I have added some new entries to my Famous Relatives page. William White and Susannah Fuller were my 11th great grandparents. The Whites and their five year old son, Resolved, were passengers on the Mayflower. William was a signer of the Mayflower Compact.
Susannah was a couple months pregnant at the start of the journey. She gave birth to a son (Peregrine) on the Mayflower on November 20. 1620 while the ship was located just outside the tip of Cape Cod.
William died on February 21, 1621. Susannah remarried fellow Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow. Edward’s wife Elizabeth had also been a pilgrim and died. Edward adopted both the White children and made them his heirs. Edward later served as the governor of Plymouth Colony.
I am a direct descendant of Resolved. I discovered this connection about a month ago when researching my sixth great grandmother, Miriam (Goss) Wright. Because there is a lot of bad research out regarding Mayflower lines, I wanted to make sure my information was solid before publishing it. To be honest, I half expected it to fall apart. I have already had that experience more than once.
The first five generations of the Mayflower descendants are fairly well established. My research is solid up to Miriam Goss. This gave me about a two generation gap to fill in. Most of the information was readily available online, but I was having trouble with the marriage of Timothy and Miriam. I found two marriage records. One was from Springfield and put their marriage as December 14, 1759. The other was from North Brookfield and put their marriage at February 6, 1761. This had me concerned that I was mixing two similarly named couples. The distance between the two communities (about 40 miles) amplified this concern. When taking a second look at it this week, a scan of the microfilm for the marriage record in Springfield was online through familysearch.org. I don’t know if this is new or I missed it previously. The first record was not a marriage record, but a intention of marriage. Furthermore, it identified Timothy as being from Springfield and Miriam as being from North Brookfield.
The family of Timothy and Miriam outside of my own lines is still mostly a mystery to me. After marriage, they settled in Ludlow, MA and had at least 9 children. With the exception of my fifth great grandfather, the family seems to have left Ludlow and gone somewhere else. Where they went isn’t clear to me yet.