 and was buried six miles north of Cranbrook. No doubt our family tree would have required more than a little surgery to prove a claim. The event, however, taking place before the inven­ tion of death duties and estate taxes, would have provided enough to eliminate the hardships of the early American years-that is, if some sharper did not cut the bottom out of the recipient's pocket! Incidently, there is only one Charles- Booth among the 150 or so de­ scendants in the two Booth branches of the family recorded in this booklet. If a fortune had been in hand, Henry Gough Booth would probably not have developed the restless spirit which kept him looking for something better throughout his life. Even if he had, the whole course of history would have been changed. His elder son Henry would never have started the first branch of the American family by marrying a French-Canadian Protestant by the name of Clara Gag­ nier; George, his younger son, would never have wed an American girl-Myrtilla Smith-to start the second branch, and Anne would have married someone other than a Toronto architect by the name of Henry Langley. So What? We are. Each of us is unique because of the merging streams of history-be­ cause there were differences of opinion in religion, hard times, wars, riots, fires and fevers; because of the twinkle in an eye, failures and successes; stout or timid hearts, feeble or vivid imaginations, phys­ ical and spiritual passions. Our forebears made history; history made us fruit on our family tree. Some of the fruit is good to look at, some sweet, some tasteless, some all too sour; some is nourishing and of great value to others, some sounder than a Roosevelt dollar, some full of the seeds of new ideas. But in all this harvest it is doubtful . there is a single worm which can't be turned to some good account. As each new blood stream is blended with another, as each of us faces the events of this present, let us do credit to the Booth blood even though it is a mere drop in a well-filled bucket. "Quod Ero Spero"-if, as the Booth motto says, you resolve to be what you hope to be, be sure your hopes are hight The Booth name carries on. The Cranbrook name carries on also. In addition to the Kentish village from which the family emigrated there are at least two towns and an educational community bearing the name-a small village in British Columbia, Canada; a city in Australia and a group of six institutions in Bloomfield Hills, Mich- 3 igan, U.