Are you one of the 10 million Americans, or the 35 million people worldwide who descend from Mayflower Passengers? This year, 2020 is the 400th Anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower so it is a good year to find out.
The Pilgrims sailed to America under a Charter from King James, and under that Charter they were to join the people who had already settled in Jamestown. However, they were blown off course and landed of the coast of what is now Massachusetts. They decided that since they didn’t have a Charter to settle where they landed, they would write their own rules for how they would govern their colony
The Mayflower Compact was important because it was the first document to establish self-government in the New World. It remained active until 1691 when Plymouth Colony became part of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
That said, these Pilgrims were important to the ultimate founding of America. There are a couple of ways you can find out if you have an ancestor that came on the Mayflower.
- If you have a free FamilySearch account and you have a tree in FamilySearch, you can go to a site called relativefinder.org. Sign in with your family search user name and password. On the left side of the screen you will see a number of special groups that you can check out. Click on the one that says Mayflower and it will pull up any Mayflower Passengers to whom you are related. If you click on one of the passenger’s names, you will be able to pull up a chart that gives your lineage back to that person.
- Again from FamilySearch, you can sign in an go to Search>Research Wiki> and search for Mayflower Passenger List. The list of passengers will come up and you can click on any person that you know, or suspect may be related to you. This will bring up that person’s profile page, and if you click on the ‘view relationship’ tab on the top right of the screen, you will be given your relationship to that person – if there is a relationship.
- Also free is mayflower.americanancestors.org. This site will help you find a relationship to a Mayflower Passenger. If you are not related to someone who sailed with them, you can still click on any name of a passenger to pull up information about that person, and lots of fun facts to share, [virtually of course] with your family during this Thanksgiving Season.
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