The Family Tree That Bore Fruit for Three Hundred Years

In 1900, sociologist A. E. Winship published a remarkable study tracing the descendants of Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century pastor from Northampton, Massachusetts. What he found read like a covenant blessing made visible. From Edwards and his wife Sarah, married in 1727, had come thirteen college presidents, sixty-five professors, one hundred lawyers, thirty judges, sixty-six physicians, eighty holders of public office, and countless ministers of the gospel.…