I took a quick look online to see if anyone had posted pictures of Moses Fletcher's Dutch descendants, since I had none, and found this link: http://www.tamurajones.net/PilgrimsWelcomedInLeidenAgain.xhtml

There is a group photo of some of them on a tour of Leiden/Leyden organized by Dr. Jeremy Bangs of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum Foundation.

Thank you, Susannah Doane & Prince Kenney, a lovely Nova Scotian couple born in the late 1700s, both of them Gen. 8 Brewster descendants, for being our 499th & 500th Mayflower descendants to grace these pages over the past 3 years. Welcome aboard!

It is just impossible to help folks with their genealogy without access to a good historical newspaper database. This is my conclusion after two months of trying. In an earlier post I griped about the sudden loss of the colonial-era newspaper database that had been part of my NEHGS subscription. I tried making do with findmypast.com, the Library of Congress's Chronicling America database (1836-1922), asking friends with ancestry.com subscriptions to get obits or news articles posted on other subscribers's private pages for me, and looking unsuccessfully for a library that had a subscription to a good service, but having been spoiled by the previous database I was very disappointed in the results. Using these methods I found maybe 10% of what I needed (random guesstimate.) So I have officially thrown in the towel and bought a subscription tonight to Genealogy Bank. If you are shopping for a new source for historic newspaper articles you will find other databases, but I tested several by searching for articles from 1770-1830 that I had found in the past. Only Genealogy Bank got the hits I expected. They also had the broadest chronological range, going back to 1690. The sheer volume of old journalism they have available just made it impossible to resist, and based on the past 2 months' experience I knew it was worth $69.95 for a year. I was looking for a particular 1873 death announcement today that I've seen posted online (neatly trimmed around the edges, showing neither the date nor the publisher and thus rendering it useless when applying to a lineage society.) I did not find it anywhere but Genealogy Bank.

I signed up for "amazon smile" a few months ago and made the General Society of Mayflower Descendants my charity. I hadn't used it yet since the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth is my designated charity on goodsearch.com and goodshop.com and I'd been doing any amazon shopping through goodshop to earn Pilgrim Hall a few pfennigs. Goodsearch pays a penny for every unique online search I do through their browser and goodshop pays varying amounts when I buy something online. (Note: I ONLY buy things through charity browsers like goodshop and upromise when that is the least expensive source and I was going to buy that item anyway. Still, Ben's 529 college savings account got about $550, albeit over 12 or 13 years, and Pilgrim Hall gets $20-30 per year via me alone.)

My idea was to start far enough ahead of time that Pilgrim Hall Museum would have a significant contribution "from" me by 2020 (the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim's landing at Plymouth) in order to fund their activities. It is frustratingly difficult to track what Pilgrim Hall actually gets "from" me via a goodshop amazon.com purchase because amazon's payment promise is "up to 1.5%." It's also not clear if they donate anything sold via a 3rd-party vendor, even a corporation. They take months to give the contribution to goodshop and are vague about the formula their "up to" contribution actually uses. I can't tell on goodshop's site what, if anything, a purchase there netted Pilgrim Hall. Long story, but I tried "amazon smile" today in hope that I will be able to figure out whether one method or the other nets significantly more for the charity of my choice.

I will let you know if I learn anything because online charity systems like this, prudently used, can mean a significant income for the charity of your choice. (Under full disclosure laws I should probably tell you that this site is an amazon affiliate. There is an ad on the home page and a link on the links page and if you accessed amazon through that link and bought anything, mayflowerfaces would get a tiny percentage. No one has ever done that, but still. I did not place an amazon affiliate link on this post.)