Purpose

It has now been a little over a year since exploring my family tree. It was not hard to find out that I am a direct descendant of an original Mayflower family who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts in AD 1620. I am 12 generations down from William and Susana White through Resolved White, their son who was around 5 years old when he accompanied his parents on that long and arduous journey, almost 400 years ago.

After researching the direct line from this family down, and trying to gather all the facts I could through every generation, I went back to the original Mayflower family and tried to find out more about the first and second generations that settled in the Plymouth Colony. Needless to say, I found out more than I bargained for. It was not so much the tragic first year after the arrival of the Mayflower passengers that I found so intriguing, because this has been so well documented and fairly well-known for anyone reading just a few books on the subject, but it was, rather, what happened afterward with my ancestors that was most extraordinary.

What I discovered was that this White family became a very wealthy, prominent and powerful family, not only in Plymouth, but also in all of New England itself. It became part of the elite of New England. And, through the generations, not only did this family became a part of the history of the 17th and 18th centuries in colonial America, but it actually influenced history, and in some ways, to a degree of great significance.

This is the purpose of this blog-website, to explore this White-Winslow family and to show how it came to be, how it became so prominent, and how it actually influenced colonial history in the 17th and 18th centuries. The influence which this family and its descendants exerted, extended into the colonial histories of the United States and Canada.

Another purpose is to take certain events in the lives of this family, and to delve into the characters of the various members of this family. In others words, I want to find out what these people were like, what made them tick, and how their society influenced them, and their influence upon society. Simply because this family was fairly prominent, there has been a fair amount of material from which to pull, although amazingly enough, there is also little to no information on some family members, who which one should think we should know more about.

Below is a chart listing those family members I will be writing about. I will be also be writing about some of their selected descendants who can be traced centuries later. There will also be historical notes made throughout the text in order to help the reader understand the kind of society these people lived in, and the events of the day which they had to live through, and which influenced them heavily.

My direct line comes through William and Susanna White, and their eldest son, Resolved White. However, on this chart, everyone except Edward Winslow is a blood relative of mine, and thus their descendants are just as important to me as are those who are members of my direct line.