This blog is courtesy of a special guest blogger – my Grandmother Corna Mae Trout Ross. She died many years ago. However, when she was in her 80s, she filled 43 pages in a spiral notebook about what her childhood and young adult life were like in Southern Ohio at the turn of the twentieth century. Today’s blog contains excerpts her journal that I recently re-discovered while sorting through boxes of old family photos and […]
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Mayflower Chronicles – The Tale of Two Cultures
This month I signed a contract with Green Writers Press in Vermont to publish a book that has taken seven years, three trips to Europe, and multiple trips to New England to write. Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures is a historical fiction account of the very real men, women, children, crew, and two dogs that sailed from Plymouth, England to what became Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. It is also the story of the Natives […]
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Mayflower Adventurer Stephen Hopkins
Only about a third of the Mayflower passengers were part of the religious refugees who fled England to live in the more tolerant Holland before sailing on the famous ship. Stephen Hopkins and his second wife, Elizabeth were among those who sailed for other reasons. His biography is amazing. He was born in 1581 in Upper Clatford, Hampshire, England. By 1604 he was living in Hursley, Hampshire and married to Mary. Their first child was daughter […]
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A Sanctuary City
People seeking out a sanctuary city is not a new phenomenon. What I am about to describe may sound like what’s currently unfolding for undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and migrants today in the USA, but this blog is about the plight of a small group of English people in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The Separatists’ political and religious beliefs clashed with the dominate culture of their era. The clash escalated until government officials started […]
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Myles Standish – Mayflower Military Leader
Myles Standish met the English religious refugees when they emigrated to the Netherlands. Their Pastor John Robinson befriended the young soldier when the group settled in Leiden, Holland. Standish enlisted in Queen Elizabeth’s army as a young boy and was stationed in Leiden when these Northern England Separatists settled there in 1609. In 1623 Pastor Robinson sent Plymouth Plantation Governor William Bradford a letter referring to Standish as, “whom I love.” Thirty years later Standish […]
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