Happy Thanksgiving, cousins!
Those of you with a free FamilySearch.org membership may have recently received an email like this one:
| You Have a Mayflower Heritage! |
| Discover your Mayflower connection, and learn about the sacrifices your relative made for religious freedom and greater opportunities as he helped shape the new world. |
The Mayflower information on this page comes from two different authoritative sources. The Mayflower passengers information in the FamilySearch Family Tree comes from the General Society of Mayflower Descendants Silver Books. The biographical information was provided by American Ancestors. Due to the scarcity of documents in this time period, data in these resources are based on the best estimates of the researchers, and may vary slightly, based on the calculation methods and interpretations used by different researchers.
| John Billington (1580-1630) and Elinor (last name unknown) (1580-1642) |
10th great grandparents |
| Francis Billington (1606-1684) and Christian Penn (1607-1684) |
9th great grandparents |
| Mercy Billington (1651-1718) | 8th great grandmother |
| Desire Martin (1684-1727) | 7th great grandmother |
| Esther Carpenter (1718-1794) | 6th great grandmother |
| William M. Bowen (1760-1854) | 5th great grandfather |
| William Bowen Jr (1783-1854) | 4th great grandfather |
| Lydia Ann Bowen (1826-1879) | 3rd great grandmother |
| Amanda Lydia Walker (1857-1933) | 2nd great-grandmother |
| John Quincy Callin (1879-1956) | great-grandfather |
| Robert T (Bob) Callin (1920-2007) | my grandfather |
So, given the fact that there might be some mistakes between the place where the professionals left off and where I ran into my roadblocks (with William Bowen, Jr., the father of Lydia Ann Bowen), you might enjoy exploring what they had to offer.
You can follow the line down from these known Mayflower passengers to my grandfather, Bob Callin, and check out the individual profiles on FamilySearch (linked from each name) in the table to the right, if you want to verify the evidence they have for each link in the chain.
You can also read the research I've done on this blog about Amanda Walker's family in the posts A Few Words About the Walkers and The 20th Century Callin Clan.
Here's what FamilySearch had to say about these Mayflower ancestors:
Francis Billington
Age at Landing: 12
Francis Billington traveled with his father John, mother Elinor, and brother John on Mayflower. He was born around 1606. While aboard Mayflower, Francis provoked trouble when he shot a gun inside a cabin, narrowly missing a barrel of gunpowder.
In 1634, Francis married Christian (Penn) Eaton and had 9 children. He died in 1684 in Middleboro.
Elinor (Billington)
Age at Landing: 38
Elinor married John Billington around 1607 and traveled on Mayflower with him and their two sons, John and Francis.
The Billington family was particularly troublesome for the early colony. Elinor's husband John became the first in the colony to be hanged for murder in 1630. In 1636, Elinor was put in the stocks for slandering John Doane. She remarried in 1638 to a man named Gregory Armstrong.
John Billington
Age at Landing: 40
John Billington traveled on Mayflower with his wife Elinor and sons John and Francis.
John and his family were particularly troublesome for the order-loving Puritans. He was hanged in 1630 for the crime of killing a fellow colony member, John Newcomen, with whom he had a long-running feud. He was the first man executed by hanging in the colony.
- -- --- -- -
I know there is a tendency to view the past as something separate from us and from the world we know. The "Good Old Days" we hear about as children were filtered through generations of both nostalgia and embarrassment - and the world we live in now is often painted as inferior or more chaotic than it used to be.
I think the Billingtons teach us a different lesson. Their bios suggest that they were flawed troublemakers who didn't fit into a society of people who were already considered a fringe group in their homeland. I'm sure if we got their side of the story, they might tell us they were unfairly characterized here.
But I delight in learning about the real people who make up the bulk of our under-explored history. Whenever you trace the mighty oak of history to its tiny, acorn roots, you always seem to find something a little mightier than you expected.
I hope that in spite of the history we are living through, you are finding a way to enjoy holidays unmarred by hangings, exploding gunpowder, or time spent in the stocks!
Love from your cousin,
Tad Callin
No comments:
Post a Comment