The Story of the Search

Today, the country turned 250, and by a coincidence that I did not plan, the last unproven link in my Howland line finally closed. It did not close with a Pilgrim reference book. It closed the way these things usually do, with a single column in a town death register.

The line I had been chasing runs from John Howland, the Mayflower passenger, through his daughter Hope. Every link from Howland to the early Chipmans was already documented. The one join I could not prove was the step from Mary Chipman up to her father, Jacob. For that, I had no record at all.

In the end, three plain vital records closed it, and no two of them came from the same town. Mary's own death record, filed in North Bridgewater in 1872, named her parents outright: a widow of seventy-four, born in Easton, daughter of Jacob and Olive. A death record from Easton in 1849 listed a Jacob Chipman, laborer, dead at eighty, which put his birth around 1769 and made him the right age to be Jacob Chipman III. And a marriage recorded in Middleborough in 1792 gave the mother her real name, because the Olive of the death register turned out to be Orpah Leach, whom Jacob had married that year. Three towns, three registers, one couple. On my chart the link is now marked supported.

I had expected an easier path than that. I went looking for the Howland Silver Book, certain it would cover Hope's line, and found that it doesn't. Howland's family had been documented long before the General Society of Mayflower Descendants ever reached him with its modern Silver Book project. The early Howland lines were the work of a genealogist named Elizabeth Pearson White and published by Picton Press in a set called John Howland of the Mayflower. Each of Howland's first four children got a volume, and Hope is Volume 3. Because those lines were already finished, the Society's own Silver Book, Volume 23, simply started fresh with the children White had not covered. Hope's volumes belonged to a different publisher, and at some point they quietly went out of print. The oldest and best documented stretch of my whole line was sitting behind a copyright. In the end I found that the Boston Public Library keeps a copy of White's Hope Howland book for reading on site only. But its online catalog points to a scanned copy on Archive.org that can be borrowed online.

It is worth remembering that the Howland line almost never existed. John Howland crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower as a young servant in the household of John Carver, the colony's first governor. He was not a leader, and not a name anyone at the time expected to matter. Partway across the Atlantic, the Mayflower met a storm bad enough that the crew took in all sail and let her ride it out, and Howland, coming up on deck, was thrown clean overboard by a roll of the ship. He caught hold of a topsail halyard trailing in the water and held on, well under the surface, until the crew hauled him back aboard with a boat hook. William Bradford, who told the story years afterward, remarked only that Howland lived on to become a useful member of both church and colony.

Few Mayflower passengers have left a family line behind them as long as Howland's. By some estimates something like two million living Americans descend from John Howland, Franklin Roosevelt among them, and not one of them would exist if that rope had slipped through his hands. Most of the others matter for what they did once they came ashore. Howland matters first for a single moment at sea, when the entire future of his line came down to whether one cold, wet grip would hold.

There is something fitting about closing his line on the day the country turns 250. Howland stepped off the ship a hundred and fifty-six years before the first Fourth of July was celebrated, and Mary Chipman was buried almost a century after it, so the whole life of the nation fits neatly inside the span of this single family. And that span, in turn, once hung on a wet rope in the middle of the ocean. Everything downstream of that grip waited on one man not letting go.

When I started, I thought this project would be a single clean line to follow generation by generation, until it either reached the Mayflower or ran out. Maybe it'd be a few evenings of tidying notes.

The project has not stayed small at all. One passenger became more than a dozen. A single line became several, braiding together through shared ancestors. Every new ancestor brought their own dates to reconcile, a Silver Book to check, and a family link that had to be rated honestly: documented, probable, or still a guess. Somewhere in there it stopped being a family tree and became a research project with dozens of open questions.

At that point notes were not enough. I could not keep straight which links were actually proven, which were leaning on a single unverified source, and which people I still needed to document. So I built a tracker.

The Dashboard is a running scoreboard for the whole search. It tallies how many links are backed by a Silver Book or a record I hold and, more usefully, lists the people and connections that still need proof. The Charts draw the lines and color every link by how well it is sourced; the Dashboard shows where the work still is; and this Journal is where each discovery and dead end gets written down.

It is a work in progress, and the tracker exists so the gaps stay visible instead of quietly getting lost.

Working through the Silver Books gave me a real appreciation for how much documentation a Mayflower lineage takes, so before filing a preliminary application I wrote to the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants.

My family's roots run through Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and I believe I descend from several passengers rather than one, including a few who were on the Mayflower as a family. That raises questions the Silver Books cannot answer: whether one application can name more than one passenger, whether a married couple counts once or twice, and which line is the smart one to submit a preliminary application under.

Rather than guess, I asked. Here is the note, close to how I sent it:

Subject: Preliminary Application Strategy for Multiple Mayflower Lines

Dear Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants,

In referencing the Silver Books and other related materials and records, I have gained an appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into documenting descent, which is why I wanted to reach out before submitting a preliminary application for your team's review. I believe I can document direct descent from several Mayflower passengers through my family's roots in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Before starting the preliminary application, I wanted to ask how to proceed in regard to Mayflower passengers who traveled as a family unit.

For family units (husband, wife, child) who traveled together aboard the Mayflower, does the MSMD require applicants to choose a single passenger as their qualifying ancestor? If so, is there a standard approach, such as applying under the eldest ancestor (e.g., James Chilton vs. Mary Chilton), or is it a matter of personal preference? In the case of married passengers, would an applicant be required to pick a single spouse to apply under, or is listing both an option?

If it must be one spouse or the other for the preliminary application, is there anything to consider before submitting, such as which spouse an applicant would like listed on any future records or certificates?

Would there be a separate application fee for each passenger in a married couple? For example, would it require four application fees to prove lineage to John Howland, his wife Elizabeth, and her parents, who were all passengers? Or would it be a single fee if the applicant proved descent from a child born to John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley?

The passengers I believe I directly descend from include:

• John Alden
• James Chilton, his wife (Mrs. Chilton), and their daughter Mary Chilton
• Francis Cooke
• John Howland and wife Elizabeth Tilley, and her parents John Tilley and Joan (Hurst) Tilley
• William Mullins, his wife Alice Mullins, and their daughter Priscilla Mullins, who married passenger John Alden
• Thomas Rogers

Since I may be able to document descent from several of these passengers, is it best practice to submit my first application through the line with the strongest or most complete existing MSMD documentation, in order to limit additional town hall visits and document fees? Then, once I am more familiar with the process, would it make sense to apply for supplemental memberships through the other lines afterward?

If that is the recommended approach, could you describe how the process works for adding additional qualifying ancestors after the initial application is approved?

I want to make sure I approach this efficiently and start the application in a way that best fits the Society's requirements.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Now I wait to hear back. Writing it out made one thing plain: the strategy question, which line to lead with, depends on knowing which of my lines is best documented, and right now I have no clean way to see that.

The Athenaeum books were not due until early July, but I had worked through the volumes I came for and intended to return them ahead of time. Before boxing them up, I wanted to close one loose end: the Thomas Rogers line, where the printed book had carried me a few generations but I still could not see how it joined the rest of the tree.

So I did what I had been putting off and went looking through various online family tree services, the big crowd-sourced databases where anyone can post a lineage. They are not proof. A name gets copied from one tree to the next until nobody remembers the source, but they are useful as a set of leads because someone else may have already noticed a connection worth checking against the actual books.

Rogers was there, and the trees pointed past where my volume had stopped. What I did not expect was how much else came up alongside it. Chasing Rogers surfaced other names, other passengers, and other lines I had not realized my family touched at all. Every one of them is unproven until a Silver Book or a real record says otherwise, but there were suddenly far more threads to run down than the handful I had started with.

That changed the calculation. This was no longer a single line I could finish in a few sittings with a stack of borrowed books. It had become something larger, with more open questions than I could hold in my head, and returning the books now would mean giving up the sources right as the scope doubled. I need a better way to keep track of all of it, and I need the books a while longer. So I renewed them instead.

The Boston Public Library also holds the Silver Books, but in Special Collections, for reference use only: you read them at the table and they do not leave the building. It is the opposite of borrowing from the Boston Athenaeum. No checkout, just a reading-room desk and a phone camera, working through the Chilton and Cooke volumes page by page.

I came in today to settle a discrepancy. The Athenaeum's Chilton volume did not list Rebecca Washburn, while the online database had, and the gap looked like a matter of editions. The library's copy confirmed it: a revised 1997 printing, newer than the one I had taken home from the Athenaeum, and it listed Rebecca Washburn in the fifth generation where the older Athenaeum copy didn't. I photographed those pages on the spot. That single edition difference reconnects a stretch of the Chilton line that had otherwise dead-ended.

The books are slower than a database, but they are the actual sourced genealogy the whole tree leans on. It is also a reminder that, in this work, the printing matters: a newer edition can be the difference between a grey "probably" on the chart and a documented gold link.

The reply from the Historical Society came on May 11, weeks after I sent it and days after I had already turned towards researching my own family. It was worth the wait. A reference librarian had gone looking for the original of Blackstone's invitation and, in the most useful way possible, come up empty.

Here is the response, lightly trimmed:

Thank you for contacting us. This took a bit longer than I had anticipated, so I apologize for the delay. I have been digging through the published works in our collection hoping to find some reference to original documents consulted during the research process. So far I have been striking out, though I have attached a few scans of pages I found worthy of note: pp. 6-7 of Blackstone: Boston's First Inhabitant by Thomas C. Amory (1877); pp. 6-7, 18 of William Blackstone in his Relation to Massachusetts and Rhode Island by B. F. De Costa (1880); pp. 177-181 of The Great Migration Begins, vol. 1, by Robert Charles Anderson (1995); pp. 51-52 of The Life and Letters of John Winthrop, edited by Robert C. Winthrop (1971).

Blackstone seems to be a figure for whom there are numerous short biographies floating around without much actual documentary evidence to back up facts that seem taken for granted. I have seen the anecdote of his invitation in multiple later histories where no one has cited a specific document from the actual event in question. With that said, I do not believe we have any such document here at the MHS, nor do I know of an institution that does. In lieu of this, I have assembled a few resources that may help.

In the Winthrop Papers there are at least two transcripts that mention Blackstone, though they are not directly related to the Shawmut invitation:

• Roger Williams to John Winthrop, 1637-11-10
• William Hooke and Thomas Bradbury to John Winthrop, 1637-09-13

The best thing I have come across has been the typescript Life of the Reverend William Blackstone, 1596-1675 by Elfrieda Kraege (1969). The appendix especially has a good number of notes to original sources, as well as transcripts of them. If you would like to see additional pages, I can make scans and send them.

Beyond that I can offer further biographical research in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 16 (1878) and Third Series, Vol. 61 (1927-1928), the transcript of the 1711 Deposition of Anne Pollard that is mentioned throughout the literature, and a brief mention in an account book for prices paid by Edward Gibbons on behalf of Thomas Morton.

Apparently the Morgan Library in New York owns a document signed by Blackstone, though from the catalog record alone the content is unclear: an autograph letter signed, dated 1642 Dec. 14.

I hope some of this proves useful. If you have any further questions, please do get back in touch.

That second paragraph is the one that matters. A figure with many biographies and little documentary evidence. An anecdote repeated in history after history where no one has cited a specific document. That is the whole problem in a few sentences, and it is exactly the trap I did not want my own family tree to fall into.

The other lesson was in how long it took. I sent my question in April, and the answer came three weeks later. It was the work of a trained librarian going book by book through a major archive, and all of that effort produced a stack of leads and one firm conclusion: the document everyone assumes exists cannot be found. If it took an expert weeks to settle a single fact about the most famous figure in Boston's founding, then settling one ordinary fact about my own family may take the same patience. Family history is not a weekend of copying names. It is a process of locating and cross-referencing each source one at a time, for as long as each one takes.

So if the founding story of Boston can float for four hundred years without a source underneath it, the people a few generations back in my own line can drift the same way, unless I go find the records and pin them down. By the time this email arrived, that was already the plan.

The online database only revealed the fifth generation, so getting the printed Silver Books in hand became the priority. That meant the Boston Athenaeum, a membership library that keeps part of its collection in offsite storage and where members can request a volume ahead of time for retrieval.

I left with a stack of Mayflower Families Through Five Generations volumes, due back in early July. It is the first time I have been able to sit with the actual sources rather than a paywalled summary of them.

The books themselves also carry their own history. Inside the front cover of one is a printed bookplate: "Boston Athenaeum, from the income of the bequest of George Francis Parkman, born August 20, 1823, died September 16, 1908, A Proprietor of the Boston Athenaeum."

That name carries some weight in Boston. George Francis Parkman was the son of Dr. George Parkman, the physician whose 1849 murder at the Harvard Medical College became one of the most notorious trials of the century. The killing was gruesome, the body dismembered and burned. Thousands lined the streets of Boston for Dr. Parkman's funeral. The scandal pushed the family into decades of seclusion at 33 Beacon Street (225 meters from the Boston Athenaeum at 10½ Beacon Street), yet when George Francis died in 1908 he left almost his entire fortune, close to five million dollars in 1908 (on the order of $150 million today), to the City of Boston. The income of that gift, the Parkman Fund, was set aside to maintain and improve the Boston Common and the city's parks, and it still does; the bandstand on the Common bears his name. As a Proprietor, one of the shareholders who collectively own the Athenaeum, he left the library its own bequest as well, and the income from that gift is what bought the Silver Books now sitting on my desk.

So this is not just a printing of a genealogy. The copy was purchased with the legacy of a man whose bequest still helps tend the Boston Common, and the bookplate records that as plainly as the pages inside record the descendants of the Mayflower. That provenance, more than a century of it, is exactly what a database strips away.

There is a complication, though. In the Athenaeum's Chilton volume, Rebecca Washburn is not listed under Chilton, even though the database placed her there. The most likely explanation is the edition. The copy in my hands is an older printing than what AmericanAncestors scanned. The Boston Public Library catalog lists a revised 1997 Chilton edition, and I suspect that newer printing is the source behind the AmericanAncestors.org database entry. That is where I need to look next.

The first stop was the Boston Public Library, to use AmericanAncestors.org, the New England Historic Genealogical Society's database. It carries the Mayflower genealogies, and while the site is a paid subscription, it is free to use on the library's computers at the Copley Square branch. I signed in at a public terminal and started working through the lines.

The free access has a hard limit. What it shows is the fifth generation only (the Fifth Generation Descendants, 1700-1880 series), which is useful for the later stretches but is not the full run of Silver Books.

Even so, the day produced a lead. Rebecca Washburn appears as a fifth-generation descendant of both James Chilton and Francis Cooke, and she has a son recorded as Isaac Johnson, born 9 Aug 1721. That is the thread to follow: Rebecca is already tied to the Mayflower, so the task now is to connect her forward to Alice Johnson, through Isaac.

The database can only carry this so far. To read the actual sourced entries from the Mayflower passengers down to Rebecca, I need to find and reference the printed Silver Books.

The Blackstone story stayed in my mind and I started researching. The more I read, the more the famous invitation seemed to rest on repetition rather than on any document. I wrote to the Massachusetts Historical Society to ask what, if anything, survives.

Here is the note, close to how I sent it:

Subject: Research Inquiry: William Blaxton and the Settlement of the Shawmut Peninsula, 1630

Dear Massachusetts Historical Society,

I am researching the events surrounding the founding of Boston in 1630, and in particular the invitation by Reverend William Blaxton (Blackstone) to the Puritan settlers at Charlestown to relocate to the Shawmut Peninsula. I am interested in learning what materials your collections may hold that relate to this episode.

This might include correspondence or journal entries related to Blaxton's interaction with the Puritan settlers and the circumstances that led to the establishment of Boston in 1630.

Specifically, I would like to know:

1. Whether the original letter or any contemporary copy survives in your collections or elsewhere.

2. Whether it appears in the Winthrop Papers held by the Society, or in any related collection.

3. If the document does not survive, whether any transcription or facsimile exists in published or archival form.

I understand that Blaxton's home was destroyed during King Philip's War, which may have affected the survival of his papers. I also note that the letter was addressed to Isaac Johnson, who died shortly after in September of 1630, which may complicate its provenance.

I am particularly interested in firsthand accounts, whether from Blaxton himself or from those who received his invitation. I am also interested in any records relating to the subsequent grant of 50 acres awarded to Blaxton by the very settlers he had invited to the peninsula, and the circumstances surrounding that arrangement.

I would be grateful for any guidance on relevant holdings in your collections, as well as any suggestions for other repositories that may have related materials.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Then I waited, and the wait was going to be a long one. The Society's website says up front that a research inquiry can take a month or more to answer, so I knew not to expect a quick reply. Rather than sit idle, I kept pulling threads on early Boston, one tab leading to the next, deep into the lives of people that I am not related to at all.

At some point the obvious question landed: Why was I spending weeks waiting on a single factoid about a stranger from four hundred years ago, when I couldn't have told you much about my own family a few generations back? That same waiting time could go toward the family instead, chasing records that are actually within my reach. Why not redirect energy there? That question is where the rest of this site and project comes from.

Boston had come through a hard winter. The season just past was the ninth-snowiest on record, a little over sixty inches, the coldest and snowiest since 2014-2015. A storm in late January buried the city under twenty-three inches in one shot, and in February a blizzard came through with near-hurricane gusts and left more than half a million people without power. So when the first genuinely mild evening of spring arrived, I walked over to the red ticket shed at the Museum of Science and asked whether the Boston Duck Tours had anything left. There was one seat open, on the last departure of the day, which turned out to be the run where the sun sets from the water at the end of the loop.

If you have never taken one, a Duck Boat is a refitted amphibious vehicle that drives through the streets and then straight down a ramp into the Charles River. The guides pack a surprising amount of history in between their jokes. There was one joke that had several layers behind it that came as we rolled past the Boston Common on Charles St. It was about William Blaxton, the first Englishman to live on the peninsula. He came out here to be left alone, the guide said, then turned around and invited the entire Puritan colony over to join him. His guests promptly returned the favor by deciding what their host would own, granting Blaxton fifty acres of the peninsula that had been entirely his to begin with. Blaxton kept that land entirely open and empty, which to a colony of hard-working Puritans would have been about the most frivolous use a person could make of good ground. That frivolity, the guide added, is the reason the Boston Common is there at all. Without Blaxton keeping that ground open, the green we were passing would be city blocks. The guide's parting shot was that Blaxton eventually grew so tired of his neighbors that he left Boston for good and moved south... where he became the first settler of Rhode Island.

That joke stuck with me, because underneath it was was a real person. Years before the Puritans, this same Blaxton, an English minister, was already living alone on the Shawmut Peninsula, with a house on the slope of Beacon Hill where he planted the first apple orchard in America. When the Puritan settlers across the river at Charlestown were falling sick for want of clean water in 1630, Blaxton was the one who invited them over to his side, where there was a good spring. They came. Within a few years the town he had welcomed in had grown up all around him. Worn out by his new Puritan neighbors, Blaxton left the peninsula and is quoted as saying "I came from England, because I did not like the lord-bishops; but I can't join with you, because I would not be under the lord-brethren." The open ground Blaxton left behind became Boston Common.

It is a strange story, and it stayed with me. A man settles here first, invites everyone else in, and is then largely written out of the story the city tells about itself. I wanted to know how much of it was actually true, and where, if anywhere, it was written down. That question is the one that started everything else on this site. I just did not know it yet.

Sources: NBC Boston, 2025-2026 New England winter recap · February 2026 North American blizzard (Wikipedia) · Boston 400, Boston's First English Settler · William Blaxton (Wikipedia)