Today Leiden in the Netherlands is a delightful city of about 125,000. The center city is much as it was hundreds of years ago, but easily reached today by modern bus service. In 1609 the Scrooby Separatists religious refugees relocated there from Amsterdam. At that time Leiden was a significant industrial community of around 15,000 and growing. By 1650 the town had grown to a city 55,000. Though I grew up knowing our family tree […]
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Amsterdam Refugees
When the Scrooby Pilgrims’ 1607 first attempt to immigrate to the Lowlands failed, they returned to Scrooby and organized for another attempt. Their 1608 efforts resulted in successfully becoming the Amsterdam refugees. It was a mixed blessing. No longer must they worry about searchers and enforces rounding them up and handing them over to authorities. Instead they had to worry about where they would live and how they could support themselves in a bustling city, […]
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Meet A Few Pilgrim Authors
I’ve been offering blog readers tours of places that played a role in the Mayflower story. You can visit Scrooby, York, and Boston in England at your leisure. Before we emigrate with the Pilgrims to Holland, I want you to meet a few Pilgrim Authors – that is authors who have researched and written about the Mayflower story. These people have devoted years to researching and writing about the fascinating stories behind the Mayflower story. […]
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Scrooby, England and the Mayflower Pilgrims
As far as I’m concerned, the Mayflower story begins in Scrooby, England in the very late 1500s and early 1600s. Come with me to explore this little community far off today’s beaten path. According to a Legacies of History article about Scrooby, the village’s population then was between 150 and 200 people. Today it still a small village, with a population of less than 500, located on the River Ryton, near the confluence with the […]
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The Great Dying and Coronavirus
We wait and wonder, “How long until the WHO and CDC declare this novel coronavirus pandemic under control?” How soon can we resume our normal routines? Will we fill our church sanctuaries Easter Sunday 2020? Responsible clergy will not; but rather are at work this Holy Week planning alternative ways to bring folks together virtually. As several of my pastor colleagues have point out, there was no crowd there at the first Easter. The Great […]
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