Welcome to an end-of-summer rerun of the “Labor Day 1620” article I ran a few years ago. As you read this, I’m in New England preparing to finally meet up with a group of Brewster descendants for my first attendance at their triennial Elder William Brewster family reunion. I hope to come home with many new Brewster relatives in my contacts list and more stories to share with you about the history beyond this fascinating […]
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What Did Mary Brewster Wear?
What did Mary Brewster and her family wear? To celebrate the release of Mary Brewster’s Love Life, I thought you might enjoy learning a bit about how people of her class and time period dressed. The Brewster family clothes most likely resembled those of other common folks; they had to be sturdy and practical. The most common material for clothing was wool, which people spun into yarn. First, they sorted the wool, then carded, or […]
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Mary Brewster’s Love Life
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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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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