Brooks Family Papers

Morgan Brooks (1861-1947) and Frona Marie (Brooks) Brooks (1861-1947) are central figures in the Brooks Family collection. They descended from the Brooks, Butler, and Buck families of New England.

Frona's grandfather, Charles Buck (1798-1863), married Sophronia Herrick (1803-1841) in 1825. The couple had three children, Charles W. Buck (1833-1933), a Unitarian minister; Robert Herrick Buck (birth name Jedidiah), who invested in Colorado gold mines; and Charlotte Frances Buck, (1828-1907). In 1852 Charlotte married Boston attorney Benjamin Franklin Brooks, and the couple had four children: Frona Marie Brooks, the only child to marry, Arthur, Esther Clara Herrick Brooks, M.D., and Franklin Herrick Brooks. Morgan's grandfather, Caleb Butler, married Clarissa Varnum, and they had a daughter, Frances Butler in 1822. Frances married Francis Augustus Brooks, a Boston, Mass., corporate attorney and railroad president, in 1847. This couple had three children: Charles B., Frederick, and Morgan Brooks. The collection includes correspondence among these family members and a great deal of professional correspondence and documents, mainly from Charles W. Buck, Benjamin Franklin Brooks, Franklin Herrick Brooks, and Francis Augustus Brooks.

Morgan Brooks and Frona Marie Brooks were married in 1888. They moved to Urbana, Illinois, shortly after their wedding where Morgan became a nationally known professor of engineering. Morgan and Frona had eight children, all of whom survived into adulthood: Henry Morgan (1889-1948), married Ruth Hayford in 1911; Charles Franklin Brooks (1891-1958), married Eleanor M. Stabler, and they had seven children; Frances Brooks (b. 1893) married Lincoln Colcord in 1929; Frederick Augustus Brooks (1895-1967), married Harriet Kinley in 1921 (divorced) and, secondly, Margaret H. Ward in 1929; Roger Brooks (1896-1957) married Anne Goebel in 1921 (divorced) and, secondly, Janet in 1928; Edith Brooks (1889-1952); Frona Marguerite Brooks ("Margie") (1901-1985), married George Hughes in 1924. The couple had two daughters, Ann and Octavia ("Taffy") before they divorced in 1927; she then married Richard Rice; Dorothy Prescott (b. 1905), married Joe Thomas in 1931. Barbara Brooks Kerner(1922-2007), the Brooks descendant who consolidated the Brooks family papers in her home in Newark, Delaware, was the middle child of Eleanor Stabler Brooks and Charles F. Brooks. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944 and earned an M.A. at Cornell University; during the summer of 1945 she worked at C.P.S. Camp #46, Big Flats, N.Y., for two months. In 1948 she married Edward Kerner under the care of Brooklyn Preparative Meeting. Edward H. Kerner (1924-2002) was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project in Dayton, Ohio, and a long-time physics professor at the University of Delaware.

Barbara Kerner was active in peace activities, including draft counseling during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. A lifelong Quaker, she was a member of Newark Monthly Meeting at the time of her death on October 28, 2007.