AnceStory Archives: Mayflower

Showing posts with label Mayflower. Show all posts

Monday, June 8, 2020

The Mayflower Billington Brothers Dubbed First Juvenile Delinquents in America

Pint Sized Pilgrims Also Caused Trouble

You can read my full story on GenealogyBank blog Billington Boys

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Scituate MA 1956 Gun Powder Tea Party

Of course, you’ve heard about the Boston Tea Party, a protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston Harbor on 16 December 1773 against the British Tea Act. But did you know there was a Second Boston Tea Party in American history?
And did you know they used tea from the original Boston Tea Party?
In 1956, nine men gathered in Scituate, Massachusetts, for the Second Boston Tea Party. Colonel Charles Wellington Furlong (1898-1966) hosted the event at his home “Eight Gables” on Old Oaken Bucket Road.
Read my post on GenealogyBank Blog: Second Boston Tea Party Held – in 1956!

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Book Review of Mayflower Live Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience

Mayflower Live Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock at Amazon
This is a book review from New York Journal written by Robert S. Davis, an award-winning senior professor of genealogy, geography, and history. His writing credits include more than 1,000 contributions as books, articles, and reviews in historical, library, education, and archival journals related to the South. He is also a frequent speaker.

"Each chapter in this book becomes not just a separate life and adventure but a different way to learn about the Pilgrim experience."
A new century brings special anniversaries as occasions for reflection; 2019 had plenty of such benchmarks including for Jamestown, and 2020 will include the Pilgrims' "impact on popular consciousness" while putting their "hardships in sharp perspective."
Author Martyn Whittock in Mayflower Lives seeks to explore "the motives, trials, tribulations, successes, and significance of this myth-making voyage" of the Pilgrims. The author does this through the "dramatic and colorful" "interlocking lives of fourteen of those who were part of these events." "They move the story forward from journey, to settlement, to building a community."
Religion and its politics permeate this story. "Puritan religious beliefs had set them [the Pilgrims] at odds with an increasingly authoritarian Church of England" and the king. Whittock tells the Pilgrims' tale both in terms of the turbulent politics of 1640 England and as immigrant refugees and exiles.
True Puritans sought to change the Church of England, but the Pilgrims wanted separation in every way. The Pilgrims left England for the religious freedom of Holland but where "their sons were facing conscription into the armies of the Protestant Dutch" in Europe's religious wars.
After a "long and hard" voyage on the Mayflower, weather conditions forced the Pilgrims to settle on Cape Code, "a strange and alien environment," instead of the distant "northern parts of the colony of Virginia" or the Hudson River of today's New York. Plymouth settlement began as a poorly planned fluke, "in an area that lacked royal authority" but so did the other efforts from which would come the British Empire.
The Pilgrims and the strangers (non-Pilgrims) in their impromptu home in the New World would face huge challenges. "Desperate hardly begins to describe them." Half of these 130 settlers died in the first winter of 1620–21" from sickness. Of the survivors, half were "children and teenagers."
Fourteen of the settlement's 18 adult women died that first year. Settlers buried children and spouses. Pilgrims like widow and mother Susanna White married from the survivors; with widower Edward Winslow, she started a new family.
Love could develop powerfully, "even if it was not the initial driving force" of necessity and survival and the Pilgrims "stressed the quality of lovemaking as well as its regularity" in achieving an average of eight children per person. That became the basis of the legendary love story of the Mayflower lives of John Alden, Myles Standish, and Priscilla Mullins.
Scandal and tragedy runs through many of these tales. Whittock devotes a chapter to the rebels and scoundrels of Plymouth. Myles Standish led brutal outrages against the Native Americans.
Of a family of four abandoned children, only Richard More survived the first year at Plymouth. Their vengeful father had declared these helpless infants. Richard grew up to serve against the Dutch, the French, and the Native Americans. He lived to witness the Salem Witch trials.
The book appropriately begins with Christopher Jones, the master of the Mayflower who brought the Pilgrims to America. He had no real experience with the dangerous Atlantic. So much went wrong, but Jones persevered even when the Mayflower started to fall apart.
The author describes Jones and his ship as exceptional in a time of seafaring and trade that Whittock writes even made each of Jones' marriages a "sound commercial prospect." Two years later, he died in England and the decrepit Mayflower became scrap lumber.
William Bradford led the Pilgrims. A modern docudrama told the history of the settlement through his history, a document that, like the Pilgrims, had a complicated history.
Whittock gives the lives of these founding fathers and mothers within the story of the Pilgrims of Plymouth as a whole. "Some were men, some were women, one was a little child who did not survive the first winter; one was a Native American." Each chapter in this book becomes not just a separate life and adventure but a different way to learn about the Pilgrim experience.
Although the Puritans believed in the "weakness of women," the author discusses the forgotten but critical female history of Plymouth. "The girls were tougher than anyone had imagined" and lived longer; young women, although few in number, managed to survive "to a remarkable degree."
The characters featured each lived a complicated "Mayflower life." Stephen Hopkins, for example, had survived Bermuda and Jamestown. He knew Pocahantas. At Plymouth as "a stranger among the saints" or not a Pilgrim, he proved a skilled hunter, acted as a negotiator with Native Americans, and owned a rowdy tavern.
Native American Squanto (Tisquantum) became a part of the legend of the Plymouth settlement. His story had the elements of the worst of the European discovery. Kidnapped and enslaved by fur traders, he lived in Spain and England before he found himself back home after his people had died from an epidemic passed to them by the Europeans.
Mary Chilton's Mayflower life serves as an opportunity to explain the legends of Plymouth Rock and Thanksgiving. Whittock often uses these biographies to look for truth about myths. She would become the widow of the wealthiest merchant in Boston and mother of their 10 children.
The entertaining narrative of Mayflower Lives carries the reader through the times as reality and not children's stories. The book has annotation but no illustrations.

Monday, January 28, 2019

Gen Tom Thumb and Countess Margi Unveiling Tablet to Richard Warren Mayflower Ancestor 1915

From The Boston Globe November 1 1915 for full PF contact me

Thursday, December 3, 2015

"M" Standish Trap migrated with Native Americans or another Standish altogether?

A photo of a Standish trap. I've had this trap in my collection for about 30 years. It has teeth in the jaws and is larger than most of the Standish traps I've seen. Miles Standish was a seventh generation descendant of Captain Myles Standish of Plymouth Colony. He made traps for the American Fur Company and other fur companies from 1821 to 1868.

1936 Washington Evening Star article

The Daily Telegram 1953

From Hunter-trader-trapper, Volume 11 1905

OLD TRAPPER'S NOTES. O G Wells. My two sons, Archie and James, and I have been taking the H-T-T and we have been much interested in the questions and inquiries. I see in November's issue. Brother Frazier found an old fashioned trap marked M. Standish, and wanted to know who made traps like that. Undoubtedly it is one of Marquer Standish's makes, a French blacksmith who lived below St. Paul. Minn. I do not know just where, as I was very small then. He made a great many traps for my father. My father established an Indian trading post on the west" bank of Lake Pippen Minn., in 1833. He was a hunter, trader and trapper, and one of the first members of the Minnesota legislature, and it was at this post that I was born in 1840. and It was in one of this style trap that I caught my first coon when I was six years old. Infact, all the traps I saw in those days were made with the bottoms melded together.

See M.Standish hand forged trap

From 1935 Hamlin Herald Texas

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Inside the Mayflower 1957 Clark Kinnard Article & Mayflower Compact & More From Archives!

For a PDF or Link to file please contact me

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Pilgrim Century Furniture Discovery 1658

While researching the Newbury Short family cabinet makers I came across Gary Sullivan's blog post on the Pilgrim Chest featured on the Anderson Cooper show in 2011. Gary is overseeing my Short family project and while the earliest piece in that family is the wedding dresser below the Shorts were part of the 1635 Newbury Massachusetts settlers. Imagine the hidden treasure troves that have not yet been discovered. How many more items are out there?! Recently a gentlemen contacted me on a few pieces that he has in his possession that were in his family from the early Allen sea captain line in Massachusetts. Well will just wait and see.
Here is the Henry Short and Ann Longfellow Short wedding dressing box ca. 1694.