Our summer issue of the Mayflower Descendant includes an article by myself and Michael Leclerc entitled “The Family of Louis and Lydia (Fosdick) Lambert Ma(s)cillier of Boston, Virginia, and Guadeloupe: The First Known Catholic Mayflower Descendants in Massachusetts.” When we first announced our digitization project of the parish records of the Archdiocese of Boston in 2016, I was interested to find such descendants. I wrote about the first person I found in the records with colonial New England ancestry, Caroline (Plimpton) Francoeur (1759-1827)—however, she had no Mayflower ancestry. I only needed to go eighteen pages further in the parish records to find the baptism of the eldest child of Louis Lambert Ma(s)cillier and his wife Lydia Fosdick, who was an eighth generation-descendant (two times over) of Mayflower passengers William and Mary Brewster.¹

Throughout the colonial period, no official Catholic congregations were allowed in Massachusetts. Local laws forbade any Catholic priest even to enter the colony. The 1780 Massachusetts Constitution established religious freedom in the new state, and the first public Catholic Mass was held in Boston in 1788. The below baptism of Mary Catherine Elizabeth Lambert in 1796 (who died suddenly in the following year), and that of her sister Amelia Mathilda in 1798, represent the earliest known Catholic Mayflower descendants in Massachusetts. I cannot qualify this beyond the Bay State, as there were early Mayflower descendants in England, Netherlands, and elsewhere in North America. I state in the article that if any readers can find earlier examples in Massachusetts (or elsewhere), I will happily publish an update. Continue reading Catholic Mayflower Descendants →