Dear Ava,
As promised, I am writing a blog post just for you regarding your/our ancestor, Degory Priest. I am posting links here to other outlets for the detailed history behind the Mayflower and the Pilgrims; Pilgrims because they were foreigners going to a foreign land. Puritans because they were former Catholics who believed the church needed to be reformed, that it had strayed far beyond what Christ taught and His Biblical principles:
Degory Priest had married Sarah Allerton (sister of Isaac Allerton) in Holland and had two daughters. In 1620 he left his family behind and came aboard the Mayflower to journey to the New Land. His intent was to build a house and help establish the new colony before his wife and two daughters joined him.
However, Degory Priest was among many of the Mayflower passengers who died that first winter. His date of death is believed to be 11 January 1620. But his death came AFTER he signed the Mayflower Compact. The photos I’ve included are from 2023 (I think) when Aunt Jocie visited Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Colony. The stone shown bears the names of the individuals who died that first winter.
Sarah Allerton, Degory Priest’s widow, remarried a man named Godbert Godbertson (possibly Cuthbert Cutherbertson), and the family sailed to America, landing in 1623. Like the Bible commands, they were “fruitful and multiplied,” so here we are.
You and your McGrew cousins are 14th-generation descendants of a Mayflower Passenger. That makes me, your dad, and our siblings 13th-generation descendants; Papa Jack and all his McGrew cousins are 12th-generation descendants; and my grandfather and all his siblings 11th-generation descendants. I say that because it was my Papa’s sister, Gloria, who did the work to connect our family to Degory/Digory Priest. It made her able to join the Mayflower Society, a very prestigious organization. I had to take a picture of the lineage: The ink in my printer is dry; I couldn’t get the list on a single page with it wrapping; I was fed up and quit trying.
By the way, count down 7 rows from the first line in the image above (or 8 up from the last line) to find “Abigail Richardson and Capt. Oliver Brown.” He’s another “famous” dude in our family (and American History, to be honest). I don’t know where the middle name Reed came from, but here’s information about Capt. Oliver Brown – he was a busy guy during the Revolutionary era. That means you can buy one of those shirts with the “Descendant of an American Patriot” on it. He’s not the only Patriot you/we descend from, but his name is in the Mayflower Descendants above. Capt. Oliver Brown is buried in the Wellsburg Cemetery at Wellsburg, Brooke County, WV, up in the vertical panhandle, north of Wheeling. That’s west and northerly about 250 miles from where you live.
