John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, son of John and Abigail of Braintree (now Quincy), MA, was conscious of his heritage. Like his father, he was happy to repeat the story that his great-great-great grandfather, John Alden, was the first Mayflower passenger to set foot on Plymouth Rock. (The story comes from Alden family tradition, and competes with that of the Chilton family, which promotes Mary.) More than that, JQA thought that Hannah Bass, granddaughter of John and Priscilla Alden, was the one who added new vigor to Adams family — known for its mere "industry, sobriety, and integrity" — and thereby affected his own makeup.

On this website we have a list of distinguished people descended from Mayflower passengers, such as John Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Grandma" Moses, Alan Shepherd, and George W. Bush. It is tempting to expand the list. Whom would you add? What qualities does your suggested descendant possess in common with his or her Pilgrim ancestor?

What do these two well-known individuals have in common with Pilgrim Isaac Allerton (1585-1659)? Answer: General Zachary Taylor is a direct descendant of Isaac Allerton⁽¹⁾, and Robert E. Lee is collaterally related to Hancock Lee, husband of Sarah Allerton (1670-1731), granddaughter of Isaac⁽¹⁾. Zachary Taylor was the 12th President of the United States, and Robert E. Lee was the famous general of the Confederate Army in the Civil War.

Setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths has become as much a part of the annual holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But should historians bother? Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Brandeis, thinks not. She asks on the website "Common-Place" (in 2001) whether it's worth while "to plumb the bottom of it all - to determine, for example, [...] whether Plymouth's 'Pilgrims' were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE describes [i.e. United American Indians of New England]. [...] Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades? Combing period documents and archaeological evidence, we might peel away some of the myths [...]

Very little is known about the ship which brought the Pilgrims to New England. No name is given in Bradford's History Of Plimoth Plantation, nor in the other early accounts. The first mention occurred in a document of 1623, which assigned to the individual colonists an acre of land apiece. The list of people was subdivided by ship name, and the first group came under the heading, "The Falles of their grounds which over in May-Floure, according as their lotes were cast .1623." Bradford in his History stated only that she "...was hired at London, of urthen about nine scoure,..." A later passage concerning John Howland's fall from the Mayflower and subsequent rescue refers to his catching hold of a topsail halyard, thus indicating that topsails were present.

Modern history easily confuses the Mayflower Pilgrims with the Puritans who followed later in the 17th Century.

It is reported that currently there are over 10 million living descendants of the 52 Mayflower Pilgrims who had children. Are you one of them? Click on "Join Us" above to join. Click on any of the highlighted names below for more information about the descendant. Note: Pages will open in a new browser window. External sites are not endorsed by the SMDPA.

The Map Center at Ancestry.com offers a large collection of free, printable maps. Some which are pertinent to Pilgrim History are: "Localities in England Connected with American History" (includes Pilgrim villages); "The Netherlands at the Death of Elizabeth I - 1603"; "Grants to the London and Plymouth Companies of Virginia 1606 & Council for New England 1620"; "Plymouth Plantation 1620-1630"; "English Coast, 1625-1642: Piscataqua-Pemaquid Region Showing Plymouth Colony Cushnoc Trading Post"; "New Netherlands 1609-1664"; and "Early American Tribes and Cultural Areas."

For over 150 years the Mayflower Pilgrims have been numismatically celebrated. Presented here are a few examples of this honor.

"This is the Good News." That's how I would conclude the reading of the Holy Gospel on a Sunday morning. I don't know how my Pilgrim ancestors, my Pilgrim clergy brothers, concluded their readings.

"This is the Good News." I have to speculate whether this afternoon's Gospel lesson comes to us, 21st century, upper middle class, white Americans living in one of the wealthiest areas of our wealthiest of all nations. How did that sit with you: Don't worry about anything - not what you eat or drink or wear. What's the good news about advice like that when every morning the financial pages of our newspaper show our stocks on a roller coaster ride, our quarterly mutual fund reports display graphs with falling lines, our salaries are frozen while our kids' tuition and our real estate taxes and the price of the drugs that keep us reasonably healthy keep going up and up, and our pension funds continue to shrink? It doesn't cut any ice with me that this summer the National Bureau of Economic Research announced cheerily that what weve been experiencing as a recession officially ended two years ago. Tell it to my creditors. Tell it to the hundreds of thousands who are out of work and out of options.