Family Life Archives - How Wise Then

Mary Brewster’s Many Pregnancies

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 05 May 2023 08:30:35 +0000

Research leads to fascinating information that can’t all fit into a novel of reasonable length. As I was researching the life of Mary Brewster, I wondered what her experiences with pregnancy and delivery might have been like. Though I didn’t include much of this information in Mary Brewster’s Love Life: Matriarch of the Mayflower, I thought others might be curious about “The Many Pregnancies of Mary Brewster.” In honor of another approaching Mother’s Day and in recognition of the current heated debates about reproductive issues, I decided to share some of the research about what the many pregnancies of Mary Brewster might have been like.

Mary appears to have been typical of 16^th and 17th-century women. Born in Northern England around 1569, she died in modern Massachusetts on April 17, 1627. Around 1592, she married William Brewster in Scrooby, England. She was probably 23 when she married William. Her first son, Jonathan, was born on August 12, 1593. Specific dates of her other children are not known. Even back then, parents were more likely to record the events in their first child’s life than those of their future children.

Marriage in the 1500s

In Mary’s era, England’s legal age for marriage was 14 for men and 12 for women; though typically, men married between 20 and 30 years of age. Women generally married in their mid-20s, so Mary was in step with the customs of her day.

The first baby usually arrived a year or so later, as Jonathan did for William and Mary. Becoming a mother gave a wife status that childless wives lacked. Children born outside marriage created both a social and moral stigma and economic hardship for the mother. There was no social safety net to help her or her child. Should a wife fail to produce offspring, it was assumed the infertility was her fault.

Bearing children was a woman’s primary focus during her childbearing years. However, having children was risky. Pregnancy and delivery have always included potential danger for both mother and child. It would be wonderful if every pregnancy resulted in a healthy newborn and a mother who lived to raise the child, but that has never been the reality. Today, about 15 women die for every 100,000 who give birth. A century ago, the death rate was approximately 600 deaths per 100,000 births. In Mary Brewster’s era, the estimated death rate was double that. As many as one in three women died during their childbearing years due to infections or other birth-related complications.

The Role of Midwives

Midwives played a crucial role in assisting mothers in birthing their babies. The term comes from a time when “mid” meant “with.” They learned their midwife skills from giving birth to their own babies, observing other midwives, and serving as apprentices to veteran midwives. Their teachers were usually their own mothers, grandmothers, and other women relatives.

Men were barred from the birthing room. If possible, the birthing area was closed off with tapestries over the windows to block out as much light as possible, leaving a window open for fresh air. People back then thought that too much light might damage the mother’s eyes. Religion played an important role in childbirth. The mother would likely have asked her priest to pray for a safe delivery and would have had various religious items around the room to give her spiritual comfort. The thinking was to create a womb-like experience for her as she brought her baby from her own womb.

Three of the other women aboard the Mayflower with Mary Brewster were in their third trimesters when the ship sailed. Elizabeth Hopkins, Susanna White, and Mary Allerton all delivered while still living on the ship. Given that Mary had been through labor and delivery herself six times by the time of the voyage, she would have surely served as midwife to the Mayflower mothers when it was their time to deliver their infants. The mortality rate among the three pregnant women was 33%. Mary Allerton delivered a stillborn infant and died shortly after, likely from infection.

The Dilemma of Childbirth

It seems ironic that the act of giving birth is fraught with potentially fatal consequences when the survival of the species depends on birthing each new generation. Human infants are born helpless and remain so for years. Anthropologist Holly Dunsworth and her colleagues have concluded that carrying a fetus for those final few months “is like being an incredibly good athlete.” Dunsworth lists several factors that make childbirth dangerous: exhaustion, risk of infectious diseases, prolonged labor, and obstructed labor in which the baby isn’t correctly positioned for birth.

The most significant danger to an expectant mother is infection. Before medical professionals understood the concept of germs, people suspected that childbirth fever was contagious. Hemorrhaging was also often a contributing factor when a woman died in childbirth or shortly after.

Until sometime in the late 1800s, delivering babies was almost always women’s work. Medical schools offered little instruction in obstetrical care. However, as the medical profession began to expand, doctors began to replace midwives, and institutional birth edged out home births. Randi Hunter Epstein writes in Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, “Before forceps, babies stuck in the birth canal were dragged out by the doctor, often in pieces. Sometimes midwives cracked the skull, killing the newborn but sparing the mother. Sometimes doctors broke the public bone, which often killed the mother but spared the baby.”

Labor and Delivery as a Revenue Stream

Once caring for pregnant women became a lucrative medical practice, doctors replaced midwives, and hospitals replaced homes. Ironically, in the first decades of the 20^th century, the maternal mortality rate was higher for wealthier women than poorer women. This may have been because doctors tended to care for wealthier women in hospitals, while midwives cared for poorer women at home.

As far as my research has revealed so far, Mary Brewster raised to adulthood five of the six children she birthed. Given the length of time between a couple of her pregnancies, she may have had other pregnancies that miscarried or resulted in a stillborn birth. We do not have that information, as that information has not been recorded anywhere I’ve discovered. Pregnancy was a private affair, and women seldom recorded their experiences. Miscarriages and stillborn births were common in her era and not all that uncommon in our own times. Midwives likely tended to Mary at home for each of her babies’ births. When her daughters married and had their babies in the fledgling Plimoth Plantation, they surely delivered with the help of the older women in the colony.

I wonder what their reactions would be to the vitriolic discourse taking place today around issues of pregnancy, labor, and delivery.

Some information for this article came from Encyclopedia.com/history, Slate.com, and TudorSociety.com.

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Mary Brewster’s Love Life and Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures: available wherever books are sold. Bookshop.org/Mayflower; Mary Brewster
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Those Sturdy Surviving Pilgrim Women

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:30:33 +0000

“Those intrepid English women whose courage, fortitude, and devotion brought a new nation into being.” So reads the inscription on the Pilgrim Maiden Statue in Brewster Garden in Plymouth, MA. Those Sturdy Surviving Pilgrim Women are immortalized in the work of Henry Hudson Kitson’s sculpture, dedicated to their endurance, courage, and devotion in 1924.

”The Mayflower set sail for the New World from England in September 1620 with nineteen women among the 102 passengers. The passengers consisted of two groups. The smaller group were Separatists, English subjects who’d been living in Holland as religious refugees since 1608. The others were English residents added to the passenger list by the Merchant Adventurers. This group financed the trip and insisted that the additional passengers be included to increase the chances that the new settlement would survive and make them a good return on their investment.

An Increase in the Passenger List

All nineteen women survived the trans-Atlantic journey, including three women who were pregnant. The first woman to deliver her baby was Elizabeth Hopkins. She and her husband Stephen named their new son Oceanus since he was born somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. They traveled with three other children, two born to Stephen’s late wife, Mary, and one previously born to Elizabeth. Once they established themselves in Plimoth Plantation, they had five more children.

Mary Allerton delivered her stillborn baby while living on the anchored ship off the coast of Provincetown. She died a few days later, leaving behind three young children and her husband, Isaac.

Susanna White also delivered her son while still living on the anchored ship. She and her husband, William, named their baby Peregrine. They also had a five-year-old son, Resolved. William was among the many who died the first winter, leaving her a widow in a strange new place with a newborn and a young child.

Loss and Resolve

Her marriage to Edward Winslow on May 12, 1621, was the first marriage in the Plimoth Colony. Edward’s young wife, Elizabeth, had died in March, another victim of deprivations and the harsh first winter. An extended period of time to grieve was a luxury these desperate people could ill afford. Both the Whites and the Winslows were among the Separatists emigrating from Leiden. The couple had four children: Edward, John, Josiah, and Elizabeth, in addition to an unnamed child who died young.

Katherine Carver, another of the Separatists, was one of five women still alive when winter finally gave way to spring. She and her husband, John, married while living among other Separatists in Leiden. John Carver served as the group’s first governor until his death in April, from what was presumed to be heat stroke. Katherine died a few weeks later, perhaps from a broken heart at the prospect of going on without her husband and without any children needing her attention or offering her comfort.

Four Surviving Pilgrim Women

After Katherine died, only Susanna White, Elizabeth Hopkins, Mary Brewster, and Eleanor Billington still lived. Mary was married to Elder William Brewster, the designated spiritual leader of the emigrated Leiden community. They sailed with their young sons, Love and Wrestling. Their older children, Jonathan, Patience, and Fear, arrived at the settlement on later ships. Mary, being one of the older passengers on the Mayflower, often provided a home for orphaned children and young adults on their own. She was also one of a handful of pilgrims well enough to tend to the sick, nursing future Governor William Bradford back to health.

Eleanor Billington and her husband, John Billington, traveled with their young sons, John and Francis. They were part of the English residents foisted on the Leiden community by the Merchant Adventurers. The family caused much trouble in the colony from time to time. John was executed for murder in 1630. Six years later, Eleanor was sentenced to sit in the stocks. However, during that first winter, she pitched in to care for the many sick among both the Strangers and Separatists.

People of Hope – Angela Burgess

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:30:25 +0000

These days, there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. Pope Francis

Angela Burgess is on a mission to help families escape the poverty trap and find hope for their futures. I met this exuberant carrier of hope through the Houston non-profit RaiseUp Families organization. After being a long-time donor, she became the executive director in 2020. In that role, she combines her Christian values with over twenty years of experience in the field of wealth management, insurance, and nonprofit development.

She is passionate about guiding families out of the poverty maze, which has been the agency’s focus since 1994. RaiseUp Families has successfully stabilized hundreds of families struggling with the tough times that can overwhelm anyone. The COVID-19 pandemic, medical bills, car repairs, and other problems stretch a tight budget to the breaking point. That starts a chain reaction that compounds problems until the family is desperate and destitute, often resulting in evictions. That leads to children changing schools or missing school altogether, which impairs the child’s education and social development as relationships with teachers and peers are disrupted.

Lack of Cash Leads to Frequent Moves

Cash-deficient families often move, sometimes to take advantage of an apartment move-in promotion that gives them a break on utilities; other times, they are evicted for failure to pay the rent. RaiseUp Families works with clients to catch up on overdue rent and utility payments, to avert eviction, so that the children continue attending their current schools. Maintaining a consistent school routine maximizes the child’s chances of thriving, which is a key component in overcoming generational poverty.

Angela’s enthusiasm is contagious and inspiring. “I’m convinced that money comes from unexpected sources when you focus on the work,” she said while discussing the funding required to help client families. The results of the agency’s virtual April 2020 spring fundraiser illustrate her point. By the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading, and the agency decided to cancel its annual in-person spring fund-raising luncheon.

Over the next four days, Angela pulled together a virtual replacement event. “We raised the same amount of money as the previous year, without having to spend money for a venue and food, so really, we came out ahead in the budget game.”

Forced to Rethink the Program

The COVID pandemic also put a crimp in how the agency interacts with clients who could no longer come to the office, where staff helped them increase their income while decreasing their expenses. Angela explained, “Because of privacy policies, schools and apartment complex owners were unable to make referrals. I called the Houston Apartment Association and asked, ‘How can we help each other?’ Soon, we were able to expand our mission to all of the Houston area and began working with clients face-to-face via Zoom.

Their creative workaround for the COVID challenge got picked up by reporter Amy Davis at KHOU, which generated 800 calls for information. All this attracted the attention of an anonymous donor who liked what the agency does. His first check for $75 was followed by another for $3,000 and then by a note inquiring about what RaiseUp Families needed most. “He gravitates towards places that help children and animals. I believe that if you do the right thing, God will provide.”

The anonymous donor then gave another $250,000, enabling the agency to expand its services to around seventy families by the summer of 2021. By 2022, that number grew to eighty-five families. Nearly a hundred percent of those families managed to keep their children in the same school system. Equally significant, families that completed the program experienced an average income increase of sixty-one percent and stay in stable housing after completing the program.

Family and Career Training

Angela grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, and attended college in Pella, IA (home to Pella Windows), with thirty-four churches and four bars. In college, she majored in Spanish and Communications. She spent a semester in Washington, D.C., working as a lobbyist for farm workers and cranberry farmers. There she honed her persuasion skills. She puts past experiences to good use in Houston, where being bilingual is definitely an asset. Her training in financial management and generosity started at home, where banking runs in the family. Her father and grandfather were bankers, and her mother worked in a savings and loan firm.

Eventually, she went to work for Smith Barney (now Morgan Stanley) in Chicago, where she said, “I kept encouraging people to restructure their portfolios to include donations to charity. I wanted to help people connect their money with their mission, to know what’s best for the donor, the family, and the charity. I love talking finance.”

Spreading Hope

She said she learned her first financial management skills from her parents. “I came to realize that my parents were disciplined in exactly one thing: deciding whether something was a need or a want, and not giving in to the temptation of wants. Growing up in a middle-class family, my parents repeated these words to me time and time again: ‘It’s not how much you make, but how much you spend.’

Many of the families we serve were never taught that principle. Combine a lack of basic money management tools with one large unanticipated expense or loss of a job, and suddenly a family drops from barely getting along to extreme hardship.”

After Angela moved to Houston in 2014 with her husband, Gary Burgess, for his position with the Houston Morgan Stanley office, she launched Broad Oaks Consulting. At that time, in 2018, she was a donor for RaiseUp Families and worked with victims of assault and rape, which she found gratifying. She says, “I’m good in a crisis.”

Angela has applied her boundless energy to mentor girls through Big Brothers-Big Sisters, serves as a guardian ad litem with Child Advocates, and maintains a prison ministry through Order Malta, a Catholic lay religious order. She says, “My motto is everyone has time to save a life or change a life.”

Inspired by Faith

Although Catholic now, she was raised in the Presbyterian church by her parents, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother who were all people of strong faith, and they did a wonderful job enriching her life with Jesus’ teachings and love.

“When I left home, I began seeking a church home that provided the same grounding my childhood church had and, after many years of searching, found the Catholic Church. At age twenty-four, I became a Catholic, finally finding a community in which I felt I belonged.”

A significant part of her work with RaiseUp Families consists of nurturing current donors and expanding the organization’s impact on the community. Houston earned the dubious honor of being the city with the most evictions once the onset of the pandemic set in. Apartment managers were eager to partner with people who could help them keep their tenants and still collect the rent.

She knows what it’s like not to have the funds for rent. “I’ve sat at my kitchen table at two o’clock in the morning, calling my credit card company to ask for a cash advance so I could pay my rent that month. I know how tough things can get.”

Expanding Hope and Help

Today, Angela and her staff continue to dispense hope by ending poverty one family at a time. Thanks to support from donors, community partners, and a wonderful, forward-thinking Board of Directors, RaiseUp Families has doubled the size of staff under Angela’s leadership. The agency has restructured its HandUp program to help clients achieve even better outcomes. The agency anticipates that by June 2023, they will have served TWICE the number of families as in 2021 and 2022, with client incomes also increasing.

Angela’s new goal? “I want to see 60% of our families reach the income “happiness index” of $70,000 in household income within three years of entering our HandUp program. To date, about 10% of our clients are achieving or exceeding that mark within 12-18 months, so we have our work cut out for us, but we’re on the right track!”

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Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures is available wherever books are sold in paperback, eBook, and audio.
Bookshop.org (Supporting local Indie Bookshops)
Amazon.com/Mayflower-Chronicles-Tale-Two-Cultures/
BarnesandNoble.com/w/mayflower-chronicles-kathryn-haueisen/
Autographed copies are available from my website or BlueWillowBookShop.com/book/

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Giving Thanks Again

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:30:00 +0000

We soon come to the annual tradition of giving thanks again in the form of Thanksgiving Day. Sadly, the original intent of the holiday has been buried in the Black Friday promo ads and non-stop athletic competitions, with some gorging themselves into poor health while others struggle to find enough to eat at all.

The 2022 Midterms are now behind us. Some of my candidates won by very thin margins. Some lost by equally thin margins. Assuming you voted – you did vote – didn’t you? I sure hope so. Assuming you did, I figure it must be the same for you. This Thanksgiving, some political families are exuberant about keeping or starting their terms in office. Other political families are licking wounds and wondering, what now?

It is always a good time for giving thanks, but especially so now. Though there was neither a blue nor red wave, there was the opportunity to go forth from our homes to express our preferences at the ballot box. We, the people, still have the right – and the responsibility – to state our beliefs, hopes, dreams, fears, preferences, and choices.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of fallow lately. This Thanksgiving, I’m in a fallow place personally. I’m no longer in my former home in Houston. I’m not yet moved into my next home in Columbus. I am in a fallow place. Resting. Settling. Waiting. Remembering so many wonderful moments. Anticipating what the future may hold but having no way of actually knowing. It is a fallow time, and I’m exceedingly grateful for it.

My built-in computer dictionary, which I consider one of the modern miracles right up there with ice makers, microwaves, and e-mail, defines fallow thusly: “plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility as part of a crop rotation. . .long fallow periods when nothing seems to happen.”

If oak trees could speak, they would tell us that they got their strength and start from a tiny acorn buried deep in the earth. For all appearances, it seemed as though nothing was happening or ever would. But then, a tiny root goes down deeper into the earth while a splinter of a shoot reaches up for the sun. Over time, the result is the magnificent, mighty oak tree.

Thanksgiving is a good time to pause from all the frenzy that has come to define the USA political scene. Whether your candidates won or lost, the elections are over, with the exception of a few run-offs. It’s time to pause. It is a time for giving thanks and pondering all for which we can be grateful. It is a time to enjoy the people around us, the beauty of the changing seasons, the completed harvests, and opportunities to maintain and forge friendships.

There is much that needs addressing in this country. We have allowed loud, angry voices to carve us up into subgroups, like the traditional Thanksgiving turkey into white and dark meat. We are more than red or blue, urban or rural, north or south, East Coast or West Coast. Yet there remains much for which to be grateful in this red, white, and blue country. Giving thanks again is good for our mental health, our relationships with one another, and the health of our shared homeland. Giving thanks again is good for what ails us.

Less frenzy. More fallow as we wrap up the balance of this year and prepare for whatever shall come our way in the next.

Wherever, however, you observe Thanksgiving Day, I hope it includes a bit of fallow time for giving thanks again. As for me and my household, I also hope it includes turkey, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin something.

I’m grateful for each of you who take the time to read this. Blessings on your time of giving thanks again.

Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures is about the events leading up to our traditional Thanksgiving. There’s much more to the story than you learned in school. I’d love to speak to your book club or organization about this fascinating history. Contact me at HowWiseThen to make arrangements. Sign up to receive free weekly blogs and/or a monthly newsletter there as well. If you enjoyed this article, share it with a friend.

Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures covers the Pilgrim’s escape from England and their interactions with the Pokanoket people. Available wherever books are sold in paperback, eBook, and audio.
Bookshop.org (Supporting local Indie Bookshops)
Amazon.com/Mayflower-Chronicles-Tale-Two-Cultures/
BarnesandNoble.com/w/mayflower-chronicles-kathryn-haueisen/
Autographed copies are available from my website or BlueWillowBookShop.com/book/

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Mother Mary Brewster

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:30:21 +0000

Historians believe Mother Mary Brewster was probably born in 1569, most likely in Northern England. We do not know her last name prior to becoming Mrs. William Brewster. Genealogists are fairly certain she married William in 1591 in a small country church in Scrooby. She became Mother Mary Brewster with the birth of Jonathan, born on August 12, 1593. Confirming the value placed on the firstborn male child, his birthdate is the only Brewster child whose birthdate is so clearly documented.

Eventually, Mary had at least five more children. One was either stillborn or died in early childhood. Her next two babies were daughters, born when the family still lived in England. Her two younger sons were born when the family lived in exile in Leiden. They lived there from 1609 until William, Mary, and the two younger sons joined the others on the perilous Mayflower voyage as English colonists.

My Launch into Motherhood

Daughters Carol & Karen

On October 7 – a few decades ago – I joined the ranks of motherhood when daughter Carol joined the family. A couple of years later, Karen joined us. Today both daughters are grown, each with their own three children. Though I grew up knowing we are related to William Brewster, I knew very little about Mary until I started digging into the story behind the story of the Mayflower to write Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures. As the mother of two daughters, I was stunned at what I discovered about our ancestor.

My mother was a reference librarian. She spent many hours in her early retirement years documenting our family’s connection to William and Mary Brewster. The Brewster surname in our branch of the family ends in Duncan Falls, Ohio. Several generations of Brewsters lived and died in this community a few miles southeast of Columbus. The last one to bear the Brewster last name was my great-grandmother, Emma J. Brewster, who married a Ross. Their son, George Ross, is my mother’s father and our link to the Mayflower story.

Tracing Family History

In March 2017, my brother and I, accompanied by one of my granddaughters, made a pilgrimage to England to fill out the Brewster story a bit more. The pilgrimage took us to Scrooby, England, where the Brewster family played a role in the oversight of Scrooby Manor, an important communication link between London, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland.

I already knew that William and Mary Brewster, and the other Mayflower passengers, owed their lives to the Native Americans who first greeted the new settlers. In my research, I learned it went well for about fifty years, thanks primarily to the treaty between the two cultures initiated by Massasoit Ousa Mequin.

Sacrificial Love

What I did not know prior to doing the research was that Mother Mary Brewster left both her daughters behind with friends in Leiden when the Mayflower sailed. My heart ached when I learned that. I cannot imagine leaving Carol and Karen behind, not knowing if I’d ever see them again. We currently live in Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio and only see one another occasionally. However, between e-mails, texts, phone calls, and zoom capabilities, we easily stay current on one another’s daily lives.

It was not so for Mother Mary Brewster. She did not know if she would ever see her daughters again. Letters were the only means of communication, and the delivery time for a letter back then was measured in months, if not years. Her daughters, Patience and Fear, did eventually come to Plimoth Plantation, so that chapter of Mary’s life had a happy ending.

From Generation to Generation

This new-to-me family history is what prompted me to write a follow-up story to Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures. This one, Mary Brewster’s Love Life: Matriarch of the Mayflower, is also historical fiction. Since history recorded so little about Mary Brewster, I’ve had to imagine how I might have reacted if faced with the choices and circumstances she encountered. The book has a tentative publication date of March 2023.

As I reflect on what I was doing that October 7 when our family welcomed Carol into the world, I am thankful for the efforts my mother made to document these connections. Historians, librarians, and genealogists use their skills to enrich our lives by helping us find our roots. Happy Birthday, Carol. Thanks, Mom, for all those hours you spent in libraries and for being the keeper of our family’s history.

Thanks for taking the time to learn a little bit about Mary Brewster. If you aren’t already receiving my monthly HowWiseThen newsletter, sign up, so you’ll be informed about the progress of Mary’s fictional biography, which is due out next spring. Register at HowWiseThen.

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William and Dorothy Bradford – Mayflower Voyagers

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 15:30:00 +0000

In 1620 William and Dorothy Bradford sailed on Mayflower from England to New England. A great deal of what we know about the establishment of the Plymouth colony comes from Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. Four hundred years later this book is still a good source of information about the Pilgrim story, though it is obviously written from the English perspective. Today historians go to great lengths to tell the same story from the Native perspective. History has preserved a a large volume of data about this Separatist couple. Bradford’s wife Dorothy had a father and grandfather involved in the non-conformist religious movement in England in the late 1500 and early 1600s. Bradford’s life has all the makings of a feel-good movie about a young boy with a difficult childhood growing up to be a successful leader. Dorothy’s family history, combined with the her tragic death, has resulted in us knowing more about her than most of the other Mayflower women.

New research by genealogists Sue Allan and Caleb Johnson indicate that Dorothy moved to Amsterdam around 1608 from Eastern England, near Boston, with her mother Katherine and father Henry May. Henry served as a leading church elder in the Henry Ainsworth Amsterdam congregation of the Ancient Church of the Brethren. William Bradford moved there from Northern England that same year with other Separatists from Northern England.

Seeds of Religious Rebellion

The couple probably met in 1608, during the one year the Northern England Separatists lived in Amsterdam. That group first emigrated to Amsterdam where other English Separatists had already established English-speaking congregations. When conflicts broke out between and among these congregtions, the Northern English group established their own congregation in nearby Leiden, with John Robinson as their pastor.

Dorothy’s grandfather, John May had been part of the English Familia Caritatis (The Family of Love) movement. This Protestant group opposed several Established Church of England policies and practices. Members spread their beliefs primarily through family members, encouraging marriages within the faith community. They rejected infant baptisms; an unconventional view considered heretical by some church authorities.

Religious Refugees on the Move

Rising pressure against their unconventional beliefs prompted several English groups to relocate to the more religiously liberal Lowlands. Henry May and his family, including Dorothy, were among those who resettled in Amsterdam. When the conflicts erupted the church leaders prevailed upon Pastor John Robinson, down the road in Leiden, to help calm the turmoil.

Pastor Robinson probably visited the Amsterdam congregation on occasion, perhaps taking William Bradford and others from his Leiden congregation with him. There is some speculation Pastor Robinson may have encouraged the union between Henry May’s daughter, Dorothy, and William, in keeping with the groups preference that membes marry within the community.

Dorothy May was sixteen on December 10, 1613 when she married William Bradford in Amsterdam. Her age and the laws at that time dictated she must have her father’s permission to marry. Henry May gave permission and attended the civil ceremony since the Separatists did not consider weddings a function of the church.

William Bradford, twenty-three when they married, had been orphaned in childhood. In the seventeenth century, men not yet twenty-five years old usually didn’t marry without parental consent. Considering how active Bradford was in the Leiden Separatist congregation, perhaps someone from the congregation stood in as a surrogate father. The Bradford engagement and banns were recorded in both Amsterdam and Leiden.

Rough Start for William Bradford

When William was orphaned his uncles took him. They did the basics for him, but little more. From a very young age William was interested theology and scripture. He was often confined to bed due to some childhood illnesses. When he was well enough, walked seven or eight miles to a church where future Separatist pastor Richard Clifton mentored the boy. That is where he met Elder William Brewster. Bradford was a frequent guest in the Brewster home, and lived with the family a couple of times in both Leiden and Plymouth.

The Bradfords had one child they named John, born in Leiden, probably in 1617. The Bradford’s left the boy behind when they sailed for North America – presumably with the intention of sending for him when Plymouth Colony was established and more suitable for a young child. Dorothy’s parents remained in Leiden and probably assumed care for little John. The child may have been named for Pastor John Robinson, or more likely, his grandfather, John May. John did eventually join his father in Plymouth.

The Grand Plan to Relocate

The Bradfords were among those in Robinson’s congregation who volunteered to go with the first group to establish a new religious colony. The congregation decided to initially send a small group of thirty-seven settlers to establish a new religious community in the New (to them) World. Some of these settlers left family behind with rest of the community, intending to reunite once the settlement was firmly established. This plan enabled the settlers to return to Leiden if efforts to establish a colony failed.

The voyage was both tedious and treacherous. After ten weeks at sea, the Mayflower anchored off Provincetown Harbor on November 11, 1620. Using the shallop they’d brought with them, several men, including Bradford, set out to locate the best place to build their new colony. William was away on one of these expeditions when Dorothy died. She fell overboard and drowned in the frigid water. Bradford rarely referenced her death in his accounts of the colony.

An 1869 fictional magazine story suggested the twenty-three-year-old woman jumped overboard to avoid the bleak future ahead of her. More likely she leaned too far out, perhaps searching the horizon for signs that the men were returning, and slipped overboard. Women in that era wore multiple layers of clothing. Once her clothes got wet it would have been nearly impossible for her to fight long enough to be discovered and rescued from the frigid November sea. It is unlikely Dorothy knew how to swim. It seems most probable she lost her balance, fell overboard, and drowned before anyone missed her.

A Life of Challenges and Leadership

William Bradford struggled against a series of tragedies. The relatives that raised him when his parents died took no interest in his thirst for religious education and spiritual nourishment. Even as a young boy Bradford engaged in intensive Bible study, perhaps because illness prevented him participating in more rigorous pastimes.

Like many of the Mayflower passengers, William became quite ill the first winter in the new colony, but survived. Governor John Carver did not. When Carver died the first spring in the new land, Bradford assumed duties of Governor. The Colony elected him to serve in that position a total of thirty-one years. He married the widow Alice (Carpenter) Southworth on August 14, 1623. Their marriage included a feast attended by the Pokanoket leader Massasoit Ousa Mequin and many other Natives. William and Alice had three sons who all lived to adulthood, married, and had children.

A portion of this articles comes from the Mayflower400 Website.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy reading about Plymouth Plantation William Bradford. Share it with a friend, or if you got it from a friend, sign up receive your own blogs at HowWiseThen.

Read more about the Bradfords in my historical novel, Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale or Two Cultures. It is now available in electronic, print, and audio format at these places:

Bookshop.org
Amazon.com/Mayflower Chronicles

Barnes & Noble
Blue Willow Bookshop

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Stephen and Elizabeth Hopkins – Mayflower Survivors

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:30:00 +0000

I’m hiding out in the 17th Century until news in the 21st Century improves. The Stephen Hopkins Family make a marvelous distraction. They traveled to Plymouth, MA on the Mayflower in 1620. Stephen and Elizabeth are one of the more famous and fascinating couples among the eighteen couples aboard. On this trip to North American Stephen traveled with his second wife, Elizabeth Fisher Hopkins, and three children. Elizabeth was pregnant with a fourth child when they began the crossing.

Stephen’s first cross-Atlantic voyage resulted in his being shipwrecked for ten months in Bermuda. Eventually he made it to Jamestown, after helping construct a new ship from the remnants of the original one. He stayed in England several years during which time his first wife Mary died. When he eventually received work of her death months later, he returned to England to assume responsibility for his motherless children.

Stephen was from Hampshire, England. He and Mary lived in Hampshire, where their three children were born and baptized. Two of their children, Constance, and Giles, accompanied Stephen and second wife Elizabeth on the Mayflower. Stephen and Mary had another daughter, also an Elizabeth, who did not travel with her father. She may have died by 1620. Stephen and Elizabeth had a daughter, Damaris, born in 1618, who also traveled with them.

Who was Elizabeth Hopkins?

As is typical for women’s history, we know little about Elizabeth other than she married Stephen and traveled with him on his second voyage. She is perhaps best known for delivering her baby as they sailed across the ocean. Babies are born when they’re ready to be born, unless medical intervention alters the birth date. There was no medical intervention available for Elizabeth. She went into labor on the ship, in deplorable living conditions, with no privacy and few of the comforts typically offered birthing mothers. Miraculously, the child was born healthy and Elizabeth lived to raise him. They named the child Oceanus. Apparently the child did not live long, though he did survive childbirth. The death rate through the first winter was nearly 50%.

Elizabeth’s maiden name was Fisher, but information about her family is inconclusive. She and Stephen married on 19 February 1617/18. Dates for historical events in this time period fluctuate, depending on whether one uses the Julian calendar, in use until 1752, or the Gregorian calendar, the one used today. Elizabeth was one of only four adult women still alive by the famous Thanksgiving feast in the fall of 1621..

Stephen Hopkins’ Shipwreck Story

While married to his first wife, Stephen went to work as a clerk for Pastor Richard Buck and traveled with him on the Sea Venture toward Jamestown in 1609. Hopkins signed on for a three-year-term as an indentured servant to the Virginia Company, leaving Mary and three young children behind.

The Sea Venture traveled with a fleet of ships, but got separated from them in a violent storm. The ship blew off course and shipwrecked in the “Isle of Devils” in Bermuda. The stranded men survived for ten months, living on wildlife. Stephen was part of an organized mutiny against the governor and sentenced to death for his part in it. However, he begged for mercy on behalf of his wife and children back in England and his life was spared. He and the others built two small ships, the Deliverance and Patience. Stephen sailed to Jamestown on the Deliverance.

The Jamestown colonists’ situation was desperate. No one had planted a garden, their food supply was nearly gone, and they had so alienated the Indigenous people that they were afraid to leave the fort to hunt for food. Hopkins stayed at Jamestown until September 1614. When he got the news that Mary had died in May 1613, he returned to England to assume care of his minor children and then married Elizabeth.

On the Sea Again

Stephen must have possessed a large portion of persuasion for he convinced Elizabeth to join him and the others on the Mayflower voyage. Or, more likely, Elizabeth decided taking her chances on the crossing was a better option than staying back to raise her children, and his motherless children by herself. She most certainly would have have known Mary died while Stephen was away and feared facing the same fate. The ship was supposed to sail in July, giving them plenty of time to arrive in the New World and perhaps even build their own shelter before the baby was born.

The Mayflower did not sail in July. Or August. It left England, after two delayed departures, on September 6. Though we know little about Elizabeth, I think it safe to conclude she must have been a resilient and hearty woman. She survived a storm that nearly capsized the ship, gave birth while sailing, and lived through the first winter, when most of the other women did not. Stephen and Elizabeth had five more children in Plymouth: Caleb, Deborah, Damaris, Ruth, and Elizabeth. Stephen had two daughters named Elizabeth, one mothered by Mary, and one with his second wife, Elizabeth. Stephen and Elizabeth named their first daughter Damaris. She died in childhood and they gave another daughter the same name.

Life in Plymouth

Stephen played an active role among the Separatists when they first arrived in Cape Cod, though he was not part of the Separatist fellowship. He went on the early explorations in search of the best place to establish their colony. He’d encountered Indigenous people before and thus presented himself as the resident expert on them. He and Elizabeth hosted Samoset for a night when the Native visited the new Plantation in the spring of 1621.

When the Pokanoket leader, Massasoit Ousa Mequin, called on the English to work out a treaty, Hopkins offered up their home as a meeting place for the negotiations. Later he and other Englishmen visited the Pokanoket people and he served as an assistant to the governor through 1636.

Stephen was brave, but also trouble-prone. In 1636 he got into a fight with John Tisdale and seriously wounded him. The next year he was fined for allowing people to drink and play shuffleboard on the Sabbath in his house. In each of the next two years he was again fined; once for selling beer at an inflated price and a second time for charging double what a looking glass should have cost.

It makes sense that a man who survived a shipwreck, helped build a new ship, and convinced his pregnant wife to sail far from home, with three children, would be capable of taking risks that sometimes ended in trouble. His troubles ended in 1644 when he died and was interred next to his Elizabeth in Cove Burying Ground in Eastham, MA. Her death in Plymouth is calculated to have been between 1638 and 1644.

The photo of the Deliverance is the property of Caleb Johnson and used with his permission. More details about Stephen Hopkins is available at Mayflower History and in Johnson’s book about the man, Here Shall I Die Ashore. You may also enjoy reading Pilgrim and Native Peace Talks.

Thank you for taking time to read about this remarkable Mayflower couple. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend. If you got this from a friend, you can sign up for your own free subscription at HowWiseThen.

Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures covers the Pilgrim’s escape from England and much more of the interaction between them and the Pokanoket people. Available wherever books are sold in paperback, eBook, and audio.
Bookshop.org (Supporting local Indie Bookshops)
Amazon.com/Mayflower-Chronicles-Tale-Two-Cultures/
BarnesandNoble.com/w/mayflower-chronicles-kathryn-haueisen/
Autographed copies available from BlueWillowBookShop.com/book/

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Making the Right Move

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:30:35 +0000

Summer is prime time for moving. Making the right move for yourself, for your family, or for your career, is sometimes learned in retrospect when we make the wrong move first. Moving is stressful. It ranks right up there with death, divorce, and catastrophic illness as one of the major life stressors. When my family moved to Houston in August 1982, it was our fourth move in five years. I enrolled our daughters in their fifth school system since starting kindergarten.

I ended up needing medical attention for the symptoms that erupted from the stress of all that. And, I wrote my first book as a result of that move. As one friend put it, “Someone might as well gain from all that pain.” With five additional books into the weird and wild world of modern publishing, I learned why authors are advised not to sell their first book. While I remain proud of the effort, Married & Mobile: Making a Move That’s Right for You had some room for improvement.

Make the Right Move for You

Writing the book was the right move for me at the time. I learned a lot, including how to work with editors and book promoters. And, once I put forth in writing all the myriad of competing emotions instigated by all those moves, I felt much better about myself and the world around me.

I didn’t write another book for 22 years. It took a hurricane the size of Katrina to motivate me to try book publishing again. By then I’d moved back to Ohio and then back to Texas, adding several additional new addresses along the way.

I’ve learned a bit about moving and how to mitigate the stress of it. I’ve never heard of a move that didn’t include stress. But there are things we can do to mitigate it. Married & Mobile: Making a Move That’s Right for You is out of print and somewhat out of date given the dramatic changes in the way people work these days. However, I think there’s some good wisdom contained in it. For example:

Moving is a Pain

It is normal and natural to experience at least some pain as we relocate from what is familiar to what is new and largely unknown. Modern technology makes it much easier than ever to connect with friends and family who don’t live where we do. That helps. But it’s not the same as hanging out together. There are things we can do to manage the pain, such as being gentle with ourselves when we do experience pain. Emotional pain is nature’s way of honoring the significance of the people and places left behind. Leaving them wouldn’t hurt if it didn’t matter to us.

Counting the Cost

Even if you have only a dorm room size stack of things to move, and you go with the pizza and beer bribes for friends route for moving the stack, it is still expensive. Things like utility and rental property deposits, gas, and rental fees for a truck add up. If you’re selling and buying you have all sorts of interesting and creative fees to cover, on top of the down payments for a new house. It is going to cost money and it might take months, even years to truly recoup the investment.

Then there are all those unanticipated costs. The furniture that worked perfectly in the last place doesn’t fit in the new place. No matter how carefully you inspect a place before you move into it, you’re going to discover something that is missing or needs to be repaired or replaced. Count on it.

Resistance is Natural

If your other family members – that may well include a dog or cat – are well settled where you are, be prepared for their resistance to the idea of relocating. No matter how rosy a picture you paint of the new place and new opportunities, rebellion is likely to occur. A house-trained dog may forget everything about proper behavior. Younger children may revert to behavior they outgrew several years ago. Older children may resort to fighting, sulking, arguing, and storming away from efforts to communicate.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move. Moving gives us a new perspective on life. Moving gives us new people to become friends, new experiences to try, and new opportunities to investigate. But at first, it can feel very strange to let a stranger cut our hair, or talk to a new doctor about an issue the other doctor knew well.

Make Your Own Welcome Mat

In all my moves, more than I care to disclose, I can count on one hand the number of times neighbors came over to introduce themselves. If you want to know your neighbors, plan on introducing yourself to them. If you don’t get a warm welcome, it probably has nothing to do with you. Enlarge your definition of neighbor and keep reaching out.

Also, find some way to engage in the community beyond whatever job or situation instigated the move. Find people who enjoy what you enjoy and get to know them. We all need community. It is up to the newcomer to meet the community.

Keep Moving

No, not by packing and relocating again. Rather, after you’ve unpacked the essentials for daily living, go forth into the new location and explore. Try new places to eat. Find out what the locals do for entertainment. Visit area parks, museums, and special events.

Whatever brought you to the area, it is now home. Make yourself at home. If a move is part of your plans for the next few months, good luck. If you want more tips on how to conquer the pile of brown boxes and get yourself established as quickly as possible, I have all the remaining copies of Married & Mobile. I’ll gladly relocate a copy from my home to yours for $6 to cover the cost of shipping and mailing. For your copy, e-mail me at my HowWiseThen website below. I’d be happy to move them along, you know, just in case I decide to move again someday.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts about moving. If you found this helpful, past it along to a friend. If you got it from a friend, you can get your own articles at https://HowWiseThen.com.

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Life Lessons from Annette Petrick

Kathryn Haueisen — Fri, 06 May 2022 08:30:06 +0000

Annette Petrick hosts a delightful “Consider This” podcast that I get each Sunday morning. I was so moved by one she posted a couple of weeks ago that I asked her if I could use it for my HowWiseThen Mother’s Day blog. She graciously agreed to that, so here is a tribute to the wisdom passed down from mothers to children through the generations. Happy Mother’s Day to women everywhere who nurture children from cradle to well into adult life. Thank you, Annette, for your insights.

Backstory

In recognition of her fortieth birthday, my daughter wrote a list of the things she has done – significant and ordinary. They tracked a life well lived that produced a mature woman of strength and well-defined values. It got me thinking. So much learned and so much left to comprehend.

Life

I was thinking the other day about the things I’ve learned in life so far.

On a positive note, I’ve learned that, no matter what happens, how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles four different things – a rainy day…the elderly…lost luggage, or tangled Christmas tree lights.
I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as making a ‘life.’
That children grow up much too fast, right before your eyes.
That it’s a lot better to do it right away than to put it off.
I discovered that life sometimes gives you a second chance, and sometimes a third and a fourth.
I believe you should not go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back sometimes.
I’ve learned that if you pursue happiness, it can elude you. But if you focus on family, friends, and the needs of others, happiness will come looking for you.
I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.

P.S. Learning is essential to our existence. Today’s inclusive culture requires discovering new ways of relating to people, both those who have been staples in our lives and the new acquaintances evolving. What an exciting time to learn anew and expand our individual worlds.

Thanks for stopping by. In addition to Mother’s Day, this is graduation season. What life lessons have you learned that you’d like to pass along to today’s graduates? How much of your mother’s wisdom has helped you in life? Share the best Mom advice you got that you think others should know. If you got this form a friend, you can sign up for your own free subscription to my weekly articles and/or monthly newsletter at HowWiseThen.I focus on good people doing great things in our global village.

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Sidney Poitier & Black History Month

Kathryn Haueisen (Kathy) — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:30:58 +0000

Sidney Poitier always comes to mind when I think about Black History month. Thinking about him reminds me an incident I experienced a year or so after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita decimated the Gulf Coast Region. I and two other disaster response workers, both Black men, were walking along the famous Bourbon Street area of NOLA. We were in town to assess needs and address the unrelenting challenges wrought by the hurricanes. One companion was a retired Army Chaplain hired to oversee recovery efforts from Houston through Louisiana to Mississippi. I worked with him in the Houston area. The other man focused in the Mississippi area.

They were escorting me back to our hotel after our dinner out together. It occurred to me at the time how truly remarkable that was. Two Black men having dinner and walking down the streets of NOLA with a White woman, brought together by storms that uprooted thousands of people in the region.

Speaking of Dinner

When I got to my room, I turned on the TV where I found a channel showing the 1967 classic movie, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” one of my favorite movies. My husband and I watched it again a few weeks ago as a way to pay tribute to Sidney Poitier who died January 6. As I watched the movie that night, I thought about how, decades after Poitier portrayed a Black man wanting to marry a White woman, I could walk with two Black men without raising so much as an eyebrow.

We still have much work to do in achieving full racial equality; but we’ve also made progress. Indeed, I believe it is precisely because we’ve made so much progress, that we now have people showing up at school board meetings demanding that we not teach about racial inequality and campaigning to ban books that make White parents uncomfortable. I doubt that the children they’re trying to protect from reality are uncomfortable with the books in question. In spite of the current ruckus, we have made some progress. We have overcome previous taboos; taboos that made it illegal for a Black to marry a White in the 1960s when “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was released.

Be Careful What You Teach Your Children

If you’ve not seen this movie, I strongly recommend you watch it. The basic plot is that husband and wife Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn have raised their daughter, played by Katharine Houghton, to be open minded and as prejudice-free as possible. They succeeded. Their White daughter falls in love with an extraordinary young Black doctor portrayed by Sidney Poitier. The young woman is absolutely color-blind and cannot understand why her father objects to her decision to marry him. Spencer’s after dinner speech is one of the most powerful and eloquent speeches I’ve heard in the hundreds of movies I’ve watched over the years.

Sidney Poitier is one of my heroes, in part because of his sublime acting skills; but more because of his quiet, gentle, and effective way of addressing the injustices and tensions between the Black and White cultures. He impresses me as someone who was comfortable in his own skin, especially when around others were uncomfortable with it.

As we honor Black History month again this February, Sidney Poitier strikes me as an excellent famous Black man to honor. He was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, and diplomat. When he won an Academy Award for best actor in 1963 for his role in “Lilies of the Field,” he was the first Black actor, as well as the first Bahamian, to do so.

A Life Well Lived

Poitier grew up in The Bahamas and moved to the United States as a teenager. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, serving in a medical unit. When he left the Army, he applied to the American Negro Theatre (ANT), but was turned down because of his Bahamian accent. After practicing a more common American enunciation for several months, he reapplied and was accepted. His first Broadway performance was in “Lysistrata.”

He got his start in movies in the 1950 film “No Way Out,” where he played Dr. Luther Brooks who treats a bigoted White criminal. Poitier was a trailblazer for other Black actors by refusing to play roles that portrayed him in common racial stereotypes. He maintained dual citizenship in the United States and The Bahamas, serving as an ambassador from The Bahamas to Japan from 1997 to 2007. In 2009 then President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I can’t claim to have seen every movie in which he’s had a role; but I have cherished all the ones I have seen. February 2022 seems like a great time to binge on Sidney Poitier movies.

Thank you for being part of this community. Why not share this with a friend or sign up for your own free subscription at HowWiseThen.

Bookshop.org (Supporting local Indie Bookshops)
Amazon.com/Mayflower-Chronicles-Tale-Two-Cultures/
BarnesandNoble.com/w/mayflower-chronicles-kathryn-haueisen/
Autographed copies available from BlueWillowBookShop.com/book/
Available wherever books are sold in paperback, eB00k, and audio.

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