Our Thanksgiving and Mayflower Heritage.

Short Version:
Thanksgiving is especially meaningful to our family because two of our direct ancestors were in attendance at the First Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621. Three of our ancestors, William White, his pregnant wife Susannah, and their five-year-old son Resolved came on the Mayflower. These ancestors come through the Whitlock line. Susannah delivered her baby boy, Peregrine, December 2, 1620 aboard the Mayflower while it was still anchored off to top of Cape Cod. Peregrine was the first English child to be born. William died during the winter and Susannah married Edward Winslow a few months later, being the first marriage to occur at Plymouth.

Long Version:
The Pilgrims, who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America, were fleeing religious persecution in their native England. In 1609 a group of Pilgrims left England for the religious freedom in Holland where they lived and prospered. After a few years their children were speaking Dutch and had become attached to the Dutch way of life. This worried the Pilgrims. They considered the Dutch frivolous and their ideas a threat to their children's education and morality.

So they decided to leave Holland and travel to the New World. Their trip was financed by a group of English investors, the Merchant Adventurers. It was agreed that the Pilgrims would be given passage and supplies in exchange for their working for their backers for 7 years.
Originally there were two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower. The Speedwell left the Netherlands on July 22 to join the Mayflower in England. The Speedwell took on water so after many problems many of its passengers boarded the over-crowed Mayflower for the trip to America. By Sept. 6, 1620 when the Pilgrims left, many had already been living aboard ship for a month and a half. They sailed from Plymouth, England and aboard were 44 Pilgrims, who called themselves the "Saints", and 66 others, whom the Pilgrims called the "Strangers." Our direct ancestors were among the “Saints” from Leiden in the Netherlands.

The long trip was crowded, cold, and damp and took 65 days. Since there was the danger of fire on the wooden ship, food had to be eaten cold. Many passengers became sick and one person died by the time land was sighted about November 10. They were supposed to settle further south at the mouth of the Hudson River but a terrible storm kept them north. They spent the next month and a half exploring the Cape Cod area and on Christmas Day decided to stay in that area. Of 102 passengers on the Mayflower, nearly half of them died that first winter but none of those remaining chose to return to England in the spring.

Susanna gave birth to son Peregrine December 2, 1620 while the Mayflower was still anchored off the top of Cape Cod waiting for the Pilgrims to discover a place to build their colony. William died 21 February 1620/1 (double dating) in Plymouth, on the same day as three other passengers, including William Mullins. His wife Susanna remarried to Edward Winslow a few months later on 12 May 1621, being the first marriage to occur at Plymouth. Susanna was one of only four adult women to have survived to see the "First Thanksgiving" at Plymouth that autumn. Susanna died sometime after 1654, when she is mentioned in her husband's will.

Resolved White came on the Mayflower at about the age of five, with parents William and Susanna. He was raised by step-father Edward Winslow following the death of his father William and remarriage of his mother in 1621. They moved to Marshfield in the 1630s, and later moved to Scituate where he married Judith Vassall, the daughter of William and Ann (King) Vassall. Resolved White moved his family back to Marshfield in the early 1660s, and Judith died and was buried there on 3 April 1670. He then remarried to the widowed Abigail Lord in 1674 in Salem, was a soldier in King Philip's War of 1676, and became a freeman in Salem in 1680 before moving back to Marshfield a couple years later. He died sometime not too long after 1687, presumably in Marshfield.

There is much information on the internet about the Mayflower and those families if you have interest, including a picture of the cradle which William and Susannah brought over on the Mayflower for Peregrine.