TILLEY

The Mayflower Story

 

Millions of people around the world can trace their ancestry to the 102 crew and passengers of the Mayflower, according to an exclusive club that admits them as members. Yet although two Tilley brothers, their wives and the teenaged daughter of one of them completed the hazardous voyage from Europe to the New World in 1620, we Tilleys are barred from membership.

 

The two Tilley brothers, John and Edward, and their wives died in the severe winter they encountered on the wild coast of what later came to be known as New England, and the direct line of descendants ended with their deaths, probably from pneumonia.

 

Members of the Mayflower Society must prove a direct male line of succession from the original settlers. Help in tracing their ancestry is offered at the Mayflower Museum in the US harbour town of Plymouth, where the Mayflower is said to have anchored, and I headed here one afternoon from Boston hoping to find evidence that one of the Tilley brothers had perhaps left a male heir.

 

My hopes were dashed by the Museum’s curator, a brisk little lady who told me the bad news with a sad sigh. “You’ve come a long way in vain,” she said, after consulting an ancient tome containing biographical details about the crew and passengers of the Mayflower.

 

“Not as far as those other Tilleys,” I was tempted to respond, but she added a bright note to our conversation by assuring me that subsequent voyages must have brought many Tilleys to the US, where our family name is well represented, particularly in New England.

 

John and Edward Tilley and their two wives, Anne and Elizabeth, fell early victims to the bleak conditions of a life they had hoped would give them a new beginning. Even before stepping aboard the Mayflower, they had been outcasts, fundamental protestants from Bedfordshire who had fled to Holland and joined a like-minded group called the Leyden Congregation. Harassed by the restored Catholic monarchy in England and shunned by most Dutch, they raised enough money to buy a boat and cover the expenses of a voyage to America.

 

They finally set off from the English port of Plymouth in September 1620, undeterred by the prospect of arriving in a strange, inhospitable land as winter approached. They dropped anchor off Cape Cod in November 1620 and were forced to live through the winter aboard the Mayflower, suffering freezing temperatures, sickness and a lack of fresh food..

 

In the spring, they ventured onto land and built their first settlement, a stockaded hamlet of log cabins, each with a vegetable garden and an outside bread oven. The original settlement — the Plymouth Plantation — has been reconstructed as an open-air museum, peopled at weekends by drama students from Boston dressed in “pilgrim” wear and showing visitors around in broad English rural accents.

 

I stopped at one small cabin, where a young woman in long fustian dress was working in the garden with a hoe.

 

She put aside her hoe and greeted me in accents very close to the Somerset dialect of my youth.

 

“G’day, good sir. And how be you this fine day?”

 

I joined in the charade and asked her if she knew the late John Tilley’s daughter, Elizabeth

 

“Indeed, good sir,” she replied. “And how is it that you know her?”

 

I continued with the amusing exchange, asking if I could perhaps visit Elizabeth.

 

This rather threw her, but she thought rapidly and told me: “Elizabeth is now a Howland. She married John Howland (another Mayflower passenger) some time ago and lives in the big house on the hill. She did very well for hersen (sic). She might be there now if you care to call.”

 

She indicated where I could find the “big house” and I set off up the hill, which was crowned by a large, squarely built clapboard structure. It was now a museum and a plaque on an outside wall informed visitors it was the oldest house in Plymouth. It was locked and there was no sign of life.

 

“Well, at least one Tilley found a comfortable new life in America,” I thought, retracing my steps down the garden path to the bustling little town below.

 

Robert Tilley (1938-2015)