History of Westchester County, New York, Vol. I
He was colonel of the Queens County militia, then the most niimeroua regiment in the province, and was i)ultlicly thanked by the Governor, Lord Cornbury, in November, 1704, that, on an alarm of an invasion by a French fleet, he had in ten hours brought a thousand men to within an hour's march of New York. Colonel Thomas Willett's cousin, Colonel John Cornell, of Kockaway, subsequently commanded the Queens County militia until his death, in 1745. After his brother's death. Colonel Thomas Willett, of Flushing inherited his grandfather's plantation of Cornell's Neck, and in 1709
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SCARSDALE.
Richard Cornell, grandson of Thomas Cornell, of Cornell's Neck, and eldest son of John and Mary (Russell) Cornell, of Cowncck, in Henii)stead, was born about 1670, and died at Scarsdale in 1757. He marconveyed it to his eldest son, William Willett, who had removed to the comity of Westchester una made the Xeck his home. He sat in the Provincial-Vssembly as one of the representatives of Westchester Connty, with but brief intermissions, from 1702 to his death, in 1733, and was appointed ".Judge of the Common Pleas inthe County " in 1721. But this is not the place to pursue the history of the "Willettsof We,stchester, further than to show their descent from Thomas Cornell, of Cornell's Neck. The Neck has sometimes been called Willett's Neck.
Rebecca Cornell, a younger dausjhter of Thomas Cornell, was with her sister Sara, in New Amsterdam, and tliere married, in 1G47, George Woolsey, of Varmouth, Eufrland, said to have been of the family of Cardinal Woolsey ; and their descendants are numerous in Westchester County and elsewhere, several having obtained eminence, one of them being Theodore Dwight Woolsey, president of Yale College from 1846 to 1871.