Week 51 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge is Perseverance, a topic that makes me think about some of my first ancestors to settle in the New World – my Mayflower ancestors. One in particular comes to mind as she faced hardships and heartbreak yet survived and went on to be the progenitor of millions of people. I’m talking about Elizabeth Tilley.
Elizabeth Tilley was part of the Leiden Separatist colony and was about 13 years old when she set sail aboard Mayflower on September 6, 1620 with her parents, John and Joan (Hurst) Tilley and her aunt and uncle, Edward and Ann Tilley. Although only one person, a crew member, died during the 2-month voyage, life on the ship wasn’t easy. Ships at the time were mainly used for transporting cargo, and in this case, the passengers were the cargo. They lived and slept in the cargo deck which was a dark, cold, windowless space with low ceilings. There was no privacy, and to make matters worse, many of the passengers suffered terrible seasickness. Add “eau de vomit” to the smell of human waste and body odor from the 102 people down there, and surviving the stench alone was an act of perseverance.
Mayflower was destined for northern Virginia where they were authorized to settle by the British crown, however, due to storms that blew the ship off course and some navigational errors, they wound up in Massachusetts. They landed off the coast of Cape Cod on November 11, 1620. If you’ve visited the coast of Massachusetts in November, you know it’s cold and unpleasant, and definitely not as temperate as Virginia. In mid-December, the group came across some cleared land and running water across from Cape Cod Bay, named it Plymouth, and decided to settle there. They began building structures to get them through that first winter. Keep in mind that up until the time structures were built, the colonists were still crammed together in the cargo deck of the ship….in November and December in frigid temperatures. They rowed out to the colony during the day to build the houses and rowed back to the ship at night to sleep.
By the end of the first, brutal year, 53 of the original 102 passengers and about half of the crew had succumbed to sickness. Among the dead were Elizabeth Tilley’s parents, aunt, and uncle. Imagine being a 13-year-old kid, travelling in uncomfortable conditions to a strange and wild land, then losing all of your family? How terrible! The colonists took care of their own; Elizabeth was taken in by the Carver family. Unfortunately, the elder Carvers died about a year later. Their servant, John Howland, inherited part of their estate and Elizabeth became his ward.
Elizabeth and John Howland eventually married and had 10 children, all of whom lived to adulthood, and 88 grandchildren. It is believed that they have more living descendants today than any other Mayflower passengers. Among their descendants are political families like the Roosevelts and Bushes, actors such as the Baldwin brothers, Anthony Perkins, Christopher Lloyd, and Humphrey Bogart, and poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Elizabeth died on December 21, 1687. She outlived her husband, John, by fifteen years and was one of the few original Mayflower passengers still alive at the time of King Philip’s War. Thanks to her perseverance through her early tragedies and rough life in a new land, an estimated 2 million people currently living can claim Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland as ancestors.