The Donner family didn’t resort to cannibalism:

No cooked human bones were found among the thousands of fragments of animal bones at that Alder Creek site, suggesting Donner family members did not resort to cannibalism, the archaeologists said at a conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Sacramento, Calif.

“The Donner family ended up getting the stigma basically because of the name,” said Julie Schablitsky, one of the lead authors. “But of all the people, they were probably the least deserving of it.”