History of Bristol County, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of Many ... About the Great Migration. By Lynn Betlock Originally published in New England Ancestors 4 (2003): 2: 22-24.
In 1988, the New England Historic Genealogical Society initiated the Great Migration Study Project, conceived and directed by Robert Charles Anderson. The Project aimed to summarize and document everything known about the individual immigrants who came to New England in its first years of settlement. Now, fifteen years later, a substantial body of work has been produced: The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633 (three volumes), The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England 1634–1635 (currently three volumes covering surnames A–H) and the Great Migration Newsletter (now in its twelfth year), which addresses broader themes and topics. Thanks to the substantial scholarly contributions of the Great Migration Study Project, the genealogical community has grown increasingly familiar with details of the lives of these early immigrants.
Note. Northern Colonies. Early Vital Records of Massachusetts Town Index. Jamestown Rediscovery. The Far East has its Mecca, Palestine its Jerusalem, France its Lourdes, and Italy its Loretto, but America's only shrines are her altars of patriotism - the first and most potent being Jamestown; the sire of Virginia, and Virginia the mother of this great Republic. -- from a 1907 Virginia guidebook In June of 1606, King James I granted a charter to a group of London entrepreneurs, the Virginia Company, to establish a satellite English settlement in the Chesapeake region of North America.
By December, 104 settlers sailed from London instructed to settle Virginia, find gold, and seek a water route to the Orient. Some traditional scholars of early Jamestown history believe that those pioneers could not have been more ill-suited for the task. Because Captain John Smith identified about half of the group as "gentlemen," it was logical, indeed, for historians to assume that these gentry knew nothing of or thought it beneath their station to tame a wilderness.
New England. Roanoke Colony. 1903-rider-sidney-s-indian-names-in-colony-rhode-island-reduced1.jpg (2400×2850) Pdf/colonial-life/Colonial_Life.pdf. Puritan Life. As minister of Boston's Old North Church, Cotton Mather was a popular voice in Puritan New England.
His involvement in the witch trials of the 1680s would bring him even more notoriety. New England life seemed to burst with possibilities. The life expectancy of its citizens became longer than that of Old England, and much longer than the Southern English colonies. Children were born at nearly twice the rate in Maryland and Virginia. It is often said that New England invented grandparents, for it was here that people in great numbers first grew old enough to see their children bear children. Literacy rates were high as well. Massachusetts Bay Colony was a man's world. Puritan law was extremely strict; men and women were severly punished for a variety of crimes. It was believed that women who were pregnant with a male child had a rosy complexion and that women carrying a female child were pale.
Today in History: Metacomets Assassination & King Philips' War in New England, 1675-1676. On this day in history 1676, Chief Metacomet, known to the New England colonists as King Philip, was assassinated near in what is today .
The great Chief was shot by a praying Indian, a native who converted to Christianity, named John Alderman, in service to Benjamin Church (b.1639-1718) He was beheaded & quartered after his death, with his head being placed on a pike outside Plymouth. Alderman supposedly took one of his hand's as a war trophy, making money the rest of his life showing it to the curious. Famous color etching depicting King Philip created by Paul Revere King Philip's death was turned into a holiday for the Massachusetts colonists with an official church sanctioning of Thanksgiving, all but ending the first major large scale conflict ever fought in colonial America up to that point.
The assassin of Metacomet was under the employ of the first American Ranger (irregular-special forces) soldier, Benjamin Church (b.1639-1718), of the Plymouth Colony, what is today the and . Before Salem, the First American Witch Hunt. Thirty years before the infamous Salem witch trials, America’s first witch hunt hysteria swept through another colonial New England town.
Find out about the accusations and trials that rattled Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662. In late March 1662, John and Bethia Kelly grieved over the body of their 8-year-old daughter inside their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Little Elizabeth had been fine just days before when she returned home with a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres. The distraught parents, grasping at any explanation for their loss, saw the hand of the devil at work. The parents were convinced that Elizabeth had been fatally possessed by Goody Ayres.
After Elizabeth’s death, accusations of bewitchment flew, and fingers were pointed at numerous townspeople. Witchcraft was one of 12 capital crimes decreed by Connecticut’s colonial government in 1642. After Young’s public hanging, at least five other Connecticut residents met a similar fate. Rebecca Greensmith had confessed in open court. The Pilgrim Fathers UK Origins Association. Freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ancestorhunt1000/danvers_vol2.pdf.