ARE YOU A DESCENDANT OF THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS?

Are you a descendant of a Pilgrim? A project to digitize and index the authenticated genealogies of Mayflower passengers has been completed and is available online. The project, from the New England Historic Genealogical Society, includes 193,000 birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial records through five generations of 50 of the 51 Pilgrims known to have descendants. The database includes authenticated information on more than 59,000 people, descended from the small band of Mayflower passengers who survived the first brutal winter in their new home in Plymouth, Massachusetts, including John Alden, William Bradford and Myles Standish. There are an estimated 10 million living Americans and as many as 35 million people worldwide who descended from the Pilgrims. There’s a video on the site to show you how to navigate the program.
– Here are some celebrities who are descendants of the Pilgrims: Alec Baldwin, Humphrey Bogart, Matt Damon, John Cena, Ellen DeGeneres, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zac Efron, Jodie Foster, Richard Gere, Avril Lavigne, Christopher Lloyd, Sarah Palin, Meryl Streep, Taylor Swift.
(database here: https://mayflower.americanancestors.org/pilgrim-database)
* They’re called Pilgrims because they were all pretty grim, and they were all pills.
* Wait – they only just finished the database? Then how did John Wayne know all those people he ran into were Pilgrims?
* The entire gigantic database is free to use. Somebody screwed up big time!
* That one Pilgrim who has no known descendants? That would be Ernest Goodlay. “Weird Ernie” they called him.
* Why did the Pilgrim’s pants keep falling down? Because his belt buckle was on his hat.
* By the way, there was a second ship called Mayflower that brought settlers to America on four different trips between 1629 and 1639, and if you’re a descendant of one of those, the New England Historic Genealogical Society invites you to pound sand.