I knew little about this remarkable woman until I started researching the Brewsters and their role in the Mayflower story for Mayflower Chronicles: The Tale of Two Cultures. She has been largely ignored by those who have researched in great detail the life of her more famous husband, Elder William Brewster. Toward the end of the second decade of the 17th century, he and other exiled English Separatists living in the more tolerant Netherlands, made the daring […]
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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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