What is a Pilgrim?

Our family had a framed copy of a print of this kitschy 1914 genre painting by Jennie A. Brownscombe painting entitled "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth". In my dad's handwriting at the bottom it says, "Plymouth, Mass" and the date, a few months before I was born. I can only conclude that he'd made a pilgrimage there with my mom when she was pregnant with me. 

What even is a Pilgrim? Think of them as children of divorce.

Without the divorce of the adulterous and lascivious King Henry VIII in 1534 there would likely be no official English Reformation. Henry’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn and thus shake off the authority of the Catholic Church made him the Church of England’s own Constantine, an official state sponsor of a previously illegal new religion. There had been a secret Protestant movement, a much more serious one, outside of that schism, but without royal favor it may well have been extinguished, just as the French had extinguished their Huguenot minority. For comparison, at this writing France is 83% Catholic, 2% Protestant, 15% other.  Prior to Henry’s reformation all of England’s early Protestant leaders were executed for heresy, usually by burning.

 

Still, many of their ideas survived underground for a number of years. Around 1605 a group called the Separatists or the Brownists began to come together, and them’s yer Pilgrims. There grew to be around 400 of them prior to the transplantation. Between 1607 til the end of the 16 teens they lived in Holland to escape English persecution. But they grew concerned when their children started wearing wooden shoes and putting their fingers in dykes and posing for cleanser cans so they decided to try their luck in America, where a colony known as Virginia had been founded a few years earlier. After many ups and downs, some of them set sail in mid-September, landing in Massachusetts a couple of months later.

We obsess on the Mayflower as though there was only one boatload of Pilgrims, and their descendants sprang from just them like Adam and Eve. But there were many subsequent shiploads, of course.  In addition to the Mayflower passengers, I also have many ancestors among those who came on the unsung second boat The Fortune in 1621 and the obscure but adorable sounding next two the Anne and the Little James in 1623 and so forth.

And then in 1630 came the Winthrop Fleet to found Boston, bringing it with my mother’s paternal line, her father’s 7th great grandfather. These were Puritans, reformists but not out and out Separatists like the Pilgrims, and hence much more numerous. My mom’s paternal ancestry line is the longest unbroken chain in the American leg of my family background, starting in 1630 and ending in my case with my mother’s death in 2014, 385 years, 11 generations. The Founding of Boston was a much bigger deal than Plymouth, at least in terms of scale. 700 people came over with the Winthrop Fleet in 11 ships. About 20,000 followed over the next decade—this is when most of my mother’s ancestors came to this country.

Naturally, these later arrivals married Mayflower passengers and their descendants, and their descendants married Mayflower descendants, and they married other recent arrivals but they all stayed in the same place and intermarried and that is how I can get to be related to so many of them, though I am separated from my nearest Mayflower surname by over 200 years. My 6th great grandmother Abigail Fuller (d. 1804) is the last from a direct Pilgrim line.