On Sat, 23 Mar 2002 16:51:33 -0500, Penny Warne wrote: :I have been doing some reading and have seen mention of a group of :Purtitans who left England in the late 1500's - early 1600s to :settle in Holland due to the greater religious freedom offered :there. I don't know the numbers of the people that went. Any of :the articles I have read so far are vague about that. Most refer :to a "large" group or "many" people immigrating. :These same articles state that 60 to 70 of the same Puritans were, :some twenty years later, members of the Mayflower group. This :group is well documented (obviously) but I haven't found anything :on the Puritans that stayed behind in Holland. The Mayflower :Puritans, I'm pretty sure, arrived too early in North America for :Thomas Brooks to have been among them. However, if Thomas arrived :in North America in the late 1620s to early 1630s when he was in :in his early twenties, time wise, it would have been possible for :him to have been both born and married in Holland. : :Is it even remotely possible that Thomas (and maybe Grace) might :have been born to one of those Puritan families in Holland and :later on, say in the late 1620's or so, chose to join the other :Puritans who were already established in North America, perhaps :even relatives and friends. : :Has anyone looked at a possible Dutch connection? I'm probably way :off base but there's no harm in asking. Penny, you're not remotely off base. You've read some history, done some thinking, and come up with a plausible and original hypothesis. I think that's great! I have done *some* (not "a lot") reading on both Plymouth and the Puritans in Holland. I've read two histories of the colony (John Demos, "A Little Commonwealth," an academic history by a top-rank American colonial historian, as well as a more popular book written in the 40s by Whose Name Escapes Me, on Plymouth Colony. I found a couple of antiquarian books at the local library from 1920, the date of the Mayflower tercentenary. Again the titles escape me, but photocopies are somewhere here in the massive document piles to sort and enter. Basically, a group of dissenters went to Holland, I think in the 1590s. Several different congregations ending up melding and living in the direst poverty at Leyden, where a handful of prosperous congregants paid for housing for their brethren. Here they were riven by sectarian strife and split again over both doctrinal differences and the extramarital shenanigans of one of the leaders. After a generation's time, fearing that their children would grow up to be Dutchmen who had lost their cultural, linguistic and religious heritage, the largest faction (Separatists, really, unlike the Puritans of the Bay Colony of 10 years later) returned to England, where (William?) Brewster and his agents secretly organized the mass emigration which chartered the Mayflower. I haven't really followed those left in Holland after 1619. Caleb Johnson's first-rate Mayflower pages http://members.aol.com/calebj/mayflower.html might well have links to supplementary reading. A search on the phrase "Brewster" + "Leyden" at http://www.google.com also might be useful, or "Pilgrims" or "Englishmen" +"Leyden." Some of my more exotic hypotheses for Thomas Brooks, who first appears in a land grant at Watertown in 1636: (1) He came with one of the fishing fleets or colonies planted on the coast of New Hampshire and Maine from 1607 on. [Problems: Thomas isn't found in any record before 1636, by which time Sagadahoc and other fishing/trading outposts were in sharp decline or completely abandoned. If he was a maritime man, why does he settle at Concord, inland, and buy fur-trapping rights?] (2) He came as a servant (probably a "servant" in the sense of "manager" or hired administrator rather than of indenture, judging from his literacy and the fact that he was a head of household) to Sir Richard Saltonstall, son of the Lord Mayor of London, who founded Watertown in 1630. There is a record of unnamed "servants of Sir Richard Saltonstall" who arrived a year ahead to scout out the lay of the land and prepare for Saltonstall's arrival. [Problems: The Saltonstall servants aren't identified by name or number, either in contemporary records or in the published Saltonstall Papers. If Thomas really did arrive in 1629 or 1630, already married with children, how does he stay hidden until he receives his first grant at Watertown in 1636? If he's been a loyal employee, why does it take him seven years in residence to get his first grant? While seven years represents a common term of indenture, what employer would feed, clothe and house six bonded mouths for 7 years in order to secure the labor of one?] (3) He came with Winthrop in the Winthrop Fleet of 1630. Something on the order of 20 ships carried 1500 people that year, and only a fraction, mostly dignitaries or ministers like Winthrop, Saltonstall and Phillips, are known by name. [Problem: Again, how does head-of-household Thomas stay out of all public records until 1636? For reasons of length, I'll post a couple of supplementary messages on East Anglia's ties with Holland which bear on Thomas's origin in general and on Penny's question in particular. Penny, please consider all this your personal Do-It-Yourself kit for further searching. If I had two lifetimes, I'd join you ... Chris