The second European settlement (after the Spanish at St. Augustine, Florida) in the America's was at Roanoke in 1585. The first settlement was a disaster and all returned to England. The second settlement in 1587, disappeared. There are current day Native Americans who believe themselves to be descendants of the "lost settlement of Roanoke" from members of this second settlement who disappeared. Not until twenty years later did the first permanent settlement finally take root, at Jamestown. This settlement was primarily commercial in nature and was not real successful. The population of Jamestown was rather static. The Pilgrim's then landed at Plymouth Rock, approximately 30 miles south of present day Boston in 1620, thirteen years after Jamestown. Again, the settlement persevered, but could not be described as a beachhead of colonization of the colonies. During the 1620's, there were some other settlers who migrated to Massachusetts after the Pilgrims, but they were small and relatively insignificant.There were also advance parties for the Puritans in the years 1628 and 1629.

Winthrop's Fleet landed in Salem, Massachusetts in 1630, with the first mass exodus of Puritans from England. There were a 1,000 settlers in that first group of settlers. Two hundred died that winter and two hundred more returned to England the following spring. But, in the next ten years, 20,000 persons, most from England and most of the Puritan philosophy, immigrated to Massachusetts to form the backbone of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And, then, it was over. There was hardly any further migration into New England until after the Revolution. Virtually all growth of the colony after 1640 was by natural reproduction, which is why once you've found yourself a descendant of a pre-Revolution New Englander, you very likely have a bunch of immigrant ancestors.

John Winthrop was their leader, until his death in 1649. A man of some wealth, he helped to finance the first expedition and his money fed many of those first settlers in that first year.

They landed at present day Salem, but almost immediately moved to the present day site of Boston harbor. Within a couple of years, a new extension, that of Charlestown, was created. Ezekiel Richardson, our ancestor, was in Winthrop's fleet and was a founder of the church in Charlestown. Within ten years, the colony had spread into small settlements in Woburn, Lexington, Concord, Cambridge, Watertown, and others that can be seen on a map today, all within a 30-50 mile radius of Boston.

Within a few short years, this industrious and hearty group of pioneers had established a successful and thriving colony in the New World.
 

"Emigration to New England was at first encouraged by the king and his servile ministry, doubtless with a view of getting rid of the men who could not rest under the proceedings of an arbitrary government. But in 1634 the royal government resolved to deprive New England of its chartered rights, to send a royal governor to that country, and as far as possible to stop the emigration to the American strand. Repeated attempts were made to check this emigration. In March, 1638, an order in council was passed to detain eight ships then in the Thames, full of passengers, bound to New England; and on the 6th of April, in the same year, an order in council was passed that no person should be allowed to go to New England without a license. In consequence of this order, many persons embarked ostensibly for Virginia, but really for Massachusetts." The Richardson Memorial

The Growth of New England 1650-1790 - The "Great Migration" Stopped in early 1640's - Lasted Less than 20 Years

I have seen estimates of 500 or so English settlers in New England before Winthrop's Fleet. (There probably weren't more than 2-3,000 English settlers in all of the America's). The New England population would have consisted of primarily of  Plymouth Rock (1620)  and the advance parties of the Puritans, arriving primarily 1624-1629. With the arrival of Winthrop's fleet, the population of New England tripled to 1,500. That winter 200 died and the following spring, 200 gave up and returned to England. By 1640, I have seen estimates as low 16,000 to as high as 26,000 immigrants that had arrived, mostly Puritan immigrants from England.

By 1640, The Great Migration was over. Charles I summoned Parliament in 1640 for the first time in 11 years, opening the possibility of major political and religious change at home. Within short order, England was on the verge of civil war and efforts by folks to emigrate were discouraged. By 1650, Oliver Cromwell had executed King Charles and the English Revolution had quieted down. Commensurate with these events, the impact of Puritanism in England was pretty well finished. As a result of these events in England, immigration to the colony slowed to a trickle after 1640. Virtually all growth in New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine) from this point up to the revolution was a natural reproduction from the 20,000-26,000 or so Puritan immigrants of 1630-40. The population doubled approximately every 28 years. Immigration began into the area again after the Revolution, climaxed by the great immigration of the 1840's and 1850's from Ireland as a result of the potato famine.

Estimates of the population of New England, generated primarily internally after 1850, are:
 

1650:      33,000
1678:      60,000
1706:    120,000
1734:    250,000
1762:    500,000
1790: 1,000,000
Source: Primarily: Genealogical Notes on the Founding of New England, Ernest Flagg, 1926.

From Massachusetts, many of these pioneers migrated to Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. When you find you have an ancestor to pre-revolution times in New England, the odds are that you will find several generations of your ancestors being American-born back to the original Puritan exodus of 1630-40. You will find your families interweaving and intermarrying with other New England families, so that you may very well have multiple original Puritan immigrants.

The Puritans - Why Did They Come?

One of the intriguing questions in studying our ancestors is the motivations behind their migrations. Why would they leave something that had been home to generations of their ancestors for the great unknowns of what awaited them in the America's and the dangers of the trip?

See my page on Our English / Puritan Heritage for that side of the story!

Related Links:

• General History / Heritage of the Colony
• Specific Locales
• Indian History
• Way of Life
• Puritan Links
• Slavery in New England
• Mayflower Pages

 
The Massachusetts Local History Page has about every historical link there is about Massachusetts!

The Rootsweb Page for Massachusetts History and Genealogical Resources on the web.

New England Naming Patterns - fairly scholarly, but very interesting for genealogists.

The Georgetown University History Timeline

Here is a nice collection of Colonial America Links.

Visit the New England Page for all kinds of info and links about New England genealogy.

The Department of Housing and Community Development has put up a web with each city of Massachusetts listed, the county it is in, a brief history and many facts about the town, from census data to local government addresses.

The Holdings of the Massachusetts State Archives.

See my own Timeline of Colonial America.

The Winthrop Society Home Page has "tentative" passenger lists and more, about Winthrop's Fleet.

Downloadable Acrobat view maps of Mass are available.

The Roger Williams Family Association Home Page - not exactly Mass, but.... somebody might want to know where to find it.

The Massachusetts Town History Page  shows what towns split up and joined together over the years, and are also grouped by county, so you can get the county.

The Index to Massachusetts Towns gives a bit of history and descriptive data for each town in Massachusetts

The MIT Zip Code directory will give you counties for a town, but it is based on current names and current situations.

The History of Boston I found this site to be very interesting and informative.  You can prowl the links from this site for hours. Make up a pot of coffee, lean back and go back on a ride into Colonial Boston and Massachusetts. There are general Massachusetts links from this site, although it is primarily for the Boston area.

Essex County Deeds are on-line - copies of original documents! (Go to Deeds On-Line for the old stuff, the Search function is for modern stuff.)

Essex County Genealogical Society - Providers of the The Essex Genealogist

The Essex Antiquarian - (commercial page) - Published 1897-1909, Index given here, now in the process of being published in 13 volumes.

The Groton Newsletter Page - chock full of information on Groton ancestors.

Billierica Information is available at The New England Yankee Page, shareholder lists and so on.

The Plymouth Colony site - NOT just for Pilgrims... anyone who was from the Plymouth Colony.

The Tisbury and Martha's Vineyard History Page has some interesting material on that area.

The Historic Charlestown, Massachusetts Web Page

ancestry.com has several databases available with lots of genealogical interest. One is the Dictionary of New England Genealogy. They also have a rather large gedcom database contributed by folks, many of which contain descendants, and ancestors, of Massachusetts Bay Colonists. Ancestry.com is a pay service, but reasonable, and worth it, in my books. Some of their databases are free, and they usually have fixed number of free data bases, as well as a rotating list of free data bases.

The New England History and Genealogy Free Books Online Effort is a truly noble effort to place various books on-line, including Mass county histories, vital records and genealogies. The works have all been scanned in and so are therefore copies of the originals, not transcriptions. Although there is a lot of material here, this kind of database is much harder to work with than with ancestry.com or genealogylibrary.com, which are transcribed records.

An Outline of American History: The Colonial Period
 

These pages have an excellent description of the Indian history of New England from 1620-1676 and beyond, with detailed descriptions of the Pequot War and King Philips War.
 

The King Philip's War Page - rosters, genealogies of participants, list of units and battles.

The Narragansett Indians with links to more Indian tribe pages at the bottom of this page.

The Pequots - a detailed description of the Pequot War

The Massasoit Page - including a trancription of a book about the Indians of New England and a genealogy database of the Massasoit Indians.

Here is a one page commentary on life the first year after the Winthrop Fleet Landed. The Early Immigants - Not a Pleasure Cruise, written by the deputy governor of the Colony.

A Typical Apprentice Indenture Agreement shows what both parties were expected to do to fulfill the contract.

The Massachusetts Inquirer is an interesting page. It presents many of the happenings of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a newspaper format. And some of the "articles" will bring a chuckle or two.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was dominated from the beginning by the followers of the Puritan ideals and members of the church. Their influence was diminished going into the 1700's, but, their early success was a key ingredient in the early colonization of America, and their influences, from religious to legal, effect us yet today. Here are some links I have found about Puritans and Puritanism so we may better understand why our ancestors came to American and what they were about.

Our English / Puritan Heritage

 Puritan Jurisprudence: Progress and Inconsistency - A rather scholarly work, the early parts depict an excellent overview of the history of Puritanism.

Ezekiel Richardson's Role in the Anne Hutchinson Affair

Thomas Knowlton to trial for wife overdressing!

The Salem Witch Museum Page - A good place to start your research on this episode in Puritan history

Slavery was indeed in existence in New England with the Puritans. I have found references to slaves in several of my ancestors wills, some giving freedom, some giving property or income for life.
 

Chronicling Black Lives in Colonial New England

Bibliography of Early African American History

New Hampshire's black history, beginning in 1645

Time-line History of Slavery in America, starting in 1640

For a whole bunch of history regarding the History of its neighbor, the Plymouth Colony, but also more links to Massachusetts as a whole, visit:
 

The History of Plymouth by Bradford

The Plymouth Colony History Page.

A Mayflower Study

Caleb Johnson's Mayflower Page

Presidents of the US with Mayflower Lineage

The Plymouth Colony Archive Project has transcriptions of original documents, including the estate papers of my ancestor, William Kemp, father of Patience (Kemp) Seabury.

Research Resources - Many of these are on LDS Film or available from on-line bookstores on Cindy's List

Massachusetts - General

A Surname Guide to Massachusetts Town Histories, by Phyllis O. Longver and Pauline J. Oesterlin. This book was published by Heritage Books in 1993. It is an invaluable starting-point for locating information about early families. It includes references to 250 town histories. There are about 56,000 citations and more than 14,000 surnames.

Here is a commercial site with books on early New England history (I'm not affiliated.)

Library of Congress Collection regarding Massachusetts genealogy Most of these should be findable on an LDS microfilm.

Massachusetts: There She Is--Behold Her, Henry F. Howe. 1960

The Great Migration Begins, Immigrants to New England 1620-1633, Robert Charles Anderson. Detailed of every documented English immigrant to American before the end of 1633, including Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers. Absolutely essential reference for this class of immigrants.

New England's Generation, by Virginia Dejohn Anderson. The Great Migration and the formation of society and culture in the seventeenth century. Citing specific examples of immigrants, the author gets into the lifestyles of the immigrants. Very interesting. Available from the NEHGS.

The New England Historical and Genealogical Society is the richest resource available for New England research. The NEHGR is fundamental to New England research.

A list of Massachusetts church records and the correlating LDS film numbers are at the Massachusetts Congregational Churches.

The National Society of Sons & Daughters of the Pilgrims

Puritanism

 The Making of an American Thinking Class - Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts, by Darren Staloff, Oxford University Press 1998.

The Puritan Experiment New England Society from Bradford to Edwards" by Francis J. Bremer, Revised Edition, University Press of New England 1995

Massachusetts Research Resources

Woburn Record of Births, Deaths, and Marriages from 1640-1873, Edward F. Johnson, 1890 (In some cases, three volumes, in others all three with separate page numbering in one volume). Should be on LDS Film.

History of Woburn, Middlesex Co, Mass, Samuel Sewall, 1868. Should be on LDS film.

Historic Homes and Places and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, William Richard Cutter, A. M. 1908. Should be on LDS film. (Has long and detailed biographies of both the Baldwin and Richardson Families.)

A Surname Guide to Massachusetts Town Histories by Phyllis O. Longver & Pauline J. Oesterlin, Heritage Books, Inc publ 1993

Some Historical Notes

What Was the Saybrook Platform?

Following is an example of what the Saybrook Platform was and how it affected our Puritans forebears, from "The Backus Families of Early New England", by Reno W. Backus, 1966.
 

The church of the New England colonies was generally congregational in organization, each churchgroup being virtually independent, finding its own pastor, and accepting as members only thosewho had been well scrutinized by the membership, and approved by their vote. By 1708, certain leaders in the church felt it was time for a broader organization, to which the individual congregations would be subordinate. A council of delegates, 12 ministers and 4 laymen, met at Saybrook and drew up a plan for regulating the churches, known as the Saybrook Platform, giving dominant power to the ministers. They then managed to get it confirmed by the General Assembly as the law of the colony, but with the proviso that any church dissenting from this might worship in its own way.

The Norwich pastor presented the Platform to his congregation without mentioning the proviso, hoping for acceptance. The church had been of "independent Congregational order....and jealous of extraneous influences, whether civil or ecclesiastical. The members...denied the jurisdiction of magistrates and presbyteries." (78) Hearing their pastor urge acceptance of the Platform, the two Norwich Representatives in the Assembly, Richard Bushnell and Joseph Backus, rose in meeting, vigorously stated their objections to the plan, and told of the proviso permitting them to take independent action. Dissension in the church was long and painful; the pastor was eventually dismissed, a new pastor installed in 1717, and at the same time, the church "renounced the Saybrook Platform as their code of faith."

Return to Top of  Page | Home | Heritage | Fam Histories - Mom's |  Surnames | Other Stuff| What's New | E Mail |

Copyright, Norris Taylor, Jr. 1998