Searching for Home

I’m currently in Ohio, staying with my brother while searching for my next home. I’ve had a great time exploring the area and contemplating various options. As I told the realtor who is suggesting possibilities, I either want to rent or buy something, either old or new, in or not in a planned senior retirement community. I know. Searching for a home takes a lot of imagination and investigating. As I do this, I’m also […]

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Thanksgiving History

As we approach Thanksgiving 2022, it is time to again set the Thanksgiving History record straight. The Pilgrims were not the first Americans to have a period of thanks for an abundant harvest, nor did they invite the Natives to join them. Many Indigenous North American communities had their own traditions of giving thanks for a fall harvest centuries before the Mayflower sailed into  Cape Cod Bay. The Natives who gathered with the English settlers in […]

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Leiden

Leiden in The Netherlands is a delightful city of about 125,000. If you overlook the bicycles, cars, and modern buses, the center city is much as it might have been in the 1600s when the future Pilgrims settled there in 1609. After a year in Amsterdam, Separatists religious refugees from northern England relocated to Leiden to get away from church conflicts among other English religious refugee groups. At that time, Leiden was a significant industrial […]

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Leaving England

The people we’ve come to know as Pilgrims always considered themselves English subjects. They did not want to leave their heritage and country, but as the tumultuous events of the late 16th and early 17th centuries unfolded, leaving became increasingly necessary to protect their lives. The Mayflower story begins in the tiny village of Scrooby, in northern England. It was a small community then and remains a little village today. According to a Legacies of […]

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Mother Mary Brewster

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 […]

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