Category Archives: AMB Origins

Make Time for Plimoth Plantation

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Erin Taylor, December 2014

Ask Kristin. I am a curmudgeon of tourist. I sneer at the gift shops, recoil at the fellow visitors replete with whining teenagers and their fanny-packed parents. So, as we planned our trip to Plymouth, I dreaded the notion of visiting Plimoth Plantation on a Saturday in November. I’m all for historic preservation, but seriously questioned the quality of historic reenactments. For the record, “Plimoth” is the spelling Governor Bradford used in his history of the colony.

Attitude, camera, and notebook in hand, I headed down to the 1627 “authentic” Plimoth village and was immediately smitten. Kudos to the nonprofit Plimoth Plantation for an engaging and transformative experience. I was especially impressed with the reenactors and their training (a new source of fascination for Kristin and myself). If there is an international standard for reenacting history, I’d wager Plimoth is setting it. Do visit – with your children or students especially – and live some American history.

Various images fr Plimoth Pnatation

Plimoth Plantation Nov 2014

Certainly, the museum needs to fund itself so there is the usual array of retail – ye old tyme thermal mug, authentic colonial fudge (cocoa wouldn’t be seen in New England for at least another century). But these are kept at a tasteful distance from the reenactment sites. And, in full, ashamed disclosure, I skipped the Wampanoag village (Native American) as I was so intent on spending time in a home similar to Alice Martin Bishop’s.

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Team Pilgrim vs. Team Puritan

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Pilgrims and Puritans are not interchangeable terms, nor is one a subset of another. They shared a common faith, the Anglican Church (aka Church of England) and, as colonial neighbors, often collaborated. Both believed in purifying and simplifying Anglican practices and that Scripture was the guiding source for a community’s moral codes. Both groups also advocated literacy, so that each person could read the Bible.

Pilgrims settled Plymouth Colony beginning in 1620 with the arrival of the Mayflower. They continued to settle Plymouth towns into the 1630s.

Puritans were the founding families of Massachusetts Bay Colony (Arriving 1630 onward, Boston, western Massachusetts and into Connecticut.).

Pilgrims insisted state and church should be separate, and were known as Separatists. To be clear, as an astute reader pointed out, the Pilgrims earned the name Separatists because they had dissociated with the church of England — not simply over their stance that church and state not bleed into one another’s activities.  At this point, we can’t go much further without clarifying a few things. Not all passengers on the Mayflower were religious dissidents. The passengers who left England to separate from the Church of England referred to themselves as Saints. The Saints referred to the other passengers as Strangers. For our purposes here, we’re referring to both groups as Pilgrims. 

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Alice’s Arrival

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Erin Taylor & Kristin Luce, August 2014

Aside from the obvious mystery as to why Alice murdered her child, the questions that keep us up at night are who were Alice Martin Bishop’s (AMB) parents and from where and when did she emigrate? Unfortunately, we simply don’t know. Not until 1646 were Plymouth towns ordered to record every birth, death, and marriage (Davis, 83), and so we’re fortunate to have a record of Alice’s marriage to George Clarke in 1639 and to Richard Bishop in 1644. But where was she in the years before her first marriage? Considering the vast scouring done, across multiple centuries, to locate Plymouth records, we must concede we’ll likely never know the parentage, birth date, and birth location for AMB. This is the part of her story where we have to make our best educated guesses. I already issued a mea culpa for positing that AMB was the daughter of Christopher Martin and Marie Prower, who came over on the Mayflower and died that first winter. And while AMB-as-Mayflower-orphan can’t be definitively disproved, there are other, more likely scenarios for AMB’s existence in late 1630s Plymouth Colony.

Before we explore those scenarios, let’s step back and look at some numbers. According to Martin E. Hollick on the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) website, between the years 1620 and 1640, about 20,000 English men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic to settle New England. Of those crossings, we have exactly zero official passenger lists. “What lists we do have were reconstructed by careful analysis of other sources, such as letters, diaries, court records, port books, licenses to travel overseas, admiralty records, and other state papers. However, as a rule, finding the specific ship for any emigrant to New England in the seventeenth century is the exception and not the rule” (AmericanAncestors.org).

Not satisfied with those odds, we continue to look for anyone named Alice Martin (or even something similar), but as of August 2014, we are still batting .000. We have a couple of potential George Clarkes, although they aren’t perfect fits, and a Salem-residing Richard Bishop who reminds us that, unless your ancestor had a really unique name, you often need more verifiable evidence. That’s why we’re thankful for ancestors named Sally Sixkiller and Dorcas Buckminster — they make our work much easier!

Most emigrants came over as part of a family. We assume AMB didn’t have any family in Plymouth because we haven’t found anything in the Plymouth Court Records or other primary sources that link her (or the orphaned Abigail Clarke) to other Martins. But it is very unlikely that a young, single woman, using her own financial resources, could have set off for the New World on her own. So how DID she get here?

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Lessons from Ancestry.com

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Kristin Luce, July 2014

Is this a likeness of Alice Martin Bishop? Many of our Martin cousins on Ancestry.com think so. And though some of those researchers obviously believe the curls, velvet choker, lace collar, and earrings all scream 1630s Puritan New England, I’m thinking, um, no.

AMB_photo

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Ancestry members who include Alice Martin Bishop (AMB) on their trees, and some of this information is legitimate — for example, many people include scans from the Plymouth Court Records (PCR) that document the investigation into her daughter Martha’s death and AMB’s subsequent conviction. Other documents that appear frequently are relevant pages from The Sutton Family website, the memorial found on Findagrave.com, and some of Erin’s earlier posts from this blog. But I’m struggling to figure out which Ancestry sources I can trust — many contradict each other — as I look for clues to Alice Martin Bishop.

One representative tree I looked at included a number of potential eureka items. Besides the photo above, this specific researcher (let’s call him Bradford101) included the photo below, and I wondered how he figured out that Alice Martin’s family came from the town of Billericay. So I looked at his other sources, to see if those offered any clues.

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Nobody’s Daughter

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Erin Taylor, June 2014

Fear not the things thou suffer most.
-Governor William Bradford

History isn’t brain surgery.
Even when it’s done poorly, it’s not fatal.
-Jill Lepore

In the 2011 edition of this blog, I worked from the presumption that Alice Martin Bishop (AMB) was the daughter of Mayflower passengers Christopher Martin and Marie Prower, and that theory colored all of the contextual sources I brought to telling her story. Notably, I started with the assumption that she was a 4-year-old Mayflower orphan, the only surviving child of the despised Christopher Martin, forgotten in the records but somehow folded into another Plymouth Colony family. I needed to make meaning out of her life beyond the brief, documented months between the murder of her daughter Martha Clarke and the resulting trek to the hanging tree.

Eager, amateur genealogists make mistakes and I made a big one. First, I need to apologize to anyone I led astray. Second, I want to deconstruct how I made that mistake.

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