One of the features of this anniversary year – the four hundredth since the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth as well as the 175th anniversary of the Society’s founding in 1845 – has been a focus on early members of the Society, people no one alive today can have known. As a historical society, we are familiar with old records, even ones biographical in nature, but there is still something uncanny about how some early members – even some of the Society’s founders – come to life in the stories of their own time. Continue reading Undimmed luster
Category Archives: Mayflower 2020
ICYMI: Mayflower trolls
[Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 20 January 2020.]
Internet trolls are people who lurk on social media and generally cause trouble for everybody else. I recently found a list of the ten types of internet trolls, and suspect I probably qualify under No. 5, “The Show-Off, Know-it-All Or Blabbermouth Troll.” Or at least that is how I feel whenever I chime in on one of the Mayflower/Alden-related Facebook pages or the like. It becomes my job to deflate the balloons of some of these wonderful newly-found Mayflower descendants, who have, most unfortunately, inadvertently gathered and believed all the dross of Internet information about their ancestors. Continue reading ICYMI: Mayflower trolls
Mayflower hoaxes
Jeff Record’s recent post on “A ‘Relative’ Hoax“ reminded me of a few genealogical hoaxes I have encountered. In our open houses to staff on Mayflower genealogy, one of the subjects I review is the various frauds that have occurred in the genealogical field over time.
Robert S. Wakefield (1925-2002) wrote a detailed list of many of these Mayflower fables in a 1993 article in the Mayflower Descendant.[1] These include a fictional ancestry for passenger Edward Doty that was created by the well-known genealogical fraud Gustave Anjou; the claim that “Constance Dudley” was the first wife of passenger Stephen Hopkins (now identified as Mary Kent alias Back); and the false claim the Peter Brown of Windsor, Connecticut, was the son of the Mayflower passenger of the same name. (Brown of the Mayflower only had daughters.)[2] Continue reading Mayflower hoaxes
Playing Pilgrims
For me and my friends growing up on Cape Cod, the story of the Mayflower voyage took on a mythical quality. It felt significant to us to be walking the land that the Pilgrims saw after that long and perilous voyage. Our frequent field trips to Plimoth Plantation and the Mayflower II provided fuel for our imaginations, and through the long New England winters we played Pilgrim in our houses. My mother let us empty out a large closet, and my friends and I would gather some blankets and toys and munch on stale bread in the dark, pretending we were in cramped quarters on the Mayflower with our children. In the summer we gathered wildflowers for our forest fort – our version of a Plimoth Plantation cottage. I had no ancestral connection to the Mayflower, but I was drawn to the idea of a seafaring adventure and of reinventing oneself in a new land. Continue reading Playing Pilgrims
Ten years of JHC
As the commemorations continue for the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival and the 175th anniversary of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), I also want to acknowledge and celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center (JHC) in 2020.
Formerly known as the American Jewish Historical Society-New England Archive, the JHC and NEHGS launched a collaboration in 2010 to enhance Jewish historical and genealogical research and the continued collection and preservation of Jewish history. Five years later, the collaboration was further strengthened when JHC’s archives became permanently deposited at NEHGS. In 2018, the center was named for Justin and Genevieve Wyner in recognition of their longstanding support and advocacy. Continue reading Ten years of JHC
Phantom faces
On a glorious late spring afternoon, just days before the solstice and the return of summer, I should have been jostling with the crowds on my visit to Plymouth, Massachusetts. I should have been standing on the hot pavement waiting my turn to see the sanctuary of the beautifully restored First Parish Church in Town Square. Should have been in a long line snaking its way to the pavilion to get a glimpse of Plymouth Rock, after which I should have been climbing the hill for a tour of the eighteenth-century Edward Winslow House, built by the great-grandson of Pilgrim Edward Winslow, and now the headquarters of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. I should have been among the throngs visiting the humble thatched homesteads of the Pilgrims at the recreated Plimoth Plantation, watching them cultivate their gardens and listening to them recount stories of their first years in the New World. Continue reading Phantom faces
A guiding spirit
In a recent post about Provincetown’s efforts over the years to reclaim its Pilgrim story, I mentioned a number of initiatives by the Ladies’ Research Club of Provincetown to commemorate Mayflower events. In this year, the quadricentennial of the Mayflower’s First Landing at Provincetown, we owe gratitude to that small club of Provincetown ladies, all of them Mayflower descendants who, a century ago, preserved Pilgrim history for posterity to build upon.
Remember the Mavericks
Later this year, I will be giving a talk as part of Salem Ancestry Days in Salem, Massachusetts, entitled “Remember, Remember: Exploring Salem’s Mayflower Connections.” While Salem was only 80 miles north of Plymouth, the two early settlements had very little interaction. Still, there were at least four Mayflower families with a connection to Salem:
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- Richard More, Mayflower passenger and resident of Salem as early at 1637; he died in Salem in the 1690s;
- Remember Allerton, Mayflower passenger and member of the Salem church in 1637 with her husband Moses Maverick; Remember’s father Isaac Allerton (Mayflower passenger) joined the church in 1647;
- Elizabeth Turner, daughter of Mayflower passenger John Turner, was living in Salem by 1651;
- Benjamin Vermayes (later the son-in-law of Mayflower passenger William Bradford) joined the Salem church in 1642.[1]
Flushed with pride
In this period of self-isolation, the imagination of genealogists will likely extend significantly. Frequent Vita Brevis writer Jeff Record recently shared with me an online tree that purportedly gave a Mayflower line back to Seth Wheeler (1838-1925) of Albany, New York, known as the creator of perforated paper, who obtained the earliest patents for toilet paper and dispensers in 1883. The tree depicted a descent from Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke by calling Francis the father Henry Cook of Salem, Massachusetts! Francis did not have a son named Henry, and the origins of Henry Cook (who was in Salem by 1638) are unknown. So, unfortunately, I had to tell Jeff that the Mayflower line was worthless, but at least we can thank Wheeler for toilet paper! Continue reading Flushed with pride
ICYMI: ‘If space allows’
[Author’s note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 5 January 2017.]
Thanks to a timely message alerting me to a collection of letters for sale at eBay, I recently acquired one side of the genealogical correspondence between Regina Shober Gray[1] and the Rev. Richard Manning Chipman, author of The Chipman Lineage (1872). Mrs. Gray, so expansive in some areas of her diary, is comparatively terse with regard to the beginning of the correspondence: Continue reading ICYMI: ‘If space allows’