The Year: 1621 Not much is known about Mayflower passenger Elizabeth Hopkins. She married Stephen Hopkins in either 1617 or 1618 at Whitechapel, England, and had a daughter Damaris born sometime around 1619. Elizabeth was Stephen Hopkins’ second wife. The name of his first doesn’t appear in any records. In 1620, Stephen Hopkins brought his wife and their baby Damaris on the Mayflower—and his children from his first marriage, Constance and Giles. Elizabeth gave birth to a son, Oceanus, while they were at sea. Stephen had been recruited by the Merchant Adventurers to provide leadership for the colony and to assist in the colony’s ventures. He was a member of a group the Pilgrims called “strangers,” which comprised more than…
Eleanor Billington
The Year: 1621 Eleanor Billington ,wife of John Billington and mother of Francis and John Billington II, all Mayflower passengers, was born about 1582. Eleanor was one of only five adult women to survive the first winter, and one of only four who were still alive to partake in the harvest celebration in the autumn of 1621. The Billingtons were not part of the Pilgrim Separatist community. Her family is regarded as being rather ill-behaved. Young Francis Billington shot off his father’s musket in the Mayflower’s cabin while it was anchored at Provincetown Harbor, showering sparks around open barrels of gunpowder. A few months later, John Billington the younger wandered off into the woods, and was taken by the Nauset…
Jennie Hodgers
Female Soldier in the Civil War In 1862, Jennie Hodgers was living in Belvidere, Illinois. As the Civil War escalated, in July of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln sent out a call for an additional 300,000 men to serve in the Union Army. Nineteen-year-old Jennie Hodgers wanted to help her country. Image: Jennie Hodgers (right) as Albert D.J. Cashier Jennie Hodgers was born in Clogherhead, Ireland, on Christmas Day, 1844. She sailed to America as a stowaway and settled in Belvidere, Illinois. Little is known about her early life because her true identity was not discovered until a few years before her death. According to later investigation by the administrator of her estate, she was the child of Sallie and Patrick…
Priscilla Alden
The Year: 1621 Priscilla Mullins, it is believed, was born in or near Dorking, Surrey, England, and that she was in her teens in 1620 when she, her parents and her brother Joseph came to America on the Mayflower. Her parents and her brother died in the sickness that took so many lives during the first winter at Plymouth Colony, leaving her orphaned. Priscilla probably then moved in with the Brewster family. Priscilla was one of the surviving women, who became a family, bound together by common needs and sorrows. It can be surmised that she grew close to the other young members of the colony, and possibly to John Alden.
Josephine Miller Slyder
Nurse at the Battle of Gettysburg Erected in 1886, this monument to the First Massachusetts Infantry Regiment is south of Gettysburg on the Emmitsburg Road, where the regiment fought during the battle. It depicts a skirmisher stepping over a rail fence with Seminary Ridge in the background. At that time the Peter Rogers house stood just to the south of this monument. The Battle of Gettysburg resulted in as many as 40,000 deaths, laid waste to the town’s structures, and prompted many of its civilian population of 2,400 to hide in cellars, holes and ditches. Fortunately, several Gettysburg residents remained in the fray to feed the hungry soldiers soon to be engaged in battle and to care for those who…
Mary Chilton
First Woman on Plymouth Rock The Landing of the Pilgrims By Henry Bacon A Chilton family tradition, first recorded in 1744, tells of 12-year-old Mary Chilton racing to the front of the launch that was bringing the Mayflower passengers ashore for the first time. She stepped off the boat and was the first female to set foot on Plymouth Rock. Mary Chilton arrived at Plymouth with her parents on the Mayflower in 1620. Her father James Chilton, listed as 63 years of age, died aboard the Mayflower while it was anchored at Provincetown Harbor, about a month after they arrived.
Jane Stuart Woolsey
Civil War Nurse from New York When the Civil War began, Jane Stuart Woolsey was 31 years old and living in New York City with her eight siblings and her mother. Woolsey participated in the first meetings of the Women’s Central Relief Association, a precursor to the acclaimed U.S. Sanitary Commission. In 1863 she became Superintendent of Nurses at Fairfax Seminary Hospital, and served there until the end of the war. Jane Stuart Woolsey was born in Connecticut in 1830, the second daughter of Charles and Jane Eliza Woolsey. She had seven sisters and one brother. In 1840 her father died, but the family lived in relative comfort in New York City, supported by relatives and inheritances. Jane was raised…
Anne Burras
The Year: 1608 Image: Detail from a painting by Keith Rocco One of the first English women to arrive and help provide a home life in the rugged Virginia wilderness was fourteen-year-old Anne Burras. She was the first unmarried English woman in the New World, the personal maid of a Mrs. Forrest who came to Jamestown in October 1608 to join her husband, Thomas Forrest. At that time, Jamestown was a fort of about one acre in size, with one storehouse and one church, described by John Smith as looking like a barn. It was the home of about 200 men. The houses were described as shacks that looked ready to fall apart.
Temperance Flowerdew
The Year: 1609 Temperance Flowerdew survived a hurricane at sea and ate rats for dinner, and she arrived in Jamestown in August 1609, just in time for the winter famine that followed. She lived through that harrowing winter, called the “Starving Time,” when over 80 percent of Jamestown’s residents died of sickness, disease, or starvation. In 1613, Temperance married Captain George Yeardley. He became one of the wealthiest men in Virginia. The couple had three children: Elizabeth in 1615, Argoll in 1617, and Francis in 1620, who died at a young age. In 1616, George Yeardley was designated Deputy-Governor of Virginia. He negotiated an agreement with the Chickahominy Indians that secured food and brought peace to the colonists for two…
Virginia Dare
First English Child Born in America In 1587 an expedition organized by Sir Walter Raleigh established the first English colony of 117 people in the New World – on the island of Roanoke off the northeast coast of present-day North Carolina. On August 18, 1587, just fifteen days after the colonists had arrived and established what would become the Lost Colony of Roanoke, the first English child was born on American soil. Her name was Virginia Dare. On March 25, 1584, Queen Elizabeth I granted Sir Raleigh a charter to establish a colony in North America, or lose his right to colonization. On what is now called the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Sir Walter Raleigh established three separate colonies…