From Governor William Bradford's Plymouth Plantation Register, "Register of Governor Bradford's in his own hand, recording some of the first deaths, marriages and punishments at Plymouth":
Digory Priest: January 1, "the year begins with the death of Degory Priest,"
A few years ago, when my oldest were doing their family histories for their middle school humanities class, I discovered that I'm a Mayflower descendant. Just hanging by a thread, there -- a great-great-great, one Digory Priest, was a Pilgrim hatmaker, traveling first to Leiden, Holland and then back to England and on to what would become the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was one of the signatories to the Mayflower Compact, but died almost immediately, in the epidemic that spread through the fledgling Puritan settlement. After that, the evidence becomes more ambiguous. My record book indicates that his wife and daughters came over in 1621, but online (and probably more accurate) references date their arrival to 1623 on the Ship Anne, his wife having already remarried. A daughter's marriage in 1630 in Plymouth led to my own family line -- on to Nantucket and eventually westward to Ohio.
That's the gist of what I know. It was my great-grandmother who had a passion for such histories and did the research necessary to establish herself as a Mayflower descendant and Daughter of the American Revolution via two other ancestors. When the boys started to talk about their projects, my father was able to locate her thick black book detailing the first generations of early European settlers in America.
My husband's family's arrival in America was equally interesting. As we asked for information for the school report, we learned out that a cousin of his had started a geneaology project, and had located fascinating paperwork from their grandfather's arrival in New York on a ship from Wales in the early 1900s. As I recall, he and his brothers came with their mother, following their father who had left a short time earlier to establish himself. At the age of fourteen, my husband's grandfather was listed on the ship's manifest as a "boy miner," meaning that he had already been employed in what was to become his life's profession in the coal mines of western Pennsylvania.
A lot of people make fun of women like my great-grandmother, broadly-built turn-of-the-century "ladies of the club" sailing through the Midwest in their wide-brimmed hats on their DAR and Mayflower Society fervor. But I am always moved by these stories of emigration to America. What determination and courage it must have taken, whether born out of religious fervor or old world poverty, to clamber onto a small ship and set sail for a new life on an unknown continent.
My husband's family story in America is only a century long and, therefore, much easier to know than my own. His grandmother was also from Wales; she and her husband met in Pennsylvania and produced five children, four of whom are still alive. I know (or knew) in person all the players. I hope that someday we will be able to go to Wales with our children and see the places from which part of their family originated.
The family of Digory Priest has faded into mystery. Thinking that his wife and daughters came to America almost immediately after he did, I have often wondered whether they would have had any inkling of his fate when they set sail for America. It seemed unlikely that they would have come if they had known that their husband and father was already gone, but perhaps they had no options. Perhaps they knew that only those early marriages in Plymouth would secure their place in the Puritan community. The new information I have read online this morning seems to turn that story upside down; his wife was apparently already securely in her place when she brought her daughters to these shores.
It's something to think about, as I sit in the comfort of my dining room, furnished with a mixture (dare I say blend?) of 19th century antiques and a brand new Dell. Would I have boarded either of those ships? 
PLYMOUTH PLANTATION
Walked: 3.5 miles.
5 comments:
LOL, I hate Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac! The poem he read yesterday is an example of why I hate the program. This "poem" was basically a recitation of some woman's really bad week. It included death by murder/suicide and other, a disappearing boyfriend, and I don't know what else but imo it was not a poem. I have heard him read other poems of a similar nature which are nothing more than some egotistical recitation of the day's events in some dull "poet's" life "I got up and read the paper while drinking coffee. My wife left the sugar bowl out again." Yawn.
I hope you get to Wales. It must be a gorgeously rugged place.
My family can also be traced back to Plymouth Colony, when John and Samuel Eddy arrived in 1630 on a ship called the Handmaid. I think it'd be fascinating to have the time to do all the research and put together a detailed family history. Maybe someday!
My mother's mother was also quite proud of being a DAR. More disturbingly, she was even MORE proud of being a Daughter of the Confederacy. I guess I could claim membership, but no thank you.
Fascinating. I know only of my mother's family's arrival in America...her parents were born in what is now Romania, but back then was Hungary. I think my dad's mother once did her family's geneology, but I don't kow what happened to it... Lisa :-]
Some of my ancestors never immigrated here. This was their country :-). Besides my Cherokee grandparents and great-grandparents, who can be traced on some tribal registries, I know that my maternal family was here during the Civil War. My great grandmother just died a few years ago, and she remembers her grandmother telling her about how the Yankees stole the only milk cow and burned the barn to the ground. Most of her ancestors arrived over here after Culloden, when the Scots were transported to the United States, and some came over during the potato famine from Ireland. My fathers family is all Irish, and arrived after the famine, too. Learning your roots can be so rewarding...knowing their stories is priceless. I am fortunate that Appalachians have a rich oral traditon of preserving family stories.
Post a Comment