Six years ago I started this site, inspired by Maureen Taylor's Last Muster books (plus the fact that I have seen so few pictures of my own ancestors) and plus the fact that not being a Time Lord I can't run to my Tardis and zip back to 1620 with a camera. 1,000 images seemed like a lofty goal. If you've been following along, you know that the idea was also to see if there might be enough commonality in the images to spot characteristic features of individual Mayflower passengers and guess what they might have looked like. Well...other than being 99.9% white, the commonality seems to be two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth. Most of these folks are mutts like me, the average being 2 pilgrim lines apiece. Even looking at sibling or parent-child pairs with just 1 pilgrim ancestor there's no way of knowing if any resemblance was to the pilgrim or not. That could be true even with the few Gen 5 & 6 images, although I read recently that children often look more like ancestors than they do a parent. Since most images here are B&W, lemon yellow, and blurry, eye & hair color are a guess and almost no one is "good looking." Disappointingly few text sources described physique (tall, rotund, double-jointed, hairy-armed, etc.) We also assume no "paternal anomalies" in these lineages.
If you're interested in this angle, look at the index to find people with only 1 known pilgrim ancestor and check them out. Browse the pilgrim sections for people with many lines from just 1 pilgrim. An example is William Faunce, who went online last week, with 11 Warren lines, 7 paternal and 4 maternal. Look at large families, such as the 10 Blish-Jones pictures (9 siblings and their mother) in the Edward Fuller section. They powered us over the 1,000 mark this week.
Plans are in the works for an "every surname index" so you can look up surnames in your family and see which pilgrim lines they married into. I know people come here in hopes of finding their own pilgrim ancestor and I hope to make the site more useful that way. I have standing requests for scans of hardcover images to replace those I cropped from old digitized books, and for photos of people in middle age with teeth and hair, and of men without giant beards and women without bonnets. (If I had 2 photos of the same person at a different age or different angle, I did post both.) I also want more images of people of mixed racial ancestry and more females. In the meantime, many thanks to those who helped with this site, in particular librarian Sarah for the photo scans and assistant webmaster Ben. (All the typos and cockeyed photos and any genealogical errors are mine alone.)
If you're interested in this angle, look at the index to find people with only 1 known pilgrim ancestor and check them out. Browse the pilgrim sections for people with many lines from just 1 pilgrim. An example is William Faunce, who went online last week, with 11 Warren lines, 7 paternal and 4 maternal. Look at large families, such as the 10 Blish-Jones pictures (9 siblings and their mother) in the Edward Fuller section. They powered us over the 1,000 mark this week.
Plans are in the works for an "every surname index" so you can look up surnames in your family and see which pilgrim lines they married into. I know people come here in hopes of finding their own pilgrim ancestor and I hope to make the site more useful that way. I have standing requests for scans of hardcover images to replace those I cropped from old digitized books, and for photos of people in middle age with teeth and hair, and of men without giant beards and women without bonnets. (If I had 2 photos of the same person at a different age or different angle, I did post both.) I also want more images of people of mixed racial ancestry and more females. In the meantime, many thanks to those who helped with this site, in particular librarian Sarah for the photo scans and assistant webmaster Ben. (All the typos and cockeyed photos and any genealogical errors are mine alone.)
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