The Mullins Family: Money, Mysteries and the Mayflower

welcome to the Alden house historic sites presentation of the Mullins family money mysteries and the Mayflower with author and historian Kathy Atherton joining us today from Dorking England my name is Desiree mobit and I'm the executive director together with the Alden kindred Board of Directors we preserve and share the legacy of Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla Mullins Alden and their homestead in Duxbury Massachusetts this is one of a series of virtual programs that we will be presenting during this momentous 400th anniversary of the Mayflower journey the story of the Mayflower pilgrims is a story of the Saints and the strangers we're very familiar with the story of the Saints who embarked on the journey for religious reasons this book is the story about six strangers from Dorking where Kathy will take us back in time to the bustling 17th century market town famous for its poultry we meet William Mullins a successful shoe merchant his now-famous daughter Priscilla the rest of the Mullins clan and their neighbor and Weaver Peter Brown it would seem the Mullins family had it all for children prosperous business and a comfortable home from their large house on West Street the teenaged Priscilla could walk out the door to visit numerous artisans and shops so what made a successful man in his 40s who is not a pilgrim cost his life over and take his wife and two youngest children on a risky voyage to the New World Kathy will help us explore this fascinating tale of life love and loss after the talk we encourage you to ask by using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen we also invite you to share your feedback about this program and suggest other programs you'd like to see by emailing director at Alden org and now from across the pond Kathy Atherton will begin her presentation and good afternoon to you this is the really bizarre situation I'm talking to my own computer normally I'd be talking to people that could engage with you and get some sense as to what you know already obviously we can't do that so I'm just going to have to imagine bear with me if there's any scratching at the door that would be my cat trying to get in or out okay so to make a start I don't know how much you know about William Mullins and his party so I'm going to assume it's very little the basic facts are the six people from the small town of Dorking risked everything when they foraged on the Mayflower in 1620 we know who they are they knew we know where they lived and what happened to them when we arrived so in Susannah and I came to put together here I thought this is gonna be pretty easy job pretty straightforward all we need to do really is pull the facts together and show what their lives were like and why they do send it decided to leave uh it didn't turn out to be that simple much of what we thought was known actually turns out to be pure speculation there's material that appears in articles it appears in books but actually there are no facts behind it that the evidence is conflicting or it's non-existent and and much of the mystery is concerning money and that's why I mention that in in the title to this store there's no mystery of course about what happened to the family after their arrival in Massachusetts so I'm really going to concentrate on the before as it were on the town and that they're left what their lives were like in the town and that will hopefully give you some sense of why they might have decided to take this journey there so why did they decide to leave what do we know about the town I'm just going to put a couple of pictures up for you hopefully you can see this screen now okay so talking what do we know about talking in this period well it was known as darking and what you're hopefully seeing in front of you now is a map of talking in 1649 where is talking well it's in the south east of england it's about 27 miles from London so that's a pretty long day's walk it had about 1,400 inhabitants during this period it's got several Mills on the river several inns and it's got a fairly sizable church here lovely little church this is st. Martin's we know that that had been there since before the conquests because it appears in the Doomsday Book this particular church is about 12th century and it's probably where Mullins and his family would have worship and I say probably because that's one of the big mysteries whether or not he was the center and I'll come on to that later now the next site here is probably where Mullins drank now during this period the water is not particularly savory and so people tended to drink a lot of beer it was safer it was quite dilute this in here was originated in the reign of Elizabeth as the Queen's arse by the time Mullins and his family are living and talking it's known as the King's Arms after James the first and it's a stone's throw from that house so you know this is probably his local a very large in in and on the left hand side you can see a pointed roof with a cable and an Oriole window that still remains in the town much of being has gone but that it remains and it has got the initials of the landlord who was landlord when Mullins was living there so that's a direct connection but we still have to the 17th century quite amazing really his name was Edward Goodwin now let's look the King's Arms just a little bit further back down the street we have this building it now bears the name the King's Arms and it's still a historian pub you can still go and drink in there this building would also have been known to Mullins in his family although during his period it was a row of cottages and if you look quite closely I see you can see in the centre ignore the the bricks the brick gable at the end in the stem sir a very low little cottage with with small windows and that has now become a pub so the house which I will come onto as of William William Mullins and it's not mere thoughts who have occupied is right in the commercial center of this town so Dory's quite a small town and this is where business would have done it's a farming it's a rural community this is the market hall sadly we don't have it now but it was there in Mullins day and it survived into the early 19th century above where you can see the windows there that was the town Lockhart the town jail and below was where all the trade was done and that's right in the centre of the town now this town was famous as long ago as Mullins day for the cockles this is particular breeze for the Dorking Cockrum it has five toes it was very well known as a good eating birds and all the farmers in the local area bred them and they were sold at the Thursday market in talking and then those shipped up to London for the tables in in London it was said that you couldn't get a chicken in Dorking so that was big business and just out of interest at just about every organization in Dorking has its logo to this day the five toad chicken so that's just an example of that so all these buildings were wooden framed and they were made using local oak reason for that is to the south of the town it's an area with very thick play that play is very difficult to get wood across it's rock hard in the summer and it's a swamp in the winter to the north you've got the chalk hills they're very steep so if you're building in this area you're using local woods you're not bringing it in from outside and that's quite interesting and quite useful for historians because they were using oak now oak has to be worked within a year otherwise it gets too hard to cut and so we know that any houses that went up using this oak would have gone up within a year of felling and what we can do is we can analyze the tree rings in the Timbers to these houses to tell when they were felled which means we know when they were built and that's absolutely fantastic being able to date things you know to the year so I've got a few examples to show you of the sort of houses that were in the town during Mullins Town at time now this is pear tree cottage it's still there obviously and what you can see the white bit that's all rendered and stuccoed that's the original cottage it will be timber framed it's all been in the field with brick and painted over now but if you look closely you can see that timber framing it's also timber framed you can see on these side I think that's all been renewed because they all looks rather nice and neat and the bay on the left-hand side that we've been added on later it's all nicely time hung so most of these cottages will no low ceilings very small windows no porches this is typical of the town and at the time that the Mullins family would have been living there another rather nice example just around the corner from the Marling's house is this property it's called Leslie cottage we know that was built in 1560 and the reason we know that is that the person who built it got into big trouble digging play out of the river to make the foundations for the house and the problem with digging plays was it muddies the waters for everybody else who's using the water downstream so we can date that house very well and again it's it's a lo small windowed property timber frames there and that would have been well known to Mullins because they would have had to walk down to the river themselves so I've said the transport in and out of this area out of it on foot was very difficult because of this heavy play and this means that it's not a particularly prosperous area when you look at England at the time sorry actually is a fairly isolated area not at all prosperous harvests are very unpredictable and the soil is not great for agriculture so what that would mean for this town was that you know poor soils and bad transport it's not a great place to establish a business it's not a terribly prosperous town and I think that might have been a factor in why Mullins and his family might have wanted it there to leave so before I move on to what we know about family I just going to tell you a little bit about local government because it has it sounds terribly boring but it actually has quite a lot of bearing on what we're able to find out now talking at this time was parts of the manner of talking and that's the local government area what it means is the whole area area is owned by the Duke of Norfolk one of the most powerful Lords in the land he owns land all over the country so he's an absentee landlord he's never actually here but the use of the land and the behavior of the inhabitants in the town and all the surrounding villages were police than they're regulated by the Lord's course and they meet every two or three weeks and when the court met every man and boy had to be there and they were fined if they weren't there and what's great for us as future historians is they kept a fantastic record of the business of the manor so they kept the records of every time somebody died an inherited property because they had to pay a fine to the lord of the manor to inherit that property they kept a record of misdemeanors when people were fined and property transactions if you bought or sold mortgaged a house so we have these fantastic records about anyone who has the money there to be involved in this sort of transaction so this is fantastic for us so that's what we know about the town and that they came from what about the family well here we are William Mullins this is where it starts to get a bit tricky because we know the names of the Dorking party from William Bradford's account we also know it from William Mullins Oh will haha apart from whether we don't have a lot of detail you don't put you know the ages of your family or when they were born into your will so who were they well basically we've got William Mullins the shoemaker we've got his wife Alice we've got his daughter Priscilla that she's thought had been a teenager and we have a younger son called Joseph and people have guessed that he might be anything between an infant to seven or eight years old and then we've got their servant Robert Carter we think that he is under 21 that he's a minor he doesn't sign the paper compact that's probably because he was a youngster and we've got Peter Brown a weaver and they'll come to why I'm including him within the family in a bit so here we are we've got this model of William Allen's it's in the museum in talking here he is dressed in green it's not we associate with Puritan black but you probably all know that the meaning of the words Puritan in the 17th century is very different from what we tend to think when we use the word now we tend to think of people who are very modestly dressed and tend to avoid pleasure but of course it meant something quite different in the 17th century so there he is we have no idea what he looked like off easly but he's holding a pair of shoes there to signify that he's a shoemaker so we're interesting little aside on shoes actually at this point because 17th century shoes turn up all the time in Dorking they're not particularly rare in fact all across England here's an example and this one is found in a window frame not very far from where William Mullins was in business and they were very offer and put into window frames they were put underneath thresholds and they were put chimneys why I expect some some of you are asking well the answer is to ward off evil spirits they're worth in the 17th century a very real belief in the physical presence of evil and of the devil and it was thought that a piece of clothing particularly a shoe put in places where spirits might enter your building would attract the spirits to those shoes or other pieces of clothing because they had imprints of people on them rather than to the human occupants themselves and shoes were thought to be particularly good for this purpose and it was very common particularly to put them in chimneys because you could shut the window you can shut the door you can't shut down the chimney so that was a von rubble entry point so they do turn up all over the place a lovely little example turns up only a few years ago in a village called new decay which is very close and these are 17th century issues so again we've got so connection which is lovely with Mullins his business and seventeenth-century so to return to our and what else do we know about him well we know he was born in sir in 1572 his father was a shoemaker his brother was a shoemaker he grows up during the reign of Elizabeth and of course England at that point is under regular threat of war so as a young man he would have had to do archery practice on the green in the centre of town and he would have been fined for not doing that that had to be done every Sunday after church and we also know that he was fined for not attending the manorial courts that I was talking about earlier in 1595 he was in his early 20s at that point now I don't think we can probably read anything much into ban people were fined even if they actually had pretty good reasons for not attending he may simply have been ill we also know that he had two grown-up children we know that from his will Sarah and William they were married they were settled when their father decided to leave talking and we know that he had a wife and two younger children Joseph and Priscilla and we also know that prior to leaving talking he had a prophecy in the centre of talking and here we are if you ever come to talking you can see this blue Play I find myself particularly miffed by this plaque because it mentions William and it makes no mention whatsoever of Priscilla so obviously for those of you are in the stays you know Priscilla is the main act and she gets no mention here I think we probably ought to rectify that so he owns a prestigious house in the middle of talking and this is a 19th century painting showing the area where that house was now I mentioned the larger in the Kings arms and you can see that that is on the right hand side that building and then on the left-hand size of the picture is punk corner and that's where the town water pump is that's where everyone has to go and get their water and then right in the middle you can see a fairly large property with full pointed roofs and that is the house that we're Mullins owned and it's on the road from Dorking out into Guildford which is the next biggest town it's right in the commercial center of talking is it within walking distance the pump the communal washing place and the sort of premises that surrounds it are the butchers the Baker's the weavers the nether workers the Brewers the tailor's absolutely bang in the commercial heart of the town now I've got a picture coming up here you are and this is the property today now you can see those four Bay's the pitched roofs there now ignore on the right-hand side the extensions that building because that's modern it's quite nicely done fits in quite nicely but it's not original so what you're looking at there is four Bay's that are quite a large prestigious property there you can see at the bottom the shop premises that's very much as it would have been in the 17th century you can see one of those short premises there's actually open to the air now they all would have been like that they have all been extended and power woods so that's not how they would originally have looked they wouldn't also have had the tile hanging that comes along much later but the key thing that I think you'll probably noticed already is the difference between this building and those small rather lowly dwellings and then I showed you earlier you can see this is a bigger building it's quite a prestigious building it's got four storeys so that's quite an impressive building that some he has got there and a building that that would normally have been built for rent to rent out with premises for artisans and shops below and residential accommodation above so that's what we know about Mullins and his time but what we don't know is when did he marry how many wives does he have uh when were his children are born all of which I think a quite crucial bits of information and that might tell us why he decided to take his family across the Atlantic and I always assumed that it was probably his decision rather than the youngsters so that brings us really to the mysteries here and what we know actually raises a lot of questions and Susannah and I set out to tackle them when we started writing this book and this is a quirky little picture that is actually Susannah and I dressed up as as Priscilla and Mullens there a few years ago we've put on her a few years since then setting out on our quest there what don't we know well we don't know where the Alice Mullins was the mother of the two children we don't know where did a shoemaker get the money to buy that prestigious house in the center of town and quite a few questions follow on from that we don't know whether Mullins and Peter Brown were related otherwise you know why is he going and I think the most interesting question is was Mullins a religious separatist or not or did he have sympathies some of those questions are we have managed to to answer and some of them will probably never be answered but I'd like to give you a little sense of how difficult it is to do research in this period and I should say that although I started out life working the 17th century my last 10 or more years of my research has all been in the late 19th and early 20th century so I was slightly out of my depth Susannah ISM a medievalist so she thinks this is all to modern for her and so we did engage the help of Jane with who's who's the archivist talking museum because she can repair the evil lassen and she also can read these 17th century secretary scripts which looks like code otherwise are the difficulties you have his Spelling's there's no standard spelling during the period so Mullins can spell be spelt with an eye it can be spelled with an e it can be spelt Mullins so you know it is it's quite tricky and most of the records that you need to look at are here and here we have arendelle Castle it is a fantastic house or anyone who is being there will never forget it it's about an hour's drive away down in West Sussex it's is a medieval castle an original middle medieval castle it has been restored and it can be visited by the public to research there you have to go and sit in a turret it is freezing cold it's very badly lit I won't even tell you what it is like to go into the cloakroom they're positively medieval and these the Duke of Norfolk's personal records and they're not for public consumption and they go back centuries and so the documents come up and dump you know it's really quite quite interesting but it makes it makes for an interesting experience but it can be quite difficult to track down what you want so this is what doing research in this in this period is like so going on to those questions um was Alice the mother of the children well there's a large age range isn't there between those older children who've grown up and married and the young child Joseph and that has given rise to that suggestion that actually this might be a second marriage and I think that's quite possible that Alice was a second wife and that al that Joe was her child there are real problems with tying down the Mullins children and the dates of his marriages firstly there's a gap in the parish registers in talking for quite a period documents have simply been lost and this happens unfortunately and there is no record of either of his marriages and there are no records of the children's baptism and of course people have left on this and said well obviously what that means is that he didn't baptize his children in the Church of England it means he was a dissenter maybe but a more simple explanation is that he had simply moved out of the area and Caleb Johnson discovers him on a must list in Guildford it's only ten or so miles away so it looks as if at one point he has moved there and then he moves back to talking by that time he's already married and he already has his children there and we don't have the parish records for that period for that particular area so we drawn a blank on the ages of those children there but I think the question of a second marriage is quite an interesting one because it might give us some clues onto some of the other questions there particularly how does a shoemaker a reasonably humble the occupation acquire the money to buy a property as prestigious as this one there now perhaps it's incorrect really to call him a shoemaker my feeling is that he was probably by this time in business trading in shoes rather than being the man who is actually making the shoes he's obviously quite successful he takes a lot of stock with him on the Mayflower he also has money back in England when he leaves he has money to invest in the voyage so where is that money coming from and you know we're wondering whether that comes from a second marriage if he marries a woman of some substance brings that to him and the timing of that would make quite good sense given Joseph's age because if he buys the property which he did in 1612 and he's recently remarried perhaps that has given him you know the extra income to purchase this very expensive property and then he sells it again in 1619 and that's just before he sets off for the colony so if he's recently remarried and he has a young son the two things the purchase of the property and the birth of his young son can come roughly at the same sort of time but it's not clear-cut again it's speculation but there are quite a few other odd things about that property transaction firstly he took on an existing mortgage on the property he bought it in 1612 122 pounds it had a 200 pound mortgage on it that means that he's paying 322 pounds for it that's not as odd as it seems actually because right through until the early 20th century rather than entering into a new mortgage and a new loan agreement every time a new purchaser came along and they quite often took over existing loans so that's not terribly odd but the bigger mystery is when he came to ciliate in 1619 he sold it for 280 pounds which means that he'd actually made a loss on it which is a bit of a puzzle what's he selling in a hurry because he wants to liquidate his assets to invest in the Mayflower venture or was there something else going on and that is a real mystery interestingly Caleb Johnson thinks he got only 100 eighty-four it and we went back to the original records there's a smudge on the ink very inconveniently at that point but we're pretty convinced that it it's 280 so again you know why is he selling for 280 and we'll never find out that unfortunately it may be that it's part of a chain of transactions and the money was actually coming to him elsewhere it might also have been that he was selling to family and the bottle family who bought the property from him was certainly reasonably related slightly their distance but perhaps there's something of that nature going on it's very frustrating because you feel that there's something more of a story here that we just just can't get the information on there with the key that question I think rebalance is not financial but it's physical did the family actually live here and people always ask me when I do guided tours and in which bits are they living and my next slide actually shows you the Mullins coffee house and there which is one of the businesses which is one of the parent one of the bays there and people very keen that actually the family lived there and I do absolutely hate to disappoint everybody because we really don't know we have no idea and there's another slight fly in the ointment is that when he bought this property it was said to be occupied it was rented out so there is a possibility that Mullins owned this property but he never occupied it himself perhaps it was always rented out and that would immensely disappoint everyone if everyone that came tonight it's extremely unlikely that it ever will because there are no records of occupiers there tend to be records of owners so we assume that he occupied at least some of but you know we can't be sure on that fact so that is quite frustrating that as far as as we can go on that so moving on to that the third question that I raised which was Wow William Allen's and piece brown related and this is for every likelihood that they were Caleb Johnson accidentally came across Peter Brown and John Brown in the talking parish records which was just by an amazing piece of luck because as you can imagine searching for someone with the surname of Brown which is incredibly popular in England there were probably Browns in every parish of the country there are probably Peter Browns in this period in numerous parishes that we could claim is the pizza brown but Caleb Johnson came across a piece of brown with a younger brother John and interestingly they seem to have lots of family connections with the Mullins family and we do set them all out in the book it looks very much as if the reason that Brown went is because he was very close to the moments family in fact his cousins owned property nearby to Mullins and it's it's even possible that actually Mullins wife was Peter Browns arm so he would have been crossing the Atlantic with family so the key final question that we really wanted to get to the bottom of is Ross Mullins and his family a religious separatist did they have similar beliefs to the lied and contingent rejecting the structures of the Church of England the prayer book the priesthood in favor of a more pure religion based on on the word of the Bible I you know why are they leaving because they've been repeatedly fined for not attending church and possibly because their business was being impacted and by their religious position I think that's the key question that everyone would like an answer to so as I've said people tend to latch on to the lack of marriage and baptism records at San Martin's to say well obviously that wraps it up it does in a sense but where records are patchy and people moved around it doesn't really prove anything at all other factors temps just that actually enjoyed quite high status in the town you know he wasn't doing badly he owned this very prestigious property he had multiple business interests his will shows that he still got assets in England even when he sails he's acting as executor witnessing Wills for other family members in 1604 he also stands as a tithing man which is a position of some responsibility in the town and for his neighborhood which makes him responsible for the good behavior of others you know he takes his turn at that role which is unlikely if he was being fined for non-attendance of church or if he was a known radical and so that would tend to undermine this but there are some other unknowns that perhaps might back off this theory that he really was religious in 1616 he appears before the Privy Council now we tend to think that that is very serious if something London it's in front of ministers of state that it must have been a serious criminal offence but actually not so at the time it could have been religious it could have been criminal it could have been a civil matter of business matter so he could have been called up you know simply for a property or business of this view and we really wanted to do what we could to get to the bottom of this and we sent Jane up to the National Archives which is almost perineum opposite from arendelle Castle in terms of a very comfortable well-organized place to research but she still comes up with nothing the Privy Council records for that period simply don't exist it was explained to her that they had a clear-out sometime in the 19th century to make more room which is really frustrating for us today 1619 he comes before the Surrey Assizes and their records look rather more hopeful so we send Jane down to Winchester in great hope and what she can find out there must have been some kind of criminal case what what was he a volte once again she draws a blank because whatever case Mullins was called for was dropped and when they dropped a case they dropped all records of it they didn't record that the case was or why it was dropped and so in both cases we drew a complete blank and we don't think we will ever get to the bottom of what was going on and what these two cool cases were about and so the temptation is to surmise that both of those brushes with the law were on account of failure to attend church or dissemination of banned literature something like that but there's absolutely no evidence at all and so we have to bear in mind that he was a businessman and he had many dealings and any one of his business dealings might have led to some kind of legal dispute so it's quite a danger to much where we've got no evidence at all so that brings us to if he wasn't religious then why might he have decided to risk this very perilous journey and I tend to be quite cautious and I don't like to impose any sort of motives to him other than what we know and what we do know is it took 21 dozen pairs of shoes so that's 250 - I think pairs of shoes and some boots with him now did he see a business opportunity you know he's living in a town that is not terribly thriving if this colony is successful he would have been one of the tradesmen there of course everybody needs shoes he took a share in the company he's likely to make a decent profit once this colony starts shipping back at first or timber my own feeling and I think Susanna's as well is that he must have had some sympathy with the religious separatists and their beliefs I don't think he could have agreed to sail with them under the terms that they're proposing unless he had some sympathy I think with their with their beliefs and their wish and to live the sort of life that they believe that the Bible required them but we know that there were tensions between those who put money in and the Leiden separatists so I think it's only too far to assume that religion was his primary religion so I'm sorry if you think that I've kind of recited a category of failure really to answer most the questions that we set ourselves and our investigations have left us with as many questions as answers but some that is the nature of research in this period so I'm just going to finish off really with summarizing what we what we do know and that is what happened to the family and to Peter Brown on their arrival in Massachusetts because I can't assume that everybody who's listening does actually know that so forgive me if you do Mullens his wife and his son and his servant all died pretty soon after arrival they didn't survive that first winter that left only Priscilla and the Weaver Peter Brown alive at the end of that first winter my name's clearly knew he was dying because he wrote his will and this is a copy of his will it's not very clear it's in this unreadable and secretary and script of the period it was pretty unusual amongst the colonists to have will dictated and I think it underlines how prosperous he was because not only did her did he have his share in the colony the property that he'd taken out there but he also has money in Indians and money that was owed to him back in England so he needed a will that could be proved back in England and so that his son and daughter could claim his property there obviously there's no legal structure set up yet in the colony colony so they're still subject to English legal structures so that will goes back on the Mayflower when it returns there so we know that he left his money to his wife and to his two children and of course his wife and Joseph didn't survive him his oldest son interestingly back in England did eventually travel to the colony in 1636 that's fifteen years later and he brought Sarah who was monks granddaughter and she married three times in the colony so the only one of month children never to end up in Massachusetts was his daughter Sarah he's remained in England as far as piece of Browns concerned we know that he married a widow Martha Ford she arrived in the colony and one of the later boats she had a newborn baby and a young child and her husband had either died on the voyage or very shortly afterwards Peter Brown married settles they had two children of their own before she died he married again and had another two children he survived 13 years in the colony so obviously he then leaves quite a large family of small children and stepchildren and we know and that he was joined in in the colony of by his brother John also we've only know that because he took charge of 2 Peter Brown's daughters and perhaps not surprising you for a weaver he had a large stock of shaping economy and he called one of his daughters Priscilla and my initial thought was he must have named her after Priscilla Mullins they know the only other survivor from that talking party but actually looking back in through the brown family that named Priscilla crops up time and time again which is another factor that leads us to believe that they were all related because it's not a terribly common name and certainly wasn't at the time what happened to Robert Carter the servants well we know that he was a young boy and we also know from mullings will that his master was pretty disappointed with him he asks the elders of the community to keep an eye out for him so I don't think that the relations between them was were terribly good in the end they didn't have to because he followed his masters the grave fairly soon afterwards so that leaves Priscilla left alone one of by the end of that winter only one of four five adult women in that colony of 50 people all the rest and adult males and children and that's because there were far more male passengers on the Mayflower many families took their own servant men servants and many families left the women and children behind to join at a later date and that first winter took a greater toll on the women passengers than the male passengers so she's one of only four or five and one of the only marriage able women in that colony and of course you have got a large number of bachelors and widowers looking for wives and mothers for their children so that leaves her is quite a can it's really because not in only is she were the most eligible women but some she has her father's money and of course that will bring her husband considerable status I think in the colony and I think it's interesting but she didn't choose to marry one of the older more accomplished more established men in the in the colony but the ships Cooper the young John Alden so she must have seen and something in him and the rest as they say is his history of course they went on to have ten children absolutely fundamental to the establishment of the colony you know was populating it hence our title really to the book there Priscilla Muller mother of a nation and that's where I will finish I hope that that has answered some of your questions and giving you a bit of an insight into you know how we went about the research and and doesn't disappoint you too much at what we couldn't find out now see thank you so much so it was absolutely fascinating there have been many comments that are being posted and at this time we do encourage you to type your questions into the Q&A section there which you find at the bottom so we're gonna try to go do a little back and forth letting I get the fun of just asking the questions Kathy has to answer them so bear with us as we go ahead and get started here alright so what the first one up here is what in the will surprised you I think it surprised me actually um how much he had to leave actually yeah because I saw the well fairly early on before it started to look at the property scenario and the law sums of money that we were talking about it also surprised me that he seemed to have some SS back in England and that made me wonder about his thinking it still makes me wonder because the economy's up to there had been fairly unsuccessful after the Mayflower colony and others colonies became established there seemed to be a lot of traffic then going back and forth between England and Massachusetts we know that Mullins his son came out and then he went back again I'm wondering was he expecting to stay in the colony or was he expecting to set up and actually return you know that he had left some you know some debts and property in England and so next one how many shoemakers were in Dorking around 1619 around the time that they left the offices of that question is that we can't possibly know it's a very difficult one because the earliest map that we have of talking is from 1649 which is thirty years afterwards which has a lot of best sort of information on it who owns lands what their names are often what their occupations are that's obviously thirty years later and so we really can't tell and the difficulty with dealing with these sort of records is as I was saying if your own land it's being recorded in these court records if you are quite committing a misdemeanor or a crime it's being record if you're going about your day to day business it's not getting into trouble and you know not buying and selling property then you just disappear from the record so it's impossible to say so another comment actually here is do you know if they're in descendants of her sister Sara who stayed back in England um no we do but we have people on the case we have people in talking now who are trying and the difficulty yes you know how exponentially you know this genealogy works through the generations but we have people who are trying to find that how brilliant if we can yeah some requests for the photos your beautiful photos that you included in this from some of the I I do want to mention that they are published in the book and if you want to get a copy of the book I'll mention this again through special arrangements we have copies that Kathy is shared and they are available on the Alden website but Kathy you may have another way that you can share some of the photos um yes I mean indeed we've got the JPEGs of the photos I'm not quite sure how to how to facilitate that I mean yeah yes I don't know if people could get in touch with you we could we can work that out sure sure and other questions for you as well so here's how about any what's your thought about truth in that in the Longfellow poem oh yes yeah I mean I didn't talk about that at all that's right I mean it's supposed to be a family story passed passed down the generations who knows there may be some truth I have to say that Longfellow is a storyteller by nature isn't he you know that's his that's his work so it could be all complete fantasy or it could be that there was a germ in there he has taken and embellished yeah so how about do you know if there any places in Massachusetts to access their family records and this is written by an ancestor mmm no I'm sorry I I do that I have to say I'm not I'm not a genealogist myself so I tend to be quite reliant I've been we've been quite reliant on help for others on this I'm quite good once you get into census records and we you know in 40s but I'm out of my depth you know right I think um you know going to the Massachusetts historic archives might be a good thought for you know maybe some of that at least for the 17th century so can you provide a little more history the shoes are very interesting Kathy can you provide a little more history of shoes in the walls yeah it's absolutely fascinating isn't it that the first time I came across there you know I'd never heard of it at all and now they crop up you know all over the place you know and the museum we had a bag full of them at one point you know they pop up all over there's a project run I think my Leicester University which are trying to record every instance whenever they turn up and it went on right through into the 20th century it's a superstition that building I think they probably by then didn't even know why they were doing it and you still find build us doing odd things like that even today and it wasn't just shoo some slightly more gruesome was to bury a cat's under the threshold and was commonly done as well so it's not unusual in those that these old buildings when they're being real renovating the building will come and say we've just found cat bones under the threshold but I think the idea I've been told by someone who's made a study of this with shoes is unlike other clothes the shoes really retain the imprint of the occupant you know they take the shape and so that's why they were felt to be more effective tracting spirits yeah here's an interesting question could Priscilla possibly have lived with Peter the Peter Brown family after the loss of her family I think he was single though still at that no no Linda I think food records who she went to live with and it might have been William Bruce I can't remember what's on my head but it is it is in in the book it is recorded who she went to live with yeah she was left alone so do we know what Alice's maiden name was no no we don't because we had we don't have that marriage record that's the frustrating thing and the interesting research that Caleb Johnson does you know he comes up with an Alice in this family who appears well has been widowed and you know he one of the things he surmises is that she might be the Alice who married Mullins but because we don't know Alice's maiden name there's nowhere we can go with that another question about what became a William's father and brother who were also shoemakers any information about them uh I had I can't quite recall whether it's known when they died or not I'm not I'm not entirely sure they certainly don't seem to have have followed William oh no I'm not sure with their deaths are known if Mullins was looking at the colonies only as a business venture wouldn't he have left his family in England and you know that which was pretty common is that and is that you know she just wanted to know if that was correct yeah yes yes a lot of those who traveled when and set up themselves expecting things to bring their families over and he didn't know them is a fair point yes so back to was the interest in the month William getting you know his brush with the law there's a question about the clink is saying that Mullins was locked up there and can you comment on that is it true no it's not true no I all right so what else can be told about Priscilla's brother William did he remain in the colony and are there records of his descendants okay yes yes he had no descendants yes he did and he married in the colony and one is to have had no children and similarly his daughter Sarah who is Mullins his granddaughter married three times in the colony but had no children another do you know of the ancestry of the Mullins and how far back can you go I don't because it was beyond the remit of what we wanted to do in this book I do know of one person in England who has attempted to do that Jane who as I say is the museum's archivist is a little bit dubious about some of his research so I don't think we have anything that is you know conclusive and it is very difficult once you get back to these periods to actually you know once you're out or you know the 19th century where you've got your censuses and very clear birth marriage and death records it is really difficult so no I can't comment on that what what was the inspiration for this research and the book yeah it was really I mean we've always known about this story in Dorking and I lead guided walks in Dorking and it's always a big feature and the anniversary was coming out and we thought there is nothing actually in print that tells the whole story there's a couple of lines in the book here couple of lines in the leaflets here we need something that brings that together I was very dubious that that was actually enough to say but once we started looking at it in fact there was nothing really in print about what donkey was like in itself in the permeate so it was an opportunity to look at the town to look at what remains of Mullins talking as well that's been that great offshoot from it is that we now do specifically Mullins Mayflower related guided walks where we take people around to see all these old houses that often people have lived in the town because they're down the side street there so we never being down here we had no idea that there is a beautiful old cottage so it was an opportunity to look at the period and the tower as as a whole so they're always the inspiration for it and I'm really glad that we did it now because of the idea later this year is that we'll do an exhibition about the town in 1620 rather than simply retelling the Mullins story that's covered in the museum anyway and look at what people were eating what people were wearing tying all those aspects of the town's history in yeah so it's it's one of those things that was sprung on us but has been really fortuitous and everybody affecting donkeys got terribly excited about it well I can tell you and having read the book that the maps that you included you know just really brought the 17th century home you know of a town at that time is so helpful so again back to the shoes why did William bring so many shoes and boots on the Mayflower and was he expecting to sell them to the other colonists well I think he must have been you know you don't need that many pairs of shoes for a family of her six so clearly there's no other reason was that he was expecting to sell them it actually does make a lot of sense everybody is going to need shoes you can't work you can't farm you can't put up houses if you're not properly sure particularly you know well I suppose they didn't know what climate they were going into because they were actually fixed up in the wrong place but but even so and you know thinking about it everybody when they landed it's all hands on deck isn't it to all the houses to plant you don't want your shoemaker away making shoes surely it makes more sense that he comes with the supply of shoes and then he able bodied men who can work and that was my supposition that he has a shorter stock of shoes that don't see them through that first period while they're getting established happy we've always wanted to go into Priscilla's closet to see what she had for footwear another question here are you a descendant of the Mullins no I'm not even talking born and bred I'm James Sussex further south so so here's a question actually this is from Pauline Kizer she's our board president the picture you paint about Williams life suggests he's not just a shoemaker he seems to be an intrapreneur with many irons in the fire do you think this helps explain why he would take such a risk and go on this journey yes I think I think it does you know he's described off the mr. shoemaker but if shoemakers suggest the guy who's sitting there making the shoes you know he's got this huge premises he's got money all over the place um either he's married money or he's been very successful and if he's been successful at what he does it would suggest that his entrepreneurial you know that he's probably taking some risks in his life yeah maybe this was another one hmm the will was signed by a Thomas really who is he um check that because I think yes that's the that's the oddity about the will because it was witnessed by the ship's surgeon the ship's captain no I don't think anybody knows who Thomas Ridley is I think it might have been something like the person who who copied it yeah it's a bit of a mystery because there are two copies of the will one has Thomas Ridley mentions and the other one doesn't so it might simply be the secretary at the Probate Registry or its equivalent at the time so let me just take a quick look oh so here's another question about the tourism the great deal of tourism in Dorking now to visit the Mullins house on which your book states is the last known standing house of a Mayflower passenger and you mentioned that wonderful tour that you now offer so has that brought a lot of other tourists of an interest to your town well yes if we want a look down I think yeah I mean we started the Mayflower tours in November December of last year and we found that you know people were coming down from London which was you know it's quite a surprise it's really they don't feel normal you know talking tours we're also getting interest from people who are over from the states and they've checked into the the Mayflower 4/100 website and they just you know email on spec as to whether there's someone who can take them out so yeah fact we had a whole schedule of tour was on sale for the whole summer into the autumn which all have had to be canceled now so we're cancelled right up till the first of July and then we'll we'll have a rethink and see whether it will be possible to restart them again but yeah so far everyone had sold out which is absolutely lovely but they will restart and they will be something that we won't just do this year yeah it's the re anniversary this year but we will continue to offer them so we're was the will storage when it went back on the Mayflower and was it you known since that time has no where is it where did it go I was probated yeah all right now I'm not sure exactly what the process I know what the process for probate is now I'm not sure exactly what the process was then but probate would have been granted and this is the other odd thing that I didn't mention is one of these copies says the probate was granted to his daughter and one says that it was granted to his son very odd we can't get to the bottom of that one either and they are now in the National Archives so whoever dealt with the program at that time it's gone down through the centuries and it's been deposited in in the National Archives which is why we can we can see it now so did any of John and Priscilla's ten children become shoemakers so like their grandfather I can tell you that I think one of them was a Cooper I have not heard about a shoemaker perhaps future research may may be reveal that information so oh here's a good one for you Cathy about Dorking tourism any suggestions on where to stay when vacationing in Dorking after this is all over and so we can walk and enjoy that is walk in the footsteps of those pilgrims I will add that probably be pleased with me for saying so but there's an ancient in in the center of town called the white horse it has a 15th century Timbers inside the outside is mainly 18th century it's got lots of character and it's within walking distance of Melinda's house so that's probably the obvious place to stay yeah nice character I can definitely tell you though that you have to have coffee and cake in that Mullin shop we've had a sample of that that was brought to the United States especially and it was just delightful so we highly recommend it I think we've gone through there's so many questions Cathy which we will share with you but I think we've touched on most all of them again we do want to tell you that this book is available for sale it is offered through Alden org the website again it's a very special courier surface that we have in these days right now Kathy very kindly has helped so much to make that happen I want to thank you so much for just this fascinating presentation we've been so excited to be able to share this the minute we first heard about this book I also want to thank our board member Terry Reiber who's been literally behind the screens making all of this happen encourage you all to keep checking out our website for future talks we are offering another one in two weeks interestingly named the wicked pilgrim and again thank you all so very much

Channel: Terry Reiber

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Id: gLRJaLx9pRU

Length: 70min 42sec (4242 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020