Resources for Tracing Plymouth Colony Ancestors
Millions Descend from New England's Earliest Pilgrims
Nov 16, 2008
Consider this: If someone has more than 15 immigrant ancestors to New England before 1660, chances are one in ten that this person descends from one or more Mayflower passengers because their ancestors married descendants of these pilgrims.
It is estimated that there are four million descendants of John and Priscilla (Mullins) Alden alone. Multiply that times the number of Mayflower pilgrims--leaving space for duplication of ancestors--and the number of living descendants keeps on multiplying.
The children and grandchildren of the Mayflower passengers married into the families of the new immigrants who followed them across the Atlantic. Dozens of new surnames were then added to this ancestral collection. Even considering the shrinkage caused by multiple descent from the same ancestors, this means there are millions of people descended from the first century of Plymouth Colony residents.
The Mayflower Society
The premier source for information on this collection of Plymouth Colony residents is the Mayflower Society. Because this organization has documented, chronicled and published the first five generations of descendants of the Mayflower passengers, there is no reason to comb New England records looking for them.
A carefully researched database that once was primarily accessible only to Mayflower Society members, and those submitting lineages to apply for membership, is now readily available to everyone. This database is in the form of the "Five Generations Project" books issued by the society over a period of years. There are more than two dozen of these books. The list of them, plus numerous other books of a similar nature, can be found on the Society's website.
Using the Five Generation Books
The chief purpose of the book list is to learn what is available. It serves as a guide to locating these books in a library that has a good genealogy collection, or to purchasing them online at used book rates.
Where to start? One jumping off platform is the website of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Washington. They have compiled an alphabetical list of surnames for each book of the Five Generations Project. The list is searchable online.
Libraries also have a collection of the Society's lineage books, but they are not as up-to-date as the books resulting from the "Five Generations Project".
PILGRIM HALL MUSEUM
The Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, MA, is the oldest museum in the United States. It is the place to go to find story material about Plymouth Colony Ancestors--the source for information that will make them more than just names and dates. This is where William Bradford's Bible, Peter Brown's beer tankard, Peregrine White's cradle, Constance Hopkins' beaver hat, Edward Winslow's portrait and Loara Standish's sampler are to be seen. This is also where one gets a sense of how it felt to live in the New England of the 1600s.
OTHER SOURCES ON PLYMOUTH COLONY RESIDENTS
There are, for most of the surviving Mayflower passengers, societies for descendants of that particular pilgrim. These societies have often more intensely researched that particular person than has the general society. A list of these societies, plus numerous other resources relating to all early Plymouth Colony residents, can be found online at Cyndi's List.
Cyndi’s List also provides dozens of other sources for material on Plymouth Colony, as well as mailing lists and other online sources of information.
(Companion articles focus upon Mayflower pilgrims Edward Billington, John Carver and Mary (Chilton) Winslow.
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