***-----Original Message----- ***From: Polly Shaw [mailto:p.v.shaw@verizon.net] ***Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 4:23 PM ***To: MAYFLOWER-L@rootsweb.com ***Subject: [MFLR] Saints and Strangers *** *** ***I recently purchased this book through e-Bay on the Pilgrims, ***first published in 1945. Does anyone know anything about this ***book and whether any of the information in it is authentic? -- ***Polly (born a sceptic) Polly, Eugene Aubrey Stratton, author of the highly esteemed _Plymouth Colony: Its History and People_is on your side. He speaks of Willison's book saying, "George E. Willison's 1945 popular book Saints and Strangers, which was written by a Rhodes scholar who could and did do a considerable amount of good research to write his book, and then vitiated it by throwing it together in an undocumented hodgepodge of fact and fiction so intermixed that it would be difficult for even a trained scholar to extricate the one from the other." [Eugene Aubrey Stratton, _Plymouth Colony: Its History and People 1620-1691_ (Salt Lake City, Utah, Ancestry Publishing, 1986) page 1. So Stratton's opinion seems to be that there is much of merit in the book, but one has to be careful to doublecheck. In my own experience I find that Willison connects my ancestror Richard Wright, who married Hester Cooke, to the William Wright who came to Plymouth on the _Fortune_, claiming William is Richard's father. There is in fact no documented connection or really any reason to think there ever will be. That seems to be the kind of thing that troubles Stratton