My day job as a historian and other responsibilities caught up with me during COVID so it's been quite some time since I posted any Mayflower genealogy images or information. The good news is that if you are actually an aficionado of space program history, my long-awaited book on the history of NASA's research in that field during the shuttle and early space station years is finally out. My author copy arrived in the mail yesterday, so it's real.

This book is unique, covering a topic pretty much overlooked by other historians of space programs and policy and I tried to make it a good read as well. If you work for a library or are affiliated with a college or university in any way, I would appreciate you recommending it to the library's acquisitions staff. Libraries have to learn about it in order to know it exists and then acquire it, so recommendations are helpful.

If you would like to acquire it yourself, the link to the book is: https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9781683402602. If you wait long enough, the heading just above it will cycle around to the discount code for history books. (It's their spring sale.) You can also order it on amazon.com but buying it from the publisher is more fun.

Sometimes in the fall I post a photo of the ocotillo (a very spidery cactus) in front of my house because its tiny green leaves really do turn colors and fall off, making a pile that Barbie and Ken could rake up and jump in. Although the Phoenix area did not break its record for all-time high temperature (122) we have broken records in 2020 for number of days above 110 or 115 and for drought. My area has had less than 3" of rain all year. So instead, I will share photos of a road to the mountain city of Payson showing the total destruction caused by one of our many wildfires (even the guardrails burned up) and the barrel cactus in front of my house that died. I will spare you the dead palm trees and drought-hardy, desert-heat-tolerant plants that are everywhere you look. You know it's a "2020 kind of summer" when even the cactus dies.

Join Plimoth Plantation and Plymouth 400 for a Viewing of the USPS Virtual Ceremony featuring United States Postal Service Representative 

Richard Pickering 
Deputy Executive Director, Plimoth Plantation

Michele Pecoraro 
Executive Director, Plymouth 400

George P. Garmany, Jr., MD
Governor General, General Society of Mayflower Descendants
For those unable to join us to watch the ceremony live at 11 a.m., the video will be available throughout the day in the Mayflower exhibit as well as via the USPS Facebook and Twitter pages, Plimoth’s Facebook page, and Plymouth 400’s social media channels.

Limited Edition CommemorativeAnniversary CachetsIntroducing two unique collectible envelope designs featuring Mayflower II under sail and the MayflowerCompact. These envelopes were specially created by Plimoth Plantation to pair with the USPS' new Mayflower Forever Stamp. Buy your cachets at our pop-up shop this Thursday and take them to the USPS Main St. Extension Center, adjacent to the Plymouth 400 offices, to receive cachet cancellations. Not local? You can order your limited edition cachets through our online Museum Shop!


Pre-order Plimoth-exclusive cachets and stationery

The RootsTech organization has announced that next year's event will be online, Feb. 25-27, 2021 and FREE. That's a savings of a couple hundred dollars plus air fare to Salt Lake City plus several nights in a hotel there. This is one of the rare silver linings of Covid-19 and you don't want to miss out on it. RootsTech is accepting registration for 2021 now. Click here to register and get on the updates email list for more on speakers and workshops. I attended in 2020 and even with 30+ years of genealogy and a doctorate in history I still got many useful tips that will improve my research success. Hopefully I will see you online in February.

Along with the commemorative U.S. postal stamp, there will be a set of collaborative commemorative coins issued by both the U.S. Mint and the Royal Mint, to show the departure and arrival in 1620. The U.S. coin features a Native American man and woman farming with "Sustainers of Life" above the picture and "People of the Dawn" below. On the other side are male & female pilgrims, the ship and the words "Civil Body Politick" above and "Mayflower Compact" below. The British coin is apparently real money, as it says "2 Pounds" and has Queen Elizabeth II on one side. The other has a large image of the ship with "1620," "2020," and "Mayflower." There is apparently an American version that is also worth money, a $10 coin, in 24 karat gold. Here is the link to the U.S. Mint web site, which presumably somewhere tells you how to order a set. Below are the images in silver but the web site shows the gold versions as well.

Click here to check out Westport's great genealogy website. If you are researching Bristol County (which is next door to Plymouth County and Rhode Island) be sure to check Westport if your ancestors were from "Dartmouth." The Dartmouth of today is maybe a quarter of the Dartmouth of the late 17th & 18t century, as New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet, and Westport struck out on their own after the Revolution. Transcriptions of Westport town meeting records have been online for several years but between the town and the Westport Historical Society they now have a mind-boggling array of digitized images of vital records, town meeting records, militia records, tax records, voters, road layouts, naturalization applications and lots more. I don't have many ancestors in Westport but it will still take me days to get through everything the Town of Westport's Historical Records and Oral Histories site has. Thank you, Westport!

Last week I attended an online NEHGS webinar called "The ABCs of Using School Records in Family History Research" and featuring David Allen Lambert, their senior genealogist. Although it was useful primarily to people living within the past 150 years, it had a lot of useful information. If you wanted to attend this or any other webinar, they are archived at NEHGS. Members and people logging on with the "free membership" (limited access) option can see it. As a thank you, participants who are not yet members were given a $20 dues discount by using the SUMMERGEN2020 discount code or logging on with this URL: https://my.americanancestors.org/donate/i/1?&promo=SummerGen2020

It's official! On Sep. 17th you can buy/order your Mayflower quadricentennial Forever stamps (55 cents, first class) at the Post Office or online at usps.com (then select "Postal Store" at the top, then "Stamps." ) You can see what the stamp will look like below, on the blogpost for June 1st.

Plimoth Plantation, the recreated 1626 tourist village populated by in-character reenactors, recently announced that it will change its name late this year. In the meantime it is using "Plimoth Patuxet" with a swirly blue image in between the two words, representing water. Some years ago the Plantation experience incorporated a Wampanoag village staffed by individuals with Native American ancestry (not necessarily of New England) but who do not pretend that every day is 1626. Management said the current change has been considered for a year, and that may be true since a 400th anniversary requires years of planning and is a great opportunity to improve or enhance. The Boston CBS affiliate news program says the Plimoth Plantation folks are requesting public input. Wikipedia explains that Patuxet was the name of the original "Native American band of the Wampanoag tribal confederation...[living] primarily in and around modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts." This was the group to which Squanto (Tisquantum) had originally belonged and that had been wiped out by disease by the time the Mayflower showed up in 1620. If you have an idea, get in touch.

One of my biggest disappointments at having to cancel my 3-month fun-and-research trip to New England this year was missing the opportunity to see the restored Mayflower II in sail. Click here to see footage of the Mayflower II on the high seas, sort of, and to follow it as it travels about this summer and early fall. If you would like to help pay to keep the ship in sailing order, Plimoth Plantation is offering a unique incentive: a hand-cast bell created by the same bell works that made a new one for the ship, from the same bronze, and mounted on a piece of wood from the restoration, with a bell pull made by Mystic Knotworks in CT, where the ship was restored over the last few years. They are making one for each passenger - 104 - so it is a limited edition unique keepsake for anyone donating $1,000 (or more) to the Restoration Fund.

I admit that I do not update the Mystery/Fun Photos or the Findagrave Mayflower Ancestors sections (lower part of the long menu bar on your left) very often, but when I do it's to present something pretty unique (or maybe just funny) that might give you an idea of a new source for genealogical information through pictures. I've just updated Mystery/Fun Photos to tell you about an online collection of 96 cartoons published in a SE MA newspaper over 100 years ago, featuring prominent citizens, and showing by example that the likenesses are decent and the rest of the picture tells you a lot about the person, opening up new avenues of inquiry. It also suggests where you might look for something similar for the region you are investigating yourself. Check it out!