Katherine Crane

A promotional image of the Crane family in 1999. Featured, from left to right, are Sheridan Crane (McKenzie Westmore), Ivy Crane (Kim Johnston Ulrich), Julian Crane (Ben Masters), Ethan Crane (Travis Schuldt), and Gwen Hotchkiss (Liza Huber).
Created by	James E. Reilly
Duration	1999–2008
First appearance	July 5, 1999
Last appearance	August 7, 2008

The Crane family is a fictional family on the NBC/DirecTV soap opera Passions. Seated at 14 Raven Hill Road atop Raven Hill in Harmony, New England, the wealthy Crane family amassed its fortune during the eighteenth century via the slave trade, amongst other things. The Crane family wealth is now garnered from Crane Industries, a global corporation, which does a number of things, including shipping and fishing. Over the years, the Cranes have intermarried and reproduced with a number of notable families from Harmony and New England, including the Barretts, the Winthrops, the Lopez-Fitzgeralds, the Bennetts, and the Russells.

The affluent and renowned Crane family emigrated from Great Britain in the seventeenth century, eventually settling in the coastal New England village of Harmony over three hundred years ago. The Cranes gained a great deal of influence in village affairs by the end of the century. In 1693, magistrate William Ephraim Crane ordered the execution of accused witch Tabitha Lenox after hearing testimony from the young Prudence Standish; as a result, Tabitha has long since held a grudge against William's descendants.

The Cranes first began to amass their multibillion-dollar fortune in the eighteenth century through their participation in the Atlantic slave trade; further wealth was derived in the early twentieth century by illegally smuggling alcohol into the United States during the Prohibition and through other unpalatable activities. In more recent generations, the Cranes' main source of reported income has been derived from Crane Industries, the family-run international conglomerate.