I heartily recommend Nick Bunker's _Making Haste from Babylon_ for readers who want to get up to speed on the Mayflower bunch with an entertaining and well-documented account. Craig is right that there was quite a lot of coastal commerce between Massachusetts and Virginia in the 17th century. I like to think that my New England ancestors showed their perspicacity by moving south pretty quickly, within a generation or two. Isaac Allerton is one who had the good sense to settle in the NN when his father's mercantile enterprise annoyed Gov. Bradford and some of the Puritans. Isaac Sr had come on the Mayflower; his son was born in Plymouth Colony. Last week I was able to track down the graves of some of my peripatetic ancestors in Westfield, NJ, where they paused on their way from England to New England to Long Island to NJ to VA to NC to SC within about 150 years. If anybody on the list is kin to the Woodruffs, I'll be happy to share photos of the tombstones I found. Kathleen Much The Book Doctor On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 Craig wrote: > (1) the first Thanksgiving was in Jamestown, VA long before the so-called > Pilgrims ever blew off shore and ended up in Massachusetts on a big fat rock > and (2) they never were called "Pilgrims" until the 1880s in some poem. The > group of "Pilgrims were two complete separate groups composed of (1) > Anglicans and (2) Separatists. And they settled the Plymouth Bay Colony, > not the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was settled ca 1630 by the > "Puritans." The Puritans were Anglican with an Evangelical beat. They > wanted to "purify" the Anglican Church. The Separatists, by contrast, simply > wanted to -- well--separate. No happy talk about a city on a shining hill. > There w! > as nothing shiny about it. As I wrote above, their Separatist compatriots > were of one stripe, and their financial backers and other "adventurers" were > of the purest Anglican order. Well, not entirely pure. > > Of all the characters of the Plymouth Colony, Stephen Hopkins, a reprobate > who had earlier been run out of Jamestown, stands out as my favorite. > Perhaps reprobate is too strong, but he was always at odds with authorities, > and and saved my own direct ancestor Jonathan Hatch who later founded > Barnstable, MA out of deep do doo. > > All of this really is on topic, believe it or not, for there are many more > England>New England>Virginia>New England>Virginia connections than most of > us realize. We would all do better to pursue those. >