c. 1592–1672 · Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony
The first Stratton to cross the Atlantic, arriving in 1633. Samuel established himself in Watertown, served as surveyor of town lots, and acquired considerable property including what became the historic Elmwood estate. When Margaret Jones was executed as a witch in 1648, Samuel and his wife Alice boldly declared her innocent—risking fines and public censure rather than stay silent. His descendants number in the tens of thousands.
1716–c. 1790 · Chelmsford, Massachusetts
A veteran of the French and Indian Wars, Sergeant Francis Stratton answered the alarm on April 19, 1775, and stood with five hundred men at Meriam's Corner to ambush the British retreat from Concord. At age sixty-one, when his son John could not answer the muster for Saratoga, Francis took a reduction to private and marched north to fight Burgoyne—serving at Bennington and both battles of Saratoga, helping win the victory that turned the Revolution.
1807–1891 · Rochester, New York to Ligonier, Indiana
Mule driver on the Erie Canal at seventeen, Rochester constable who helped solve a murder at twenty, deputy U.S. Marshal who broke a counterfeiting ring on the St. Lawrence, medical student alongside Elizabeth Blackwell—the first woman to earn a medical degree in America—and frontier physician with ties to the Lincoln and Seward families. Joel was shot through the lungs in the line of duty and still kept going. He died in Washington in 1863, serving the Union the only way his wounded body would allow. His great-grandson wrote this novelette to resurrect him.
1863–1905 · Kokomo, Indiana
Attorney, state prosecutor, and short story writer who published under the pen name Frank Neilson. The Kokomo Morning News praised him as one who "fought his way from the sawmill, the clearing and the farm to the front rank at our bar." His fiction appeared in leading Eastern magazines, and scholar Robert Ohmann later cited his stories as works that captured the cultural upheaval of the magazine revolution at the turn of the century.
1896–1940 · Indianapolis to Ligonier, Indiana
Before he became a dentist, Fred Stratton went to war. In 1917, the middle of three radio-building brothers shipped to France with the 150th Field Artillery, where he kept the wireless sets humming through the Meuse-Argonne. Asked if he could really work a radio, he answered: "Well enough to fix yours when it stops working." He came home, earned his dental degree, married Lucille King, and practiced in Ligonier until his early death at forty-three.
1844–1918 · Perry Township, Noble County, Indiana
The youngest of eleven children, Isaac carried a crooked scar from a boyhood axe wound when he enlisted in Company B, 88th Indiana Infantry, in August 1862. He fought at Perryville, where the 88th held the line against a charging Confederate infantry, and served through some of the hardest campaigns of the Civil War. Isaac was William's great-grandfather on the King side.
